Floyd Jenne interview, 1996: transcript

AH Oral History Interview with oyd Jemne AA Phot©graphs 1. Jenne Family [1928] 2 2. Floyd and Wilma Jenne [1937] 2 3. Floyd Jenne, four portraits [ca. 1918 -1939] 2 4. Smelter at McGill, NV [ca. 1930s] 3 5. Open-pit copper mine at Ruth, NV [ca. 1930s] 3 6. Novelty items produced at the McGill, NV smelter [ca. 1920s-30s] 14 7. Civilian Conservation Corps [CCC] Camp DF-35, Manila, UT [1935] 34 8. CCC projects at Manila, UT [1935]... 35 9. CCC Camp DG-20, Saddler's Ranch, NV [1936] 38 10. CCC Camp DG-20 rodent control work [1936] 40 11. CCC Camp DG-108 near Contact, NV [1939] 44 12. Extermination pits and fences for Mormon cricket infestation near Jiggs, NV [1936] 49 13. Boulder City Reminder article detailing Floyd Jenne's arrival in Boulder City [July 25, 1939, p. 1] 55 14. Sims Ely, Boulder City Manager [October 13,1931] 57 15. Boulder City Ranger Force [ca. 1942] 59 16. Boulder City Municipal Building [April 8,1933] 72 17. Government Dormitory No. 2 [June 1, 1933]... 83 18. Boulder City Ranger Force [1932] 86 19. Boulder City Rangers/Police shoulder patches [1940s-50s] 86 20. Handcuffs and Clark County Deputy Sheriff's badge [1940s-50s] 96 21. Ranger Floyd Jenne [1948] 22. Ranger Jack Weiler [1937] 23. Browder's Lunch [ca. 1933-35] 338 24. Ida Browder, et. al. [March 1,1960] 338 25. Asa Gray Boynton, et. al. [November 20, 1956] 142 26. Johnny Sikes [ca. 1934-35] 353 27. Steve and Virginia "Teddy" Fenton [1941] 154 ii 28. McKeeversville, Boulder City, NV [ca. 1936-41] 185 29. Camp Williston, Boulder City, NV [ca. 1942-43] 191 30. Cars halted for convoy across Hoover Dam [December 18,1941] 196 31. Demountable houses, Boulder City, NV [1940s] 215 32. Article detailing Floyd Jenne's becoming acting chief ranger [1951] 220 33. Article detailing Floyd Jenne's becoming chief ranger [ca. 1951] 220 34. Morgan Sweeney, et. al. [October 1959] 230 35. John Rice, Sr. [1949] 25g 36. Virginia Holden's corpse [1955] 267 37. Steve Bowman and Dennis McBride [1956] 271 38. Floyd Jenne [October 8, 1996] 276 * * * * iii A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s I'd like to thank Floyd Jenne for patiently spending so much time with me so that I could complete this oral history interview. With his help, our knowledge of Nevada's history is greatly enriched. The staffs of the Boulder City Library, the Special Collections Department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas library, and the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society at Lorenzi Park in Las Vegas were helpful in compiling the annotations. I'd particularly like to thank Leslie Peterson of the National Park Service in Boulder City for use of her transcribing equipment. The excellent laser prints were made by Chris Dittman at Desert Data in Boulder City, Nevada. * * * * iv .Boulder City Library Oral History Project Interview with This is Dennis McBride and Floyd Jenne. Today is Monday, March 11, 1996, and we're together in Floyd's house at 701 Arizona Street in Boulder City. I'm going to start a series of interviews with him today about his life and what he knows about Boulder City and about Northern Nevada where he came down to Boulder City from. But to begin with, Floyd, if you could tell me when and where you were born. I was born June 6, 1915 on 26th street in Ogden, Utah. My father was a teamster and by that I do not mean that he belonged to the Teamster's Union. He actually owned a team of horses and worked as a teamster. My first recollection, however, he was a switchboard operator^ for Utah Power & Light at the lower station in Big Cottonwood Canyon, which is just out of Sandy, Utah, near Salt Lake City. He left there in August of 1920 and went to McGill to work for Nevada Consolidated Copper Corporation^ as a switchboard operator. We were to follow as soon as he got a house. What ivas your father's name? My father's name was Mark Lorenzo Jenne. My mother's name was Ida Belle Fronk Jenne. Her father was an immigrant from Holland. Her mother's family were long-time residents of the United States as was my father's family. Did you have brothers and sisters? 1 had a sister that was four years older than I am, a sister two years younger, and another sister six years younger. Wiiat were their names? My oldest one was Ella Jean Jenne. The one just younger than I am was Clara Elaine Jenne, and my youngest one was Frances Ortel Jenne. A sidelight: my dad used to say that he had three daughters and they each had a brother.3 What was it that took your father out of Utah and over to McGill? A better job. We went down to stay with Mother's mother in Ogden until Dad got a house. About the time he got a house, we all came down with whooping cough. We didnt get to McGill till sometime in October 1920.1 was five years old. Do you remember much about the trip from Utah over to McGill? Actually, there wasn't too much to remember because we got on a train in Ogden at night and had a berth. My first recollection was early in the morning. We were across the valley from McGill and I could see the town and what I thought was a lot of trees. But it developed that what I thought was a lot of trees were houses with green roofs, [laughs] There just weren't any trees in McGill. The sulfur smoke from smelting the copper killed them all off. First photo, back row. 1-r: Mark Lorenzo Jenne [father]; Ella Jean Jenne [sister]; Ida Belle Fronk Jenne [mother]; front row. 1-r: Floyd Jenne; Clara Elaine Jenne [sister]; Frances Ortel Jenne [sister]; Katherine Hagen [adopted sister], 1928 Second photo: Floyd and Wilma Jenne, 1937 [photos courtesy of Floyd Jenne; negatives in the collection of Dennis McBride] Floyd Lorenzo Jenne Top: ca. 1918 Bottom, l-r: ca. 1933-35; August 1939; ca. 1930s [photos courtesy of Floyd Jenne; negatives in the collection of Dennis McBride] That's interesting. What about breathing it? Oh, I guess it wasn't too good, but at the same time I don't think it was as detrimental as the environmentalists claim because, well, my dad lived and worked there on the plant for about 35 years and he was almost 97 when he died. He was right in around the smelter where the smoke was. Later years, Nevada Consolidated Copper was the Guggenheim property out of ... . Well, they had an office in Salt Lake. During the Depression Kennecott Copper bought 'em out. They were Guggenheim at the time that your dad worked for them? When he first went there. That makes me want to ask, if the smoke was enough to kill the trees, was it very easy to grow anything? Did you have gardens around McGill? Well, actually, maybe I shouldn't have said it killed the trees because there wasnt a heck of a lot of moisture in that valley, so there weren't too many trees. Now, the smelter was started in 1905. There were a few trees around town when we got there around 1920, but by the time we left there weren't a lot of trees. Course, they had changed the smelting system. The original system used what they called roasters, where the copper ore would come through the mill and be ground up and then went through the roasters then back to the mill. The strong sulfur smoke came from the roasters because that was where heat was applied to burn as much of the sulfur out as they could. The smoke came out of a smoke stack a couple of hundred feet high. What did the roasters do to the ore? To tell you the truth I don't know much about it because they got away from that system while I was just a kid. But it was a system of heating the ore and getting some of the combustibles out before they milled it. It went back up to the mill and was ground finer till it was finally like almost a powder, then it went through a flotation system in which the rock sand was washed off and the M^SrBhi^a:SmelteratMcGil1'Nevada 1930 ssr»,«—. copper, being a little bit heavier, settled down in the riffles on the flotation tables. And from there it went on down to the smelter as what we called concentrates. What did they use in the flotation tables—just water or something else? It was water and what we used to call a water-soluble oil. Now, I don't know what it was, but it would tend to stick to the rock and make the rock float off, and that went into [what] we called a slag ditch. Actually, it wasn't a slag ditch, it was a tailing ditch. I don't know where the name slag ditch came from because slag came from the reverberatory furnace. The concentrates would come from the mill down to the smelter and it was mixed with a flux which as I remember was a limestone. I won't swear to it, but that's my recollection. And it went into a reverberatory furnace. Now, this name reverberatory comes from the fact that it was fired with coal dust blown in with preheated air. It blew up against the ceiling of the furnace and reverberated down, covering the whole inside of the furnace. That's where the term reverberatory came from. And those furnace roofs ... every few months they'd have to shut the furnace down and put in partial sections of the roof because it would have melted away. Were the furnaces made of iron or were they made of brick and stone? It was made of brick held together with tie rods. Well, on the sides was big I-beams and then the rods across the top. Those tie rods were probably about two-and-a-half inches in diameter. The thing that was interesting to me was that the tie rods would not come in long-enough lengths to reach clear across, so they would weld them end-to-end with a blacksmith weld. It was the only time I ever seen that. What's a blacksmith weld? They would take these rods, heat them near white hot in a forge and then the blacksmith helper, swinging a 16-pound hammer, would flatten them out. They'd take two of 'em that overlapped, probably 10 to 12 inches, as I remember. I only saw it done once or helped do it once, but that's my recollection. When they'd get the two ends flattened, get them both near white hot, [they] put them on the anvil, and there again put a flux between them, and pound[ed] them together. We'd turn the rods as they'd pound them, and so on, and when we'd get through with that, the only way you could tell where that weld was was you could see where the heat had been, but the rod was the same diameter all the way across. No cracks. And that was strong enough to hold up? Well, it was strong enough that then they [could] tighten them on. They had threads on the ends of these rods. You mentioned using flux. What was the purpose of using flux in that operation? The term flux—I probably should go to the dictionary—but it's a compound or substance that helps an action take place. Now, in the case of this weld, it helped the two pieces come together and melt together. But you asked about the strength when they tightened them up across the roof of that furnace. They had a wrench with about a six-foot handle on it, and a circular end with a rope [tied] in it, and there'd be three or four men take ahold of that rope. It was a ratchet-type wrench; they'd pull it, then take it back, so there was a hell of a lot of tension on that rod. I don't know what [the tension] would be because those men, they would really pull on that rope. The furnace was made of fire-block. Can't think of the term right now, but there was a furnace block [made] to handle the heat. The ceilings, the blocks that went in there, weighed about 95 pounds apiece. They hung in from rails that were formed and laid across and the block was formed so that the top would slide between those rails. There wasn't anything put to hold them together because in just nothing flat, why, the heat had melted them to where they were tight anyway. Another kind of interesting thing, when they would go to put that section of roof in, they'd knock a hole in the side of the furnace and turn hoses in there. The material that came from that furnace we called matte. It was fairly high in copper but it wasn't the finished product. But they would turn the hose in to solidify this matte down, oh, a foot, 14 inches, something like that. Go in, put scaffolds in. The matte would crack. It was kind of interesting that you could look down through those cracks. The top was black and it would start getting red and finally, down at the bottom, it would be white hot. [laughs] They kept the planks that we walked on wet, and we wore what we called wooden shoes, which basically was just a piece of wood shaped like a foot but had straps to put over your toes so your toes would hold it on. We'd go in as soon as they'd take the heat off. Well, parts of that roof would fall in, parts that were thin would just fall in. The bull gang, which was the name for the common laborer, would go in and throw those bricks out, then we would come out and go over by another furnace that they used to preheat the air that they blew the coal dust in [with], to keep warm and dry off a bit. We'd stay there five minutes, and then go throw the bricks into a truck. How big were those furnaces inside? Were they big enough for a man to stand up in? Oh, yeah. That furnace was probably 40 feet wide and maybe 100 feet long, 80 to 100 feet long and 12, 15 feet high. And at the back end they had a bank of what we called waste heat boilers—pipes with water running through. The waste heat from the furnace that normally would have gone up the flue, went through those pipes and generated low-pressure steam, and then that low-pressure steam went over to the power house through a superheater and they generated high-pressure steam, and used that to generate electricity. That's a very convenient system. Oh, yeah. It used to cost them abut a half, three-quarters a cent a kilowatt to generate power, which for a steam plant was dang cheap. Did they use that power just at the smelter, at the mine, or did they use it for the city? The town of McGill was a company town. The company owned the whole damned town. There were a few private-owned homes, but they didn't own the land. And those homes belonged to business people who had stores in town. They furnished power for McGill, for the mines at Ruth, and occasionally power supplemented [to] the city of Ely. It was just one of these things—if they had surplus power, Ely bought it. What did your father do a for a living in McGill? He went there as a switchboard operator in the power house. Then later he became an electrician. Progress did away with the switchboard. The whole power process became pretty much automated, just needed one or two men to keep track of the whole thing. I've got a pin where he had 65 years of continuous good standing with the electrical workers' union. He worked, I guess, about 40 years for the plant there and then retired and moved into Salt Lake [City], That was quite a bit later though. That was after I came down here [to Boulder City]. Tell me about the house where you lived when you were in McGill. We lived in actually three different houses. The first one was a small one-bedroom house. They had hung an addition on just before we got there. They put inside toilets in most, if not all the houses. We only lived there a short time, a year, maybe. I developed a mastoid, which is an infection behind the ear, which today you never hear of because they use antibiotics to get rid of it. But in those days if you got a mastoid they had to operate. So they took me into Ogden [Utah] where a specialist could operate and when we came back, Dad had got a house on what we called Third Street in Middle Town. The town was laid out ... . There was Townsite which was up on the side [of the] hill just south of the mill. The mill was on the side [of the] hill, too, [and] the smelter was downhill a little bit from the mill [and] partially north. The north side of Townsite overlapped the south side of Middle town. But Middle Town was still lower down on the hillside. There was four main streets in Middle Town, but those streets ran north and south. The streets that ran east and west were alphabetical. Starting up in Townsite they went A through F. Part of F Street was in Middle Town and [the streets continued on] through K, or, as we called K Street, "Depot Hill," because at the top of the hill was the railroad depot. The smelter was north of Middle Town. Middle Town was almost due west from the mill but downhill quite a ways. Then there was an older section of town that we called Lower Town. It was just a couple of streets there, but they were part of the original townsite. Then, I'm going to get in trouble here for being racist [laughs], but we had Greek Town, Jap Town, and Austrian Town. Why did they call them that? As I said, the smelter was started in 1905 and immigration laws weren't very strict in those days, so Nevada Consolidated Copper] gave a labor contractor a contract to furnish X number of laborers—we called them laborers at the smelter and the mill and the mines in Ruth. So [the contractor] went over into the Balkan areas of Europe, Greece, Austria, Czechoslovakia and so forth, and recruited these laborers from those countries. He paid their transportation from wherever to McGill, Nevada. Then Nevada Consolidated paid 'im so much a head for furnishing labor. But also, these people signed a payroll deduction to reimburse [the labor contractor] for their transportation. Where they had come from different countries they built a section of town that they called Austrian Town. And quite a ways to the south of Austrian Town was Greek Town. Originally there was just dormitories and beaneries, as we called 'em, boarding houses. But as these people got money, they sent back to the Old Country for their wives, families, girlfriends. So then they built housing for families. Kind of an interesting point, at least to me, was if they didn't have a girlfriend in the Old Country, they would go to the Greek priest and pay him, and he would make arrangements for a girl to be shipped over to marry these guys. Quite a few of em did that. In fact, I knew one that he would have these young Greek girls, 18, 19 years old, shipped over to marry im, and at the time I knew Gus, he was 40. And these girls would stay with Gus a year, year-and-a-half, something like that, then they'd take off and leave 'im. At the time we were working on the copper floor and Gus came to work one night and said, "Well, my wife left me today." I was at the age, oh, 18, 19, where I figured I had all the answers. I said, "Gus, if you'd get a gal somewhere near your own age, maybe she'd stay." He pulled himself up and looked down his nose and says, "Who in the hell wants 'em to stay?" A lot of women in Greek and Austrian Town had been in the U. S. 20 years or longer and still couldn't understand English. As I've mentioned, the company owned the town. You could paint the inside of your house every year if you wanted to and the company would furnish paint, brushes, and [so on] and deliver them to your house. When I was working in the carpenter shop, the paint shop was under the same foreman, Ed Moran, so quite often he had me take his company truck to deliver paint orders. The orders would be marked with name and address. To make sure I got them to the correct address, I would knock on the door. When the door was opened, I'd ask if [so-and-so] lived here. In Austrian and Greek Town it wasn't unusual, if the door was opened by an adult woman, for her to call a small child, 5 or 6 years old, to the door. I'd ask the child if his father's name was [so-and-so]. He'd jabber something to his mother and she'd answer back, then the child would turn to me with an answer. Me mentioning the copper floor, that gets me back to this thing of the reverberatory furnace. After they would run the concentrates in the reverberatory furnace for several hours, they would skim the slag off, and it went into a stream of water and ended up down in what we called the Black Sands, which was almost like a glass-like material that had come out of this furnace. 'Course, when it had hit the water it would break up into sandy-like material. The tailings from the mill were more clear, like regular sand, so we just differentiated—there was some black sand, then the [cleaner] sand pile. When the stuff out of the reverberatory furnace was ready, then they would tap it off into big brick-lined pots and put it over into furnaces that were called converters. These converters blew preheated air through the material that come from the reverberatory furnaces. That burned all of the combustibles out. It would be in those furnaces for several hours. I don't remember now how many [hours], but several hours. Then they would take it from the converters over to what we called a receiver, which was just a big furnace or container that was fired and kept the stuff melted. They poured the copper out into molds. At that time a bar of copper would weigh anywhere from about 375 to 400 to 450 pounds. And these were bars, not ingots? They were bars about probably 18 inches wide by 20 to 24 inches high and anywhere from 4 to 5 inches thick. That was about 96, 97% pure copper. There was a fair amount of gold and silver. In fact, for a long while, they were one of the biggest gold producers in the state. This gold was mixed in with the copper? It wasn't that the ore was so high-grade in gold, but they handled such a volume of it. They would bring the ore from the mines down to the mill in 60- ton cars. They would dump the whole car into the first crusher. Some of those rocks would be half as big as an automobile. It'd go through different crushers until finally it got into smaller pieces. Then it went into a ball mill which was like a huge barrel laid on its side. It rolled. Inside of the mill was balls that were made out of what we called white iron. It was a combination of gray iron, low-carbon steel, and a little bit of chrome. It made it quite hard. The ore would go in there and [they would start the] ball mill rolling and these balls rattling around inside. The ore came out almost like powder. Then it went into the flotation system. At what point were they able to take the gold out of this ore? It was taken out back on the East Coast. This blister copper was shipped up by rail to San Francisco, then was loaded on the ship, through the [Panama] Canal, up the East Coast. Right now I can't remember where the refinery was. But they didn't refine the gold part in McGilP. No. It went back to, I believe, Baltimore. You used the term blister copper? That was the way these bars of copper were called. I don't know where it came from. Those copper bars had a lot of different colors in 'em. As they cooled, they'd go through a yellow gold color, through reds, into a brown. They used to make a lot of unauthorized souvenirs. What do you mean? For example, when we were pouring the copper out of the receiver into these bars, some of the workers that weren't busy right then would be down under the floor—it was raised up where they could stand and move around. They had molds that they would dip into this molten copper and some of 'em were like ash trays, match holders, various and sundry things. The mold was shaped like the inside of whatever it was they were making, and the copper would stick on the outside of that mold. Then they would bring it out and dip it into a tank of cold water. Course, that would enhance the colors, too. This thing was unauthorized but everybody knew it was going on. In fact, probably half the people in town had various and sundry things, candle holders, just all sorts of things made up. What was the layout of the mill? Was it several floors you zvere talking about when you spoke of working on the copper floor? No, the copper floor was not in the mill. It was in the smelter. Going back to the mill. You started with the crushers. [The ore] came downhill [from the crushers] to the flotation system. Then the concentrates came from [the flotation system in] the mill down to the smelter in cars. Then it was dumped into bins, taken from these bins into the furnace by conveyor belt. They would put a certain amount of concentrates and a certain amount of flux in for each charge. That went into the reverberatory furnace. The converters were in the same building as the reverberatory furnace, but to get the copper from the reverberatory furnace to the converters, they poured [it] into these huge vats. By huge, I mean 6, 7 feet across and about that deep. I have no idea what the weight would be. They would pick [these vats] up with an overhead crane, take them over to the converters, put a hook on the bottom, and dump 'em just like a bucket of water into the converters. Noiv, we're talking about a time that you were actually working in the mines? I was working in the smelter. How old were you? This was 1935. You were 20, then? Interesting sidelight on that. Mussolini^ [pronounces it with a short u ] had bought a small shipment of blister copper from Kennecott Copper. By small I mean several carloads. They charged 'im copper price, but there was gold and silver in it. So Mussolini thought they were a bunch of dumb so-and-sos, so he came back with one hell of a big order. That was my first job. They hired about seven or eight of us, three shifts a day, for a week or ten days, loading his order out. The copper that they shipped to him, they would tap the top half of the converters off, and that went to Mussolini. Then the bottom half went over into a corner of the copper floor because that's where all your gold and silver was. It was heavier than copper so it would settle down. So Mussolini paid a premium price for copper, and that's [all] he got—copperl [laughs] At that time we loaded it into the boxcar using two-wheeled handcarts. One of these cars would hold 40 to 60 tons. We'd weigh the car empty, then load it, then weight it again so that they'd have the tare and the gross. The difference was your copper. You said the tare? The tare—T-A-R-E— is a term that's used in weighing. The container and the platform or whatever, is the tare. Then your gross is the tare and the product. So you subtract your tare from the gross and that gives you [the weight of] your product. What did they pay you to do this work? $3.80 a day. No coffee breaks. We did eat on company time. We carried our lunch. We'd work 8 hours straight. It didn't necessarily mean that you sat down and ate all your lunch at once. Quite often we could, but if you got started on your lunch and the charge of copper was ready to be taken off, you shoved your lunch pail back, went out and took the copper off, and came back and finished your lunch. When you say a charge of copper, what does that mean? That was the copper that came from the converters into the receivers, which was just one batch of copper. I guess they called it a charge because it came from the converters and charged the receiver, [laughs] That's the best I can come up with. How long did you work in the smelter? That particular time I worked a week, something like that. Just a few days later I went back to work again. I worked until September. That was between my freshman and sophomore year [of college]. I went to college at Utah State and majored in Forestry and Game Management. Then the summer of '34 I didn't get a job at the smelter, but I went into a Three C camp,5 is what they called it, [as a] technical student. That summer I only made enough money to go [to school] until Christmas time so I went broke. I came back [to McGill] at Christmas time. That's when I got this job loading copper for Mussolini. It might have been January of '35. What were conditions in the smelter when you were working there? By conditions, 1 mean what did it smell like? Was it hot? Was it noisy? It depended on where you were. The plant, which covered the whole smear, consisted of various shops. We had a machine shop, a boiler shop, a tin shop, a sheet metal shop, a foundry, a carpenter's shop, pattern shop. Anything they needed, if it had to be cast, they went to the pattern shop, the pattern maker made a pattern. That went down to the foundry and they made a mold of it in the foundry. Depending on what it was, it might have been high-carbon steel, low-carbon steel, cast or gray iron, brass. They cast any of those metals. Then it would go from the foundry to the machine shop to be machined and finished, and then back to whoever's gonna use it. What kind of equipment would they be making this way, manufacturing that way? Anything they needed at the plant—parts for trains, furnaces, anything. Well, I shouldn't say a/zything. Car parts was cheaper to buy. But if a furnace door burned through, hell, we made a furnace door. That was really a self-contained outfit. You did everything. Yes, it was. In fact, a lot of times, well, anything that was not for the company .... An employee would have something he wanted made, maybe a Dutch oven, or a griddle. They'd do that for you at the foundry? Yeah. We called that government work. They were made out of ... . Your Dutch ovens and griddles from the foundry were made out of gray iron. Now, if you wanted a griddle out of boiler plate, that was made down at the boiler shop. What would be the difference? Why would you want something made out of boiler plate instead of gray iron? Boiler plate was easier to treat. You see, the gray iron, the inside was relatively smooth, but you'd have to treat it. And to do that you'd put grease in it and heat it up and work it around so that the grease got into all the pores of the metal and sealed it. And you had to do that before you could use it. If you got it too hot, then you had to do it all over again. It would burn out7. Yeah, it would burn it out. But the nice thing about the Dutch ovens, you didn't have that problem because usually you put them in an oven fire or something like that, and they only got so hot anyway. But the griddles, you put them on top of the stove or over a fire and sometimes they'd get hot. Now, down at the boiler shop, they'd take a piece of boiler plate, and there again they had a form, shaped like the inside of the griddle, which would be maybe 10, 12 inches wide by 12, 14 inches long, and have a lip three-quarters of an inch coming up all around it. But they'd take a flat piece of boiler plate and put over that form. Then they had a press that they would put the outside of the griddle form in this press, the bottom down below and put the boiler plate on up and then they'd just put this press down and several tons of pressure would just bend it around. What's boilerplate made from? Low-carbon steel. Low-carbon steel will bend and not break. High-carbon steel has more carbon in it and is harder, and the harder it gets the more brittle it gets. But also tougher. Candlestick made at McGill from blister copper, ca. 1920s-30s [photo courtesy of Dennis McBride] Gray iron "Party Frog" made at McGill, ca. 1920s-30s [photos courtesy of Dennis McBride J When the workers had these griddles and Dutch ovens and whatnot made, was that something that they did on the side, the foundry did on the side, or did you have to pay for it? That was done on the side. That was just one of the perks of working there. For example, if you wanted a shoe to last—in those days you half-sewed your own shoes—you'd go up to the foundry and they had molds. They'd make the stand and the pieces of iron that fit inside your shoe, that were shaped like the bottom of a shoe that fit on a stand. You could go up and get those. Oh, gosh, there was all kinds of .... Every molder had his own set of patterns of things that were special. Other shops [at] the plant did work for the employees. For example, I had a Model T Ford. In order to get more power I had the heads milled to increase the compression. This work was done at the machine shop for free. Were there labor strikes up there that you remember? They had one in 1917. That was settled, but they brought in scabs and scab herders. 1 guess you're familiar with those terms? Scab herders—I've never heard that term. A scab herder was a boss over the scabs. A scab was somebody that went to work when there was a strike on. They had another strike in 1918, but the part of the terms that they agreed [to] in 1917 with the scabs [was] that they had a lifetime job. Lifetime? Providing that they did the work. That didn't mean that they just sat bac