Excerpt From: The Raids: The Nickel Range Trilogy, Volume 1 (Jake, Ascending) – by Mick Lowe

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Excerpt From: The Raids: The Nickel Range Trilogy, Volume 1 (Jake, Ascending)

Dayshift, Garson Mine – Sudbury, Ontario, Canada – Monday, May 6, 1963 – 6 AM

What they neglected to tell him before that first shift was that you weren’t lowered into the mine; you were dropped.
The only inkling of the bullet-like descent of the cage, packed with its human cargo, plummeting down the greased shaft guides, was the build-up of pressure on Jake’s eardrums. The miners were packed so tightly, in fact, that there was no room for Jake and his forty-five or so compatriots to carry their lunch boxes. Instead, each man simply placed his lunch box between his boots on the splintered wooden floor of the cage.

The air was redolent of excessive aftershave and explosive Cold War tension. When the cage was between levels it was deceptively quiet, with little indication of the colossal forces at play around their peaceful, gently rocking world: the cage rocketing downward toward the molten centre of the earth at a hundred feet per second, suspended from a tightly wound, heavily greased wire rope thousands of feet long unspooling with unimaginable rapidity. Only when the cage passed a level—its bright lights and promise of life appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye—was there a sense of the speed of their descent.

“He’s a fuckin’ Commie,” Jake heard from someone standing in front of him. “Câlice!” The French invective was hurled from the back of the cage. “Oh, and Thibault’s Red, too.” “Tabernac!” again from the rear.

There wasn’t enough room to swing a cat, much less a punch, which was a good thing, too, Jake reflected, as the cage glided to a halt. With a rapid insouciance born of countless repetitions the cage tender yanked on his bell cord a few times, raised the scissors gate and swung out the heavy steel gate, the signal at once reaching the hoistman on surface nearly a half-mile above just after he braked the cage to a stop, the heavy car bobbing slightly as the wire rope slackened and tightened to absorb the strain.

“Twenty-two hundred, gentlemen,” announced the tender with a wry, courtly formality.

They crowded out onto the level, still tightly bunched, like a school of fish. Instinctively Jake glanced down before he stepped out of the cage. Its floor was nearly flush with the deck. This was a wizardry that would come to profoundly impress Jake: how the hoistman, sitting in his easy chair in his silent, dimly lit little antechamber adjacent to the shaft house and equipped only with a few manual levers, foot pedals and a giant circular glass-enclosed dial, could so unerringly calibrate the forces of grav¬ity and momentum over a distance of a half-mile through solid rock.

He stepped out onto the level.

And then a half-dozen novel sensations washed over Jake in a rush: the hollow loud metallic clang as the tender pulled the heavy gate shut, the ear-splitting ring of the hoist signal bells, the underground smells of a working hard rock mine—the damp most of all, suffused with the hint of sulphur overpowered by the acrid reek of ammonia.

Jake was surprised how light it was—not bright, certainly, but here at the loading station there were a half-dozen bulbs glowing inside protective steel frames. The walls had been sprayed with some kind of reflective coating. Off in the distance down the main haulage drift a string of lights burned bravely in a losing battle against the all enveloping dark. The world ended abruptly past the last one.

Even as he was taking his bearings, Jake became aware of a slender older man of medium height standing facing the shaft.

“You young McCool?” the face behind the question broke into a ready, welcoming smile above an outstretched hand. “I knew your dad. We were stewards together at Stobie. Big Bill was a good union man. I’m Bob Jesperson, your new partner.”

Jake accepted the proffered hand. The grip was firm, but not bone-crushing. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Jesperson.” The older man waved the formality aside. “Please, let’s make it Bob.”

Jake studied the older man, found a friendly face and clear blue eyes just visible behind a pair of eye¬glasses surrounded by the safety glasses which were a mandatory piece of protective equipment for every¬one in the mine.

Jesperson turned to face the haulage drift before looking up at Jake, who stood a good head taller than the older man.
“Ever been underground before?”

Jake shook his head. Jesperson turned his back to the shaft and pointed down the tunnel, which was the only exit from the loading station.

“Haulage drift. Main drift. Muck’s trammed out on those rails you see there”—for the first time Jake noticed the narrow gauge rails on the floor of the drift—“to be hoisted to surface.”

Jake nodded. Jesperson motioned for him to follow and set off down the drift.

II

Was, Jake thought, as he trudged along behind Bob. His dad was a good union man, fairly worshipping at the altar of the Great, Almighty Mine Mill, until the disastrous strike of ’58 had nearly ruined the family, and the seemingly impregnable Local 598 along with 18 it. The bargaining agent for all of International Nickel’s eighteen thousand production and maintenance workers in the Sudbury Basin, Local 598 was larger than many whole unions, a true trade union colossus.

Oh, it had all started well enough that fall in 1958, with a breezy confidence borne of hubris and inexperience. For the first fifteen years of its existence the big Local had negotiated a series of one-year agreements without ever striking, which had fostered prosperity, yes, but also false confidence as to the impacts of their actions: the winter alone would bring the company to its knees, with water lines in the surface plants freezing and bursting, and furnace linings cracking in the unaccustomed cold.

But the long post-war boom was finally, unimaginably, drawing to a close, and a mild recession was beginning. Demand for nickel slackened accordingly, and the world price was buoyed, paradoxically, only by their own strike.
As Christmas approached, bleak reality set in. Mine Mill, which had earlier been expelled from the AFL-CIO for its left-wing leanings, was unable to turn to other unions for financial support, with the singular exception of Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters, which had also been expelled from the American house of labour years earlier.

When a delegation of Sudbury strike leaders appealed to the Teamsters for support Hoffa himself greeted them warmly, pledging one million dollars in strike support on the spot. It was a generous enough gesture—one that would be all but unrecorded in history, but amongst eighteen thousand workers a million bucks didn’t last long. Strike pay, minimal though it had been, was reduced to a trickle, and then dried up entirely. The strikers’ wives, faced with the prospect of a Christmas without presents for their children, began to waver in their support of their husbands’ cause, a hesitation that was quickly exploited by a right-wing mayor who organized a mass pre- Christmas, anti-strike wives’ rally in the city’s largest hockey arena.

The water lines in the plants did not freeze. Furnace linings did not crack. Instead, the company itself simply dug in, content to save millions in wages while selling stockpiled nickel at a slightly elevated world price.

Family savings dwindled and cupboards became bare just as the cold weather and holidays loomed. The McCools were no exception. Instead, they became gleaners. It was a humiliating act of desperation Jake would never forget: Big Bill, proud Mine Miller and highly paid, highly skilled hard rock miner, piled his whole family into their old black Chevy sedan for the trip to a farmer’s field out in the Valley—the farmer was a union sympathizer who opened his fields to strikers—to dig up any unharvested potatoes they could pry out of the frozen ground. They unearthed the spuds with shovels and spades at first, before sinking to their knees to claw their quarry out of the frozen, unyielding earth with their bare hands and with fingers numbed by the cold.

Jake’s mom did what she could, improvising dozens of new ways to cook potatoes, but there was no way to disguise the bitter taste of defeat that accompanied every meal that terrible winter. Still Big Bill, long a strong union man, clung stubbornly to his pride, exhorting his fellow strikers to greater resolve out on the picket lines. But at home, behind closed doors, the strain was almost more than any of them could bear.
And for what?

Jake still wondered as he trailed down the drift behind Bob Jesperson. The strike ended, finally, when the union had been forced to settle for the same offer it had rejected before the strike began, before the hardship, the near starvation, the barren Christmas. Even Jake’s dad, proud Mine Miller though he’d been, had to admit it was a terrible defeat.

Shortly after the strike ended Big Bill McCool quietly slipped into the Union Hall and surrendered his steward’s badge.

III

The strike’s outcome cast a long shadow over the big Local’s leadership. Blood was in the water, and the union’s monthly membership meetings, always lively affairs, became downright fractious. In the wake of Mine Mill’s expulsion from the AFL-CIO the United Steelworkers of America became the officially sanc¬tioned industrial union in Mine Mill’s historic jurisdiction, and the Pittsburgh-based Steelworkers had quickly begun to swell their own ranks by gobbling up, one by one, Mine Mill Locals in the States.

There were growing suspicions that Steel had now set its sights on the biggest prize of all—Local 598. Those fears were confirmed when Steel organizers began to sign Steelworkers’ membership cards on the job, launching an all-out raid on the big Local. The insurgents were led by vocal opponents of the progressive leaders who had so badly bungled the strike, and the pro-Steel forces soon gained traction. The conflict quickly surged beyond the Union Hall to engulf the entire community.

The city was split right down the middle: either you were a Mine Miller, and a suspected Commie dupe, or pro-Steel, and a McCarthyite tool of Washington and the CIA. There was no middle ground, nowhere to hide. On Sundays Roman Catholic priests inveighed from their pulpits against the Mine Mill, warning their flocks about the perils of godless Communism. There were Mine Mill bars, and Steelworker bars. Extremes played out in public, and among the innocents. In the schoolyards Steel kids ganged up on Mine Mill kids and vice versa. Fistfights between factions and, on bad days, full-on riots became commonplace. Global Cold War escalated into a heated local civil war on the streets of Sudbury.

Personally, Jake could care less. He had little use for unions, anyway. Oh, he conceded that they had probably been necessary when they were first organ¬ized, in the Dirty Thirties when everyone was out of work, and young men his age had been forced to hop freights, riding the rods all over Canada to seek employment. But this was the sixties; times had changed. …

© Baraka Books
Reproduced with the permission of the Publisher. Not to be printed without the written permission of Baraka Books.