Even when geologists said there couldn’t be uranium at Blind River this brash and bouncy little financial wizard tossed in $30,000 and struck a spectacular bonanza. He wasn’t surprised. “Making money comes easy to me,” he says, “ — like breathing”
ALONG Toronto’s Bay Street, the frenetic mining capital of North America, veteran prospector and minemaker Gilbert A. LaBine had long been acknowledged—until recently—as the uranium king of Canada. The reason was obvious. It was LaBine who had found the continent’s first pitchblende, at Great Bear Lake, in 1930; LaBine whose Eldorado mine helped usher in the atomic age over Hiroshima; and LaBine who, in the northern wilds of Saskatchewan, came up with Gunnar, Canada’s first truly big uranium strike.
Today—for reasons equally obvious—the top man in uranium is no longer LaBine, a conservative grey-haired elder of the industry, but Joseph H. Hirshhorn, a flashy fast-talking little mining promoter from the borough of Brooklyn, N.Y., whose exploits on Bay and Wall Streets have won him millions of dollars and a gambler’s reputation for playing long shots.