The University of Arizona Alumnus / Spring 2008
Tales of the under ground
Miners’ Story Project
by Margaret Regan
When Rod Carender worked underground in the copper mine in San Manuel, north of Tucson, it was so hot he had to wear what the miners called a “popsicle suit.”
“The water at the base was 120 degrees,” Carender remembers. “The humidity was 99 percent. When you got out of the cage a heat wave hit you. It’d knock you down.”
At the beginning of their shift, at a station 3700 feet below the earth, mechanics like Carender would go to the “refuge chamber,” a room air-conditioned to a comfortable 73 degrees. There they’d strip down to their underwear and put on the popsicle suits — specially made shirts and pants with pockets sewn all over. They’d take the popsicles — frozen sports packs — out of a freezer, and stuff maybe 50 of them into their pockets. Then, and only then, would they venture out into the inferno. Even iced up, they could work only a short time.
“You’d work a half-hour, max. The popsicles melted. You were ready to kill someone. Actually, I think the limit was 15 minutes out, and 30 minutes back in the refuge chamber.”
As much as he loved and loathed the work, Carender no longer spends his time way down in the mine. The San Manuel mine shut down in 2003, and nowadays Carender is a crew supervisor at the UA Mirror Lab on campus. All the other big underground mines that once thrived in Arizona have now closed as well.
But miners’ tales of life deep in the earth will live on, thanks to an oral history project initiated by the University of Arizona Mineral Museum.
The Miners’ Story Project “was inspired by the realization that all large-scale underground mines (in Arizona) are closed,” says Shipherd Reed, a documentary filmmaker and producer of video biographies who was hired to shepherd the project. “The remaining large mines are open-pit. But it was the underground mines that brought people here. It’s a way of life that’s gone.”
Funded in part by a grant from mining giant Phelps-Dodge, Reed is conducting in-person interviews with workers from all the major mining towns in southern Arizona and at least one in New Mexico.
“It’s a giant project, but there’s not a number goal,” he explains. “I want to collect oral histories in several more communities,” including Superior, Globe, and Ajo, and the actual town of San Manuel. “I’ve already gone to Clifton-Morenci and Safford, Arizona, to Silver City, New Mexico, and to Bisbee.
“All along I’ve been collecting in Tucson from retirees. And a lot of the San Manuel miners work at the UA.”
In nearly three years on the job, Reed has interviewed more than 200 displaced and retired mineworkers, including Carender. (You can hear Carender and the others quoted in this article tell their tales at www.minersstory.org.)
The project rescues an important piece of Arizona history. The state’s economy, wags used to say, depended on the Three Cs: cotton, climate, and copper. But the history of mining also touches on the UA. From its earliest days, the university was known for training mining specialists, and Reed also is speaking with many UA-educated mining geologists and engineers.
As he says, “When the UA was founded, there was agriculture, and there was mining.”
Appropriately, when he’s not out in the field talking to miners, Reed labors underground, deep in the bowels of the UA’s Flandrau Science Center, which operates the basement Mineral Museum. Reed travels through showrooms studded with richly colored minerals to get to his office. And near his crowded desk is a model of an underground mine. Reed knowledgeably names its parts: the “ore body,” or copper deposit, on top; the “grizzly level” in the middle, where the crushed rock falls, and the “ore cars,” or trains, at the bottom, waiting to haul it away.
Even before he got the job, he was “fascinated by Western history,” Reed says. “I knew a little bit about mines.” He pauses, and smiles. “Not as much as I do now.”
Reed is using up-to-the-minute technology to record the old-time tales. He’s making digital recordings of conversations with the miners, and digital copies of their old photos. Through the new techniques, the interviews will be far more accessible than taped or written interviews gathered by earlier generations of oral historians.
“Through the digital revolution, we’ll be able to archive everything, and edit it for audio files,” Reed says. “Eventually all the interviews will be compiled into a digital archive at the Mineral Museum.”
The Mineral Museum, and its Miners’ Story Project, will be an important component of the brand-new UA Science Center scheduled to open in downtown Tucson in 2011. Replacing the old Flandrau on campus, the new state-of-the-art Science Center will share a new building with the Arizona State Museum.
In the meantime, Reed is previewing the future museum display via an interactive kiosk that’s already up at the campus Arizona State Museum. It’s part of the new Set in Stone exhibition, which tells the story of Southwest gems, minerals, and mining from prehistory up to the present.
“Mining was part of the pre-Columbian economy and remained important,” Reed notes. “Our kiosk has touch screens. You can choose an audio story, and it turns into a digital moving (show), with Ken Burns’ technique. It’s digital storytelling.”
In the future, Reed expects the Miners’ Story Project to have a major Internet presence as well.
“I hope to also make it accessible through the Web in a couple of years. The Web site will have one page devoted to each mining town or district.”
Fights between miners, dramatic rescues, wrenching battles between unions and management, and more recently, conflicts between men and women, are all part of the tumultuous history of the mines. Nearly all the miners speak to Reed about the friendships that got them through the tough days, and nights, on the job.
“Everybody talks about the camaraderie,” Reed says. “It was a rugged job, a physical job. There was a lot of horseplay. Everybody had a nickname. And it was macho.”
As Sally Nabor-Balfour found out. Thirty years ago, she was the first woman hired to drive the huge trucks at Clifton-Morenci, the giant copper open-pit mine that’s still operating today. (The Miners’ Story Project’s main focus is underground mining, but it also includes tales from the open-pits.)
Big as a multi-story house, the trucks’ shovels alone are “room-size,” Reed says. She “encountered resistance. It was a traditionally male job.”
Just 20 years old, Nabor-Balfour was a single mom in desperate need of a good job when she got the position.
“It was a huge, huge truck,” she told Reed. “I was pretty scared.” But the supervisor admonished her, “If you can’t do the job well, it will be a long time before we give somebody else [another woman] a shot.”
That did it. Despite the razzing from the men, despite the enormity of the vehicle, “I had it in my mind: I was going to be the best truck driver.”
Years later, after Nabor-Balfour had quit to become a full-time mom, she went on a mine tour for fun. The guide, not knowing who she was, regaled the crowd with tales of her prowess.
“The first woman truck driver was the best,” he said.
But if her story ended happily, the bitter Clifton-Morenci mine strike of 1983 did not. Now a famous episode in labor history, the strike failed, the union was decertified, and Phelps-Dodge has operated the mine as a nonunion shop ever since.
“Still, to this day, people [on both sides] become visibly upset” when they talk about it, Reed says.
Miners played tricks on each other to ease the tension underground. Linden “Fuzzy” Edwards recounted the horseplay on his first day, when the old-timers set something burning to make the greenhorns think the mine was going to blow up. Terrified, “We run out of there,” Edwards says. “Nothing happens. We waits and waits.” Then they realized what was up: the other miners were rolling on the ground convulsed with laughter. “It was an interesting day, believe me.”
But miners were quick to help each other in the case of true danger. The eloquent Lou Osmer told Reed of a dramatic rescue in Silver City, when “two men in a bucket were hurtling downward, full effect of gravity, a runaway hoist.”
A Cherokee Indian named Marshall Kirkendall leapt up, jammed his foot and a timber into the works and “stopped the drum, thus saving the lives of the two occupants of the mine buckets,” Osmer recounted. “Much credit to Mr. Kirkendall.”
eed has a shiny copper-clad recording studio that he takes on the road to mining towns.
“It made its maiden voyage to Bisbee last summer,” he says. “I spent three months, three to four days a week there.”
But the old miners can’t always climb on board. “Some of the older guys, it’s hard for them to move around, or they can’t drive. I’ve done more interviews in people’s houses than in the trailer.”
When he’s going to a town, he gets the word out in advance by contacting government officials, the local media, and the local historical society. These groups usually suggest some miners willing to participate.
“I do those, and as I talk to the miners they have a positive experience and suggest other people.” Positive word of mouth reels others in. Still, “People are leery sometimes. They’ll say, ‘Who are you? Why do you want to talk to me?’ Others say they haven’t done anything interesting.”
One of the most rewarding parts of the project, Reed says, is that the interviews give people the opportunity to review their own histories. More often than not, they realize that they have indeed lived a full life. And if the preserved interviews bring those eventful lives to the Arizona public, they do the same for the miners’ family members.
All the participants get a copy of their conversation on a CD, so the family has it for posterity. After all, as Reed notes, “This is a generation that’s getting older. They won’t be with us much longer.”
And some of Reed’s subjects have since died.
“I’ve already received letters, saying their father has passed away. And they’re deeply grateful to have the interview.”
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