The Deep Dark
Page 35
Whatever went through their father’s mind had become a bone-crushing burden.
THE UNDERGROUND PRISON OF 4800 REVISITED RON FLORY EVERY night for weeks, even years. Myrna would wake him from a bad dream and nuzzle him back to sleep, telling him that he’d be all right. But he was locked into dreams that had him walking in semidarkness, trying to avoid stepping on men who had been changed by time and heat into something inhuman. Tom Wilkinson didn’t talk quite so much about what troubled him; he was always better at holding things inside. But big Ron Flory carried the 175 hours in the Safety Zone like a heavy stone. One night in a Kellogg bar, a woman teetering on spike heels and sloshing a drink slapped him as hard as she could.
“You!” she said. “I know who you are.” Flory resisted touching his burning cheek. “My husband would be alive if you hadn’t stolen the food out of his bucket.”
Flory hoped the slap made her feel better. He said nothing and turned away. What the woman and the other mourners didn’t know was that there was also a heavy price for being a survivor. Flory paid it every time he caught the eye of one of the widows or their children.
Those who lose a loved one often console themselves with the hope that something positive can come from the tragedy. The deaths of the ninety-one Idaho miners were the clarion call that not only changed the hardrock mining industry’s safety practices and restructured the federal government, but opened America’s eyes to the dangers inherent in really hard labor. A year after the fire, the USBM was out of business and the Mining Enforcement and Safety Administration was the new governing agency. MESA was the first federal agency with sole responsibility for assuring miners of a safe working environment. New rules were set for American mines. A check-in and checkout procedure was mandated. Hoistmen now worked in sealed-in compartments with oxygen tanks and a separate ventilation supply. Self-rescuers were no longer optional in hardrock mining, but were required to be carried by each man underground. Regular evacuation drills also became mandatory. No miner—new hire or old hand—could ever say that he didn’t know his way out. In March of 1977, MESA was transferred from the Department of the Interior to the place where most thought it belonged, the Department of Labor. There it was renamed Mine Safety and Health Administration.
Exactly what started the fire remains unknown.
IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN THREE DECADES SINCE THE FIRE KILLED ninety-one men and Bob Launhardt was left haunted by what had happened—and what could have been done to prevent it. Sunshine Mine closed in February 2001, ironically marking the day with a fire drill. Its deepest levels are now filled with water, submerging the hoists, the trackline, and the footprints of the men who’d worked there for more than a century.
Ron and Myrna Flory divorced, and as much as he didn’t want to, Ron returned underground to work in the mines. Though he is unemployed and on disability now, having suffered serious burns in a car accident several years after the fire, he still sees himself as a miner. Tom and Frances Wilkinson left the district and never looked back. Rumormongers at the time of the fire had it that the Wilkinson marriage was so shaky that Frances went to the dry to take divorce papers from his street clothes. Still married, they deny the story, but in the end, did that matter? Now living in St. Maries, Idaho, Wilkinson returned to Sunshine only briefly after the disaster. He has since enjoyed a long career with the Forest Service, working in the fresh air and the light of day.
Like several Sunshine widows, Wava Beehner remarried within a year of the fire. When that marriage failed, she turned bad luck into pragmatism. She told herself it didn’t matter. When she got to heaven, she was sure, Don would be waiting for her. He’d understand. Betty Johnson lives alone in her Kellogg home, away from Big Creek and the mine, though it never leaves her mind. Her bitterness toward Jim Farris, now deceased, has not lessened, and she maintains little or no contact with any of the friends she once had—though she sees many every day. Joanne Strope Reichert became the central figure in a legal case that made it all the way to the Idaho State Supreme Court. As Jack Reichert’s common-law wife, she sought to keep his Buick Skylark. She lost. Devastated by the tactics of attorneys who painted her as “the biggest tramp” in the district, Strope left the area for almost thirty years. She only returned to Kellogg recently.
The sole survivor of his crew, Bill Mitchell still believes that it was an angel that reached out through the smoke and saved his life on May 2. The angel’s name is Greg Dionne.
Janet Launhardt left Bob Launhardt a decade after the fire. Now remarried, Bob Launhardt lives in the same tidy house in Pinehurst, overlooking the golf course. He suffers bouts of depression that he concedes are likely tied to the events of that terrible Tuesday. Obsession both fuels and fights his depression. Clearly, when so many die on your watch, it isn’t easy to let go. Now in his seventies, he is an old man with perfect posture and piles of information to prove that what happened so long ago could have been averted, that it hadn’t been his fault. He has spent his life examining the Sunshine fire from every angle.
“Every day is how often Bob thinks about the fire,” Launhardt’s second wife, Barb, explains. “It almost killed him, too. He almost had a nervous breakdown.”
Even now, whenever he gets the opportunity, Launhardt preaches safety and the role polyurethane foam probably played in the disaster. There are more believers today, but he wonders why so much of the dangerous and combustible foam remains in American mines, hotels, restaurants, and tunnels. Had Launhardt’s message been heard, the death of 177 miners in South Africa’s Kinross gold mine in 1986 might have been prevented. Launhardt can still hear a survivor’s voice over the static of the radio clip: “They told us it wouldn’t burn!” The words were an echo of what the USBM told Sunshine in the mid-1960s when polyurethane foam was sprayed over drift walls as a ventilation sealant.
“What’s important here,” he says, “is that we make sure this doesn’t happen again. It could. It really could.” His words are not a salaried man’s memorized script, but a speech that came from the heart of a miner.
The places and the people of the Coeur d’Alenes are no longer as they were before the day the men died. Many of the tough young miners who fought their way out of the mine that day are now crippled old men, though only in their sixties. Wallace’s hookers turned their last tricks. Kellogg’s Uncle Bunk left town. The towering stacks that gave Smelterville its name and pumped untold tons of lead into the sky are no more. In 1985 the feds tagged a twenty-one-square-mile area around Bunker Hill as the nation’s second-largest Superfund site. Many of Kellogg’s businesses are shuttered, and the town’s Chamber of Commerce now pushes tourism as the area’s savior. And though it is impossible to know if anyone truly believes the brochures that tout the place as a Bavarian-style ski village, its people and those of the other mining towns of the district are hopeful about the future. Optimism still runs in their blood. Mining has always been about doing better the next day. Far beyond the hardhats and carbide lamps that embellish thrift-store walls, the industry’s impact remains profound. It will always be so.
IN MEMORIAM
MAY 2, 1972
Robert Alexander, 50 Howard Fleshman, 38 Hubert Patrick, 45
Billy Allen, 24 William Follette, 23 Casey Pena, 52
Wayne Allen, 39 Richard Garcia, 56 John Peterson, 57
Richard Allison, 37 Richard George, 20 Francis Phillips, 42
Arnold Anderson, 48 Robert Goff, 35 Irvan Puckett, 51
Robert Anderson, 37 Louis Goos, 51 Floyd Rais, 61
Joe Armijo, 38 John Guertner, 54 Leonard Rathbun, 29
Ben Barber, 31 William Hanna, 47 John Rawson, 27
Robert Barker, 42 Howard Harrison, 34 Jack Reichert, 45
Virgil Bebb, 53 Patrick Hobson, 57 Dusty Rhoads, 57
Don Beehner, 38 Melvin House, 41 Glen Rossiter, 37
Richard Bewley, 40 Merle Hudson, 47 Paul Russell, 30
George Birchett, 40 Jack Ivers, 44 Gene Salyer, 54
Wayne Blalack, 35 Gene John
son, 45 James Salyer, 51
Robert Bush, 47 Paul Johnson, 47 Allen Sargent, 38
Floyd Byington, 35 Wayne Johnson, 43 Robert Scanlan, 38
Clarence Case, 55 James Johnston, 19 John Serano, 37
Charlie Casteel, 30 Custer Keough, 59 Nick Sharette, 48
Kevin Croker, 29 Sherman Kester, 60 Frank Sisk, 31
Duwain Crow, 39 Dewellyn Kitchen, 31 Darrell Stephens, 20
Rod Davenport, 35 Elmer Kitchen, 54 Gustav Thor, 38
John Davis, 28 Kenneth La Voie, 29 Grady Truelock, 40
Richard Delbridge, 24 Richard Lynch, 24 Robert Waldvogel, 50
William Delbridge, 55 Donald McLachlan, 23 William Walty, 29
Roberto Diaz, 55 Delbert McNutt, 48 Gordon Whatcott, 37
Greg Dionne, 23 James Moore, 29 Doug Wiederrick, 37
Carter Don Carlos, 47 David Mullin, 34 Ronald Wilson, 41
Norman Fee, 27 Joe Naccarato, 40 William Wilson, 41
Lyle Findley, 30 Orlin Nelson, 32 John Wolff, 49
Don Firkins, 37 Richard Norris, 24 Don Wood, 53
Donald Orr, 50
Acknowledgments
THE DEEP DARK IS THE SUM OF COLLECTIVE MEMORIES OF MANY who lived through the events of May 2, 1972, and a vast, and mostly untouched, historical record. Consider those records—archived reports, diaries, letters, news accounts from the time, and legal papers—the backbone of this book. Over the past four years, I conducted more than two hundred interviews for this book and did my best to reconcile the historical record with the memories of the men and women who lived through the tragedy.
I am grateful to so many of the people of the Coeur d’Alene Mining District, who helped in direct and indirect ways, for their contributions to this narrative. Among the many I’d like to acknowledge: Ron Flory, Myrna Kinnick, Tom and Frances Wilkinson, Marvin Chase and his sons Rob and Pete, Larry Hawkins, Mel Jaynes, Ray and Rita Rudd, Randy Peterson, Lou Ella Firkins, Paul and Margie Robinson, Len Bourgard, Linda Daugherty, Lee Haynes, Johnny Lang, Susan Goos Whipple, Patty Goos Long, Howard Markve, Kenny and Judy Wilbur, Lee Morgan, Johnny Cordray, Wilbur and Ginny Bruhn, Ken Riley, Terry Jerome, George Clapp, Steve Knoll, Bob and Lois Follette, Jack Harris, Betty Larsen, Keith Dahlberg, Al Walkup, Bill Mitchell, Bill Steele, Art Brown, Ed Adams, Gordon Miner, Jerry McGinn, Joanne Strope, JoAnn Babcock, Edna Davenport, Mary Jean Hinkemeyer, Lino Castenada, Dennis Clapp, Ben Sheppard, Doug Dionne, Richelle Crumm, Shirlene Flory, Pat Allen, Don Capparelli, Harry and Linda Cougher, George and Patty Moore, Jon Langstaff, Stan Taylor, Scott Baille, Garnita O’Neal, Frances Phillips, Jim Gordon, Dale Furnish, Ray Alexander, Roger Findley, Bobbie Findlay, Bob Flory, Mary Barber Grondin, Ed Adams, Peg Geiser, Bill Dellbridge, Laverne Melton, Larry Hoven, Keith Collins, Mary Woolum and Kathy Wolfe Ebert.
A large group of historians, archivists, and mining experts proved invaluable to this project. I greatly appreciate the contributions of John Amonson, Oradell Triplett, Carol Roberts, Nick Clapp, David Bond, Gene Hyde, Elaine Cullen, and Jerry Dolph. Special thanks to Susan Karren, Director of Archival Operations for the National Archives and Records Administration for the Pacific Alaska Region, and her associates John Fitzgerald and John Ferrell and Richard C. Davis, Manuscripts-Archives Librarian at the University of Idaho; Alan Virta and staff at Boise State University’s Special Collections Department; and Terry Abraham and staff at University of Idaho Library, Special Collections and Archives.
Out of some forty boxes of archived materials from the United States Bureau of Mines (correspondence, depositions, charts, and photographs), nothing was of greater value than the “Final Report” in its various iterations. I appreciate the hard work of the men and women of the USBM and the legacy of their efforts. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the work of Dick Gentry, a writer who conducted several dozen taped interviews a decade after the fire. Those tapes provided a voice to many who are no longer with us.
On the publishing side, I’m indebted to a pair of brilliant, talented, and wise women. Literary Agent Susan Raihofer of the David Black Literary Agency, for making the business fun, collaborative and meaningful; and Rachel Kahan, my editor at Crown, who stepped into this project with grace, heart, and wisdom. Also, thanks to Emily Loose, The Deep Dark’s acquiring editor who handed off the project to Rachel’s capable hands. I also want to acknowledge copy editor David Wade Smith and attorney Amelia Zalcman for their contributions. Others helpful to this project include researcher Gary Boynton, reader and advisor Kathrine Beck, map designer Francois Houle, copy editor Julie O’Donnell, and friends Tina Marie and Nelson Brewer.
Special mention must be made to Bob Launhardt, without whom I doubt I’d have been able to write this book. Bob provided a small mountain of source material, cheerful guidance, and an enduring friendship that means more to me than he’ll ever know. In addition to Bob, I’d like to acknowledge the rest of the Launhardts (Janet, Bob Jr., Julie, Jeannie, and Bill and Hazel Noyen), the Beehners (Wava, Matt, and Nora), and the Johnsons (Betty Johnson and Peggy White).
Without exception, there is a significant story associated with everyone who worked at Sunshine during the time period covered in my book. I know that because I heard so many. But a book can tell only a fraction of what happened. For those who lost men that day and their names do not appear in the narrative, please accept my apology. The exclusion is the result of limitations of the author and the medium.
Finally, I want to thank my wonderful wife, Claudia, and our daughters, Marta and Morgan, all of whom traveled to the district over the years as I conducted interviews, sought out material, and learned what it was to be a miner. My love and thanks forever.
About the Author
GREGG OLSEN is the author of seven nonfiction books, including the New York Times bestseller Abandoned Prayers. A journalist and investigative author for more than two decades, Olsen has received numerous awards and much critical acclaim for his writing. The Seattle native now lives in rural Washington state with his wife, twin daughters, cat, and six chickens.