The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Reminder columnist Roger Cathcart, a former "smelter rat," offers memories from his time working for HBMS as a young man in the 1950s: The June 11 closure of the copper smelter, after months of uncertainty, brings back a flow of memories good and not so good for a former smelter rat like myself. This is a permanent shutdown and not the type of shutdown that we knew and feared. Back then, the furnaces would shut down and we, the labourers, would scrape out the still-hot slag by getting right inside the furnace wearing wooden clogs. We did this no matter what other job we had Ð I was a coal operator in the control room. If you were very lucky, the shutdown would fall on your days off. "Get in the furnace," the bosses would order, and even some Ð Ted Massey comes to mind Ð would lead the way. Hiring practices of the CV Whitney-owned company were just great if you were a Flin Flon boy, especially if your dad worked for the company. After writing the Grade 12 exams, I got a summer job working on the track gang at the sand pit. There were a number of us who were students and a number of new Canadians who showed us what to do. We replaced the railroad ties until noon, then did other jobs, such as cleaning and clearing bush, until pick-up time by train. Head man Alex Dobrohorsky selected me to spike the ties with him after lunch. He taught me well and it was heavy work, but really good for getting in shape. Alex told me he had been in a German concentration camp where you had to move rocks by hand. If you stopped working, they shot you. Alex later became a businessman on Main Street, and also rented out rooms to such people as my sister and her new husband. Working with him was a great experience, and some of the other regular workers were real characters. One fellow ate garlic sausage and drank wine for lunch each day. At the end of the summer I was able to stay on the job thanks to Laurie Johnson, who overruled my "temporary only because of eyesight" status and had me transferred to the copper floor in the smelter. It was hard work wheeling the huge multi-mineral bricks into the boxcars, as was the continuous clean-up, but it all depended on who the shift boss was. Often, on evenings and nights when the big bosses were not around, they let us stay in the lunch room, sleep, read, play cards and talk when we were not casting. If you got real lucky, there may only be one or two casts per night. I will never forget the boss who always threw a bar at the lunch room door as a signal for us to get out and cast. On one shift he threw the bar through the window and injured a summer student. He was in real trouble with the big bosses and paid mightily for this mistake. I received a move to the fuming plant, where I became a helper, cleaning launders, tracks and other menial jobs. In the summer I often got a tapping job because of holidays. Harold Ostby, known for his comments, is one of the bosses I remember the most. There was also Harold Lowther as well as Bert Wielenga, who called everybody "Billie." Ted Massey, known as "Rawhide," was a tough but straight-up guy to work for, and he appreciated it if you did your job. Also there was Tom Dempsey, a good guy whose stories I really enjoyed. In the baghouse, where I was often sent, Freddy Burgess was in charge. His assistant, Collinson, was quite a talker to say the least. The only bad thing about the baghouse was the zinc oxide we always had over us when we changed the bags. It smelled bad, roughened your skin and left a sour taste in your mouth. In those days we knew nothing about pollution or dangerous metals. See 'Plant' on pg. Continued from pg. My final job was as a coal operator. In the fuming plant control room, I worked with a head guy named Johnson and Vic Pettersen. My main task was to take the coal readings from the coal crushers, which was really easy unless the machines got jammed and needed cleaning. In the control room, we worked side by side with many great steam engineers, including Robbie Robinson, who had been torpedoed twice on the Murmansk run during the Second World War and was saved both times.
