Glenn Jones, born in Nevada City in 1924, recounts his lifelong experiences in Grass Valley, California, with a focus on the region's mining history and the changing local industries. He describes attending school and working various jobs as a young boy, including delivering newspapers and working in a bakery and butcher shop. He recalls the lack of refrigeration and the delivery of ice and vegetables by Chinese immigrants, highlighting the significant presence of a Chinese community in the area. He then discusses his experiences working in the family hardware business, which had been established in 1854 and remained in the family for over 110 years. He details the construction of the fireproof hardware store building, emphasizing the necessity of such measures due to frequent fires in early towns. He also shares his memories of working in various industries during WWII, including construction, carpentry, and glazing, and his subsequent service in the Navy as a gunner's mate. He reflects on the challenges and rewards of his time in the Navy, particularly his extensive travels throughout Alaska. The interview also covers his involvement in the creation of the local mining exhibit, his insights into the realities of high-grading in the mines, and his recollections of harsh winters and the community's resilience in the face of heavy snowfall and limited resources.

Full Transcript of the Video:

105 Via Vista in Nevada City, California.

And Glenn, we're off.

Thank you.

I was born in Grass Valley, that is almost, it was Nevada City actually.

Most of the people in my class in school were born in Nevada City because Grass Valley did not have a very good birthing system.

They just had a Jones Memorial Hospital which took up three floors and nurses hated to work there.

So most all the children being born were born in Nevada City.

There was a sanitarium there, they called it not a hospital, a sanitarium.

It was where the new Nevada City Post Office is now.

It was run by two women.

I don't think they were nurses, they were more in the category of midwife.

Now through the years that they were open they had a remarkable record.

There were 1900 births in the sanitarium and they never had one death.

Now I tell people I was born in a sanitarium and of course most of my friends today still think I ought to be in one somewhere.

But anyway, our family, my grandfather, came from Campbell in England.

My grandmother was born in Grass Valley in 1866 in a cabin that is now on part of the Empire Mine property.

My father was born in Grass Valley in 1894 and I was born in 1924.

I lived here all my life except for when I was in the service.

Growing up our family home was on the corner of Main and Aldous Street.

Now anyone that was on say west of Auburn Street, they either went to Washington School, which the building is still there, that's all, or Lincoln School which there is nothing left now which is on School Street, and then Bell Hill School which is still there.

When you were on the other side of Auburn Street then you would go to Washington, although I did go one grade to Washington School, and Grant School, and then it was Columbus School also, that is where the grammar school is now on Auburn Street.

They all went through the eighth grade.

There was only one high school in Grass Valley and one in Nevada City.

Both of the buildings are still there, although they've been changed dramatically.

Now most of the people that, the kids in that era, let's say you're in the seventh grade or so, they all worked summer.

We had paper routes.

I had the examiner and the Chronicle.

It was seven day a week job, no days off, no vacation, no Christmas, whatever.

You work every day of the year for five dollars a month.

Now we had to be out of the building by seven o'clock in the morning to get on your route, otherwise you'd be late for school.

But that was a system that the newspapers used.

There also was a "B" here in later years, and of course the Union, which eventually was the morning union, and then it was in the afternoon, and then it went back to mornings again.

But those were the four papers that came into this area.

Now most of us worked summer, and I say that by the time I was eight years old I had a paper route, and in another year or so, well, I was working on Saturdays in the morning in a bakery, which is where Tofanelli's is now.

And next, or the other way around, there was a butcher shop there where I worked in the afternoon, and then next door to it was the Freeman's Bakery.

So that took care of my Saturdays.

I forget what I got paid, but it was enough to go to the movie house, which cost ten cents in the late 30s to go to the movies.

The Friday night special.

By the time I was in high school, although I was a freshman, at that time I went to work in a grocery store up on High Street, which was not Hill grocery.

There were a lot of small grocery stores scattered around town in the 30s.

There were not really major stores.

I remember Safeway was here, and Purity stores, but other than that, everything was a small store.

Now you have to think back that in the early 30s there was not much refrigeration, especially in your home.

So before ice came to Grass Valley, now ice come from Boca by Truckee, one of the coldest places in California, and they cut ice there and put down the train, and the Union Ice Company would end up with it in San Francisco.

But finally we started making our own ice on North Auburn Street.

I think the building is still there, and it was delivered.

It came in big blocks.

They would saw it in pieces of say a hundred pounds, and then put a sock kerf in it for a 50 or 25, and they would just travel around all the streets.

We had a little sign if you wanted ice, and the size you wanted you hung it in your window, and they would see it.

Now vegetables were also delivered.

We had Chinese, as you probably know, we had one of the largest Chinatowns in California, and at one time only New York had a larger Chinatown than Grass Valley.

They raised many of their own vegetables going out Colfax Avenue.

There were no houses there, and of course no school property.

Those were all vegetable gardens, and they also would deliver, like a pickup panel, a screen on the side of it.

It was an ideal way to get food.

You just go out and kind of call through to what you wanted, and it went from there.

They would have a scale, but that was about it.

In the case of the ice, it was nice for the kids to run along behind it, and calling him into chipping off a piece in the middle of July when it was hot, it worked out very well.

Once in the high school, as I said, it was only one high school here, much simpler than things are now.

In other words, you either took a business course, or if you were a woman, you were going to become a nurse.

It didn't mention wives or anything like that, but it saved all this problem of these things, all the courses that are given now that sometimes don't amount to anything, but putting in time.

You only took classes that was going to do you some good.

I always think about math, which I hate with a passion, but I took a business course because our family was in the hardware business.

Now, being in the hardware business, if we go back far enough, my grandfather came from Canbourne, if I mentioned it or not.

My grandmother was born here, and our family got in the hardware business in about 1873, and our family was in it for over 110 years.

We had the oldest established hardware in California in the same location since 1854.

Now, it was one of the first brick buildings that was built in the downtown area, and the reason was, as you no doubt know by now, all new towns, I don't care what state they were in, sooner or later they burned to the ground.

They did not have adequate water or fire departments.

In Grass Valley's time in 1855, the entire town burned down.

There was not one building standing except for the Grass Valley hardware, which was still being built larger, and the Autrell's building.

They were both brick buildings, two and three floors high, and they had a common wall.

Now, the fire is quite important because you have to stop it if you don't have a fire department.

It's not going to stop by itself.

So, all the buildings that were being built then in the 50s had also steel shutters.

They were on all the windows, so, and the doors from the back.

So, when you close the building down that night, you closed it up completely like a box.

Well, many brick buildings still burned because the fire would go through the roof, come down through the roof.

So, in the case of the hardware, if you have an opportunity to go upstairs in it now, if they'll let you go in there, look at the rafters.

They're all exposed.

They're three inches by 14 inches, two of them stacked on top of each other.

So, we now have 28 inches of ceiling joists.

Then on top of that, they put boards that were one inch thick and eight, ten, twelve inches wide, like now you had a floor.

Then on top of that floor, they laid brick, just like you'd make a patio.

They would just put one against the other, no mortar, absolutely as tight as they could get them.

Then a sheet of tin on top of that, and then some kind of aggregate.

It could be sand and then pebbles, or they had tar and pebbles, which looks about like our macadam does now.

But now you had a roof that was waterproof and fireproof.

And from then on, many buildings were constructed basically like that when they found out that old towns, new and old, were going to burn, sides or from the top.

Now as time went by, I went out of high school and the war was on.

Things were scarce.

You could get out of school six months early if you would go to work in some defense situation, as long as you had the credits at Christmas.

Well, almost all the guys and half of the women in school got out at Christmas time and then went back in June to get their diplomas.

Of course, in our case, you get your diploma and your draft notice the same night.

It kind of, when you had that group together, you might as well make it pay.

We all went to work at Camp Beale.

It was just Camp Beale then.

Now if you mention Camp Beale to somebody in the Air Force, he about dies.

But anyway, that's what it was referred to.

We were all laborers naturally.

The footings that were dug and for the foundations was all done with a pick and shovel.

There was no power equipment in 1942 that was used on a construction job.

They'd line you up about 12 feet apart.

We'd give you a pick and a shovel and you were off.

Well, we did that for several months, but I had a paper, I think it was called the appeal Democrat or Marysville Democrat, something like that.

A newspaper in the headlines was 117 degrees, is all it showed.

That was one July day and that was a hot day to be running a pick and shovel on February.

So several of the people from our area went to Hawthorne, Nevada where they were building an ammunition depot.

It was cooler even in Nevada compared with being baked out in the plains around Hollywood and Marysville and New York City and so forth.

So a number of us went over there and, you know, here you're barely 18.

In that case, I don't think I was even 18 because I didn't become 18 until August.

I run down a person that was in our class in school and he was a teamster.

So he said they're hiring, you know, truck drivers.

You should be able to get a job.

So I went into the Union office and told him I was a teamster and the guy said, "That's what we're looking for.

Experienced men.

You want to see my Union card?" And I said, "I don't have a Union card.

I come from Northern California.

We don't have Unions there.

" And he said, "Well, what kind of trips do you drive?" Well, the only word I could think of was a bobtail and a dump truck and I told him, you know, that's what I had driven and he said, "Well, what about transmissions?" And I said, "Well, they had two-speed, high-low, two-speed Eaton, so that's fine.

" He felt I knew what I was talking about, which I didn't, of course.

And then he said, "We have some big trucks too you may have to drive that have brownies in them.

" So I said, "No problem.

Don't worry about it.

" So I had to join the Union, fifty dollars, so as I was walking out the door, up to that time I thought a brownie was something that you ate.

I didn't know it was some kind of a transmission.

But anyway, we all went to work as truck drivers and after about a month and a half or so, there would always be a shortage of something.

Gasoline, tires, anything.

And they'd say, "Well, you're all laid off, for five days or seven days, but phone us back and we can set you up to come to work on the following day.

" Well, I didn't want to just lay around, so I decided I'd have to go to work.

So I went in town again to find out who was hiring and they were hiring carpenters.

Well, here I was, still 17 I think, waltzed into the Union Hall and told them I was a carpenter.

The guy never blinked an eye and he said, "Well, show me your Union card.

" I told him, "Don't have a Union card.

I'm from Northern California, we don't have unions there.

" So anyway, he questioned me a little bit, but being familiar with hardware and tools and building material, well, I kind of bowled my way into that too, because it was called a she-bolt operation and I was familiar with it.

So I said, "Well, I don't have any tools here.

They're all in California, I'll have to go get them.

" So he sent me out to the superintendent of the construction itself and I told him the same story.

Now, anybody would looking at me would not know that I was a journeyman anything at 17 years of age.

But anyway, I said, "I'll go back to California and get my tools.

" But by the way, there's no use in me bringing all my tools over here.

They'll just get stolen.

You know, on this job you're only using a wrecking bar and a crescent wrench and a hammer and a measuring tape.

That's all that's used.

And he says, "That's right, that's all you bring back then.

" So I came back to Grass Valley and I went into JCPenney's, which was right across the street from the hardware in those days, and I bought the last pair of carpenters overall.

You know, they were always white, had all these pockets in them and bands on them to hang stuff.

I had no idea what it was for.

But anyway, I got out my backyard in the red dirt and I rubbed the pants and the knees.

At least it looked like I wore the dumb things on a job someplace.

Told them back over to Nevada and run this guy down and he says, "Well, I really need you on a pipeline.

" And he asked me a question about something and I said, "I was familiar with it because here again, in the hardware in high school, I would run the pipe machines and thread, you know, thread pipe and cell fitting.

" So I knew enough that I could convince him.

At least I'd seen what a pipe fitting looked like.

So we went to work on this job, just three of us, and what it was, you supplied water to the old type of mixers, cement mixers, where you dumped everything into a big tray in front of it and then cables hoisted the tray up and the aggregate slid into the drum.

But you had to have water there.

So we would work or we would get paid for 12, 13, 14 hours a day because the last thing at night you disconnected everything and had to drain all the water out of it.

So it was one of those deals.

We'd work for an hour and a half and then hide for 10 or 11 hours and then work for another hour.

So it was good duty for a while.

Then I think they ran out of cement and I was waiting for a call to win the Navy, but I didn't want to just stay there doing nothing.

So I'm back into town and that day they were hiring glaciers.

So I thought, "Well, today I guess I'll be a glacier.

" So I went up to the business agent and told him I was a glacier and so forth and, "Well, where's your union card? I don't have a union card.

I'm in Northern California.

We don't have unions in Northern California.

" So anyway, he, $50, that got me a card.

So now I'm a glacier.

So it was glass block and I had cut glass in the hardware.

We sold glass.

So I knew something about it.

Not much, but something.

So I worked for them for, I don't know how long, five, six, seven weeks and then they ran out of something.

Either glass or mortar, something.

Well, I'll have to lay off for about a week.

Well, I didn't want to be laid off for a week.

So the next day I went back to town and went on to the unions.

We're all in a group there and they were hiring cement finishers.

So I thought, "Well, I guess today I'll be a cement finisher.

" And from working in the hardware, I recognized tools that were used in cement finishing.

So I went up to get this job, told them I was a cement finisher.

"Well, where'd you work?" "Well, I've been to Northern California.

No, I'm not in the union.

I had to pay another $50, but there is where I was.

" I became the cement finisher, but we worked at night from about 10 o'clock at night until maybe 6 o'clock in the morning because in one of these floors to be as smooth as glass, there's no way that they could have sparks or anything because it was a storing of ammunition.

So everything was high polished.

And in those days, they didn't have the big 48-inch fans like they use now.

You did it by hand.

So you're down on your hands and knees and your feet are on a little bore to your toes and you just trowel and trowel by the hour just polishing this.

So I did that for about 12 days and then I didn't think I'd be able to stand if I ever got down on my knees again and it would be cold in the morning, which didn't help things at all.

So I finally told the guys that I can't do this.

I'll never get my legs straightened out again.

So it was getting now in the fall of the year and a bunch of them were gonna go home for Christmas.

So I thought, "Well, I'll go home with you guys now.

" So we went home.

Coming up to the summit, we had chains and gas was rationed.

So every day, we'd get a quart of gas out of somebody's tractor or whatever was there.

So we had enough gas to get home for Christmas.

And we got about a hundred yards to the top of the hill.

And if you remember, there used to be a highway maintenance station.

A big corrugated iron building was right at the top of the hill.

We got about a hundred yards from it.

The wheels started to spin.

The car would go forward.

So the five of us got out of the car and started pushing.

So we pushed it and we finally got it moving.

And then it would go about one mile an hour faster than we could crawl to keep up with it because the wind was really howling.

So he got up to the top of the hill and waited for us.

And the five of us then crawled the last hundred yards up to the summit.

So that's the last time I wanted to go over the summit on my hands and knees, I'll tell you.

So we came home for Christmas.

And here again, I checked with the Navy and they said, "Well, it may be a month before we can call you now.

" But you know, the people were going in the military so fast they didn't have any place to send them.

And they were also building, you know, places like Beal and for the Navy all over.

I went to Farragut, which was in Idaho.

But some of my friends in my class had been working in the in the shipyards.

So I thought, "Well, I ought to go down and see what's in the shipyard.

" So I went down there and we fooled around for a couple days.

And I got a room out by the college in Berkeley.

So I was coming home from out carousing one night about 11 o'clock and got down at the end of the line.

And there was only one person on the screen car with his little aluminum tin hat on and his little bucket and so forth.

So I said, "What do you do?" And he says, "Well, I'm a machine rigger.

" And I said, "What in the world is a machine rigger?" So he says, "Well, you know, we lower the pumps down onto the platform and bring the shaft alleys in, go into the propellers, and we run shafts between the pumps.

" And he says, "It's not hard work because we have hydraulic hoists to do it and chain falls and rope falls and so forth.

" So the next day I walked down to Berkeley and found the machine riggers Union.

So I went in and the guy looked at me and said, "You want a job?" And I said, "Yeah, I'm a machine rigger.

" And he says, "Well, boy, we're sure looking for machine riggers.

Now that's for sure.

" I said, "Well, I'm your man.

Now I'm 18, barely.

" So he says, "Where's your Union car?" And I said, "I don't have a Union car.

I'm in Northern California.

We don't have it.

" So he says, "Well, where'd you work in Northern California?" I said, "Well, I just came off a Shasta Dam.

" Now they were building Shasta Dam, but they sure as heck didn't have any equipment in there.

They barely had cement down on the bottom.

What did you do? Well, we were lowering the pumps in and rigging them up on the platform and getting ready for the machinists.

You know, you got to run the shaft alleys and hook the pumps together.

So I said, "Oh," he says, "that's what we were looking for.

Experience meant.

" So it reminded me of the Swede that went to work on a ship and they asked him what he was and he said he was an engineer.

And the guy says, "An engineer?" And he says, "Yes.

" He says, "Yesterday I didn't know what an engineer was and today I are one.

" Well, that was about me with my last six unions I had to join.

So I stayed down there only for about two months and then ended up in the Navy for the next three years.

Unions didn't help then either.

So to this day I've never been too happy with unions because I felt they were only interested in the money.

And how I learned that real quick was when I was a laborer, you were, if you did not go to the monthly meeting, you were charged or assessed one dollar.

They had a meeting hall in downtown Maresville on the second floor that you might be able to get 200 people in there if you stood them on top of each other.

And there were over 4,000 laborers that were in that area.

They were all expected to go to the meeting once a month or they paid one dollar.

Now that gave me the impression that they had a gun to my head to start with.

Yeah.

What did you do in the Navy? I was a gunner's mate, but before I was a gunner's mate you naturally start out as a seaman and so forth.

And we had a person that was in the merchant marine.

He was not making alimony payments so she got him thrown out of the merchant marine and he had to enlist in the service so he ended up in the Navy.

So he was telling us about the duty of the arm guard.

Now arm guards are gun crews on merchant ships and on the early days of the war they were in the category of special forces.

You had to sign up for it.

You had a volunteer to be in the arm guard because at that time most of the ships were trying to get to either Russia or to England and the percentage of lost ships was just unbelievable.

You know at many times 20% of the ships would not return because you had the sub packs and you couldn't get through the German subs and if you did you were going up to close to France you could be shelled from parts of France where the Germans had set up land gunnery positions like out close to the water like where you could been from Flanders.

So it was hazardous duty as far as they were concerned at that point.

But for me it was the best duty you could ever have.

We were always on merchant ships.

We always had one officer no matter how dumb he was.

We had this one guy he run a soda fountain and I think was Roseburg, Oregon and didn't know doodly squat.

He had a college degree so that made him an ensign.

That was it.

So I Mrs.

Roosevelt at that time said if you are only 18 you do not have to go overseas.

Well I was 18 and I was on a ship in a matter of minutes from the time I signed up from this and I ended up in the Gulf of Alaska.

Whatever Mrs.

Roosevelt said it was overseas as far as I was concerned and I was there for the next 17 months but it was a tremendous education to me because I have been in every port in Alaska except Pole Bay.

Every one that would take a ship that had a 20-foot draft would be down in the water 20 feet.

The weather many times was terrible and you're at sea all the time.

The longest I was ever important is 43 hours and that was the rule.

As soon as they got to the dock the Navy took off and went ashore.

If we weren't back in 43 hours the ship wouldn't be there.

That was the rule.

So it was an ideal situation for me because now I could do whatever.

I would go to libraries and things like the equal to the Chamber of Commerce.

What's in this town? Like a tourist would see.

And I think even today I travel virtually continuously and I think from what I learned then of quick ways to find things when you're in a strange place.

So it was quite an advantage.

And as I say it was 17 months before I got back to the United States.

The only reason I got back the ship was going to break in half 450 miles out in the Gulf and the hull was opening up and closing the main deck.

There's nothing you can do.

We just put the lifeboats out.

We had rubber suits that we wore expecting it to break at any time.

The closest shore or ship was I think was 219 miles from Dutch Harbor south or from the Canadian Boundary Inn.

But we did make it all the way to Prince Rupert.

Now there was army bases all over the Aleutians and Alaska all the way up into the Bering Sea and then into the Arctic Ocean because at that time they thought the Japs were going to invade by coming in through the Aleutians and down through Canada.

So what we would do we would just go from base to base continuously until we were empty and we'd go back to Prince Rupert which was our home port to be outfitted again and then we would be gone.

Then usually we would be there three days.

That was the only time we broke the 43 hour rule.

So after the 17 months and our ship was about to break we were in the inside of the passage so they let us come down through the archipelago and go into Seattle where they put it in dry dock and then the seven of us got seven hour or seven day leaves two at a time because we still had ammunition and all the guns were still aboard ships so they had to have somebody on there.

But it was an interesting tour and of course I have a great time now when I get with people on a ship and they're going up to Alaska and they say you know I've been up inside passage twice and maybe three times have you been up there? Yes I've been up there and I probably stop right there but if they keep pushing me I always say well I'm never quite sure it was either 27 or 29 times I've been up and down the passage.

Well that closes that conversation for sure.

Let me ask you a question about you know the 30-foot pelton wheel down in your North Star Museum.

Did you say that you had ridden that all the way around at one time? You see what happened the Benalek family which is one of the pioneer families in this area.

Iris Benalek was in our class in school in '42.

Well her father is who ran the pelton wheel and the pelton wheel is there because mines were being operated by steam and even the North Star mine operated for one day you would burn 20 cord of wood making steam.

Now I can heat my house all winter long on about three cord of wood all winter.

They were burning 20 a day.

We have pictures where there's not a tree standing as far as you can see and in the early days a farmer from here to Colfax if he was clearly property he would cut the wood in eight foot lengths and then drag them down to the railroad where their gauge went by and they would pick one day a month where they run special trains just to pick up the wood to use for timbering in the mines.

They'd even pick up all the slash because that's what they were going to burn to make steam.

So they decided to convert everything to air.

You realize that you can run a train on air if you have an unlimited supply.

You can replace steam by turning off one valve and drain it on the other.

So the pelton wheel had two large compressors they were about 30 feet long and it would be looking like the side of a locomotive when you see these big pistons going and so by turning off one of the steam and turning the air in they run everything in the mine on air.

Now water costs nothing in those days.

You had Wolf Creek right there so the water was picked up above the Empire mine in a 20 inch pipe.

20 inches of water is a lot of water when it drops 700 feet to get to a pelton wheel.

Now pelton wheels were the most efficient of all the water wheels.

In fact they run a test once at the Idaho Maryland because people wanted to convert away from steam.

If they had a water supply they could run the same equipment for nothing.

So they set up a nozzle with a supply and then you would put your your water wheel in front of it and they would determine the efficiency of it because now you had the same source going into it.

They tested all four of them and the closest one to pelton was I think 83% and it dropped all the way down to 50 and pelton was running over 96% efficiency.

So it's a very efficient operation.

After the mines closed they finally scrapped that whole area out those heavy machinery in there and they couldn't break the castings even the pipes were like about an inch and a half thick and if you go down there even not to the mining museum there are some pipes exposed you can see the thickness where they tried to break them with sledge hammers they couldn't do it so then you can you you break it with dynamite you can take any portion of a stick of dynamite and as long as you cover it you can put mud on it anything the explosion will go down as well in all other directions but if you just leave it on the surface it would do nothing down.

It's unbelievable you could take a stick of dynamite throw it out in your driveway a dirt driveway and I saw a half a stick one time and it made a hole oh about six inches deep and maybe three feet or four feet diameter but they took that same thing and covered with dirt and it blew a hole 28 inches in the ground it's just an unusual phenomenon how it happens so that as they were scrapping this out they burned the building first so they could pick everything out with a crane but sooner or later they got down to things that wouldn't come out they were either in the cement or in the wall so they just broke off what they could and one woman wanted to save the belt the pelton wheel so she went to the person who was doing the scrapping and said how much do you want for that wheel and he picked $2,500 well she didn't have it nobody else did either but she went door-to-door businesses houses everything until she raised $2,500 and paid him and that's the only reason that wheel was left there so when the building was gone now there's just a wheel there which will move so it was great sport to go down and ride the wheel now it was North Star property but there was no fences no cables it was just right out in the open and if you came from the high school going to where I live you could cross that bridge and then go on up so we knew exactly where it was but see now we're talking about after after 56 the there were all the buckets were on there but one by one they kept getting stolen people would unbolt them and they'd use them to block a door open on your patio or whatever so when the historical society took the wheel over we had to buy 55 buckets to bring it back so it's completely covered but what you could do you could get on the wheel and on the spokes and you could get up the spokes do you got the center hub now you have spokes like a bicycle or anything going out so you would start to walk out towards the out part of the wheel because remember this wheel now is 30 feet in diameter and as soon as you've got enough weight out there well it would start to rotate so you might be there by yourself or maybe somebody else the next boat but after you got past the mean level you start to gain altitude at this point now you slide back down the rod now the rods are about an inch and a quarter of diameter to get to the center hub because if you don't you only have a few seconds and you're going to be upside down 30 feet in the air and what you would do if you got in that unhappy situation you around the spokes you'd lock your legs and then you get the front part of it and you pull into your chest so you can hold it with your arms wrists and everything else does remember you're now upside down and rotating it's quite a thrill another lady up on the hill she would call the sheriff and he would call the constable and they would come down and run everybody off of it so when the Historical Society took it over we had to build the front part of the building the first year and then in the second or third year we finally implose the pelton wheel to keep people away from it if nothing else was anybody ever hurt riding the wheel okay okay okay what do you want me to tell you well you told me a great deal shall we stop it for a while go for it I should tell you how well grass valley actually came to be here you have to go back to about 1840 there was nothing here but in the upper northern Sacramento Valley there was a number of large ranches cattle ranches well they found out very early that cattle like green grass rather than dry grass and the valley as you know turns dry very quickly by May sometimes late April has already started to cook out so they would want to take the cattle up into the foothills now they took them all the way to Nevada but they would get ranchers would go together because it takes so many men to run the cattle they as the Wrangler take care of them they would start up out of the valley just they could come through say would be a list for instance almost all the way through the cheapo if they came down this far and turn east then they would go up through they'd end up in Penn Valley and the best thing to do is stay about on the ridges so they would follow that up well it takes like three or four days to get even that far but they found out that here if you look at grass valley it is a large bowl you can get down by the school the lowest part and you can look around at the ridge so it was referred to as grassy Valley a nice stream running through the center of it was ideal for cattle so the term was when the ranchers left they would say if we split up groups were meat in grassy Valley and we'll lay over there for a couple of days where we can rest the cattle and ourselves then they would proceed north again now at that point they would go to towards Nevada City and they would split stay to the west of Banner Mountain which is about where the Tahoe Nickin-Kiah highway is or when they got almost in Nevada City they would go pretty do west and they could get on to where Deer Creek is down by the champion mine and then that eventually became the down a ville highway going up to Graniteville and Pike and all the way up to it so now you a split and Hennis Pass is only a short distance from there when you start up the ridge now you're on top of the ridge keep in mind that if cattle by groups get in a valley first of all you can't see them they can get in the brush and hide you don't even know they're there and it's a miserable job to come out and try to get them out of there so it's better to have them on a ridge where they're more visible from then they would keep going until they got to about where Bear Valley is now you have another place water running through it green grass and so forth so they would rest two or three days in Bear Valley now they have a chance to split again if you if you go to the west you would be going up where you'd have Spalding and Bowman and Milton and Carpenter sardine there's all kinds of lakes going up through there a lot of them weren't damn or most of them weren't damn at that point but you had running water now if you if you stayed to the east you would go up about where highway 80 is and you you follow it to you got to the top where the where the summit would be then it starts to get a lot of rocks so you stay where the grass is now if you went that to the on the left hand side like we're Bowman and Spalding there's you can end up in bird eye and bird eye is actually in Nevada but there's a very large area right before you get the bird eye peak and in the 50s and 60s we used to hunt up there because there's a lot of deer and bear would be there so that was the place where they now could leave the cattle all summer long they will only take one man to stay with the cattle you could have hundreds of cows but they don't want to go anywhere now it's they have green grass and water where they gonna go so they would stay there until fall then the men would go back to get them again and I know with my dad I've heard him say many many times the last wrangler out would have a whole pocket full of kitchen matches the wooden matches and as he went out and he saw clusters of dry grass well he'd strike a match and he throw it in there they burned everything they could as they were leaving but you must remember that now the grass has grown 30 inches and the brush has grown well the tree has limbs down that far too so now you have a natural fire ladder if that grass is burned he goes right to the top of those trees and that's one of our biggest problems now they won't let you burn those things off you try and do it now and you see what the environmentalist say they'd rather burn the whole forest and burn the dry grass but that's a whole different ball game better not get into it when they when they brought them back down they basically went the same way now as time went on and you got to about 1847 there was no one that was over wintering in Grass Valley.

Hunting groups would come up they would get deer a bear and then go back to the valley to sell them they just couldn't go to a store they had to bring everything in themselves but in 48 when gold was discovered in Sacramento the free gold was in all of the rivers and we are on rivers so you could start at Stanwood Cisco and start walking and you're gonna hit rivers no matter which part of Northern California go into it then Grass Valley started to grow at that point so did Nevada City and Smartsville as a matter of fact Nevada City and Smartsville both had post offices so they referred to Grass Valley it was then called Centerville and it was called Centerville for at least two years then in 1851 Grass Valley got a post office so when they got the post office they started the name Grass Valley and it has remained that every since so there was really three names for for this town Glenn you you used to work at a hardware store with your father what particularly did you do I know you delivered hardware did you deliver hardware to the mines okay let's back up our our family got in the hardware in about 1873 it had since 54 there were two other owners prior to them and as I mentioned it was the oldest established hardware in California now we know that there was hardware before 1854 a person named McLaughlin started the store on Mill Street but when they had the big fire the union publishing company put out a special paper and in it it referred to the fact that merchandise coming into all the burned dealers they had no place to store it they had to order it you know months in advance from the east he was permitting them to put it in his new store he was constructing and also his store on Main Street where he kept most of his tinware now tinware to them was stovepipe especially sheet iron stoves all the cabins miners cabins all had tin stoves in them so we know he had a hardware prior to that date but we have no way to authenticate the year we think it was in the corner building on Auburn and north Auburn Street and Main Street there was a liquor store there more recently but that was one of the first brick buildings and from then on almost everyone built brick buildings especially after 55 when the devastation of the fire our family my grandfather he bought into the store and they reformed the corporation changed the name to Grass Valley hardware in 18 in 1906 he supposedly was in San Francisco raising money for the corporation during the earthquake he worked there up until in World War one he died and my father who was in the Navy came home on leave for his funeral and so forth and as soon as the war was over then my father went to work in the store and then he continued to work there until he passed away and when World War two was over I came home and went to work in the hardware and in a short time then after my father passed away then I ran the hardware and then I worked there for 37 years now everybody going to work in the store you know you doing as a clerk like you would in any store and because you have thousands of tools that you have to learn about and how to use them and so forth but fortunately I had done a lot of that when I was in high school that's why I have this baloney I could tell these business agents and get away with these stories we sold dynamite fuses caps in the in a new town a drugstore a newspaper and a hardware those are the three businesses that start every time you remember hearing of the jot them down store it stopped everything well that's what the hardware did I can remember my dad saying a section here where we kept just ladies clothing there was no other clothing stores so you had everything from shoes on through to foul weather gear every tool you could think of a lot of farm tools even in 46 when I went to work there in the upper part of the rafters still had a lot of plow plow equipment the plow handles there's many different kinds that not only fit on the mole board but the plow itself and we kept all those just in the rafters just push through there's very few people even after World War two had tractors where they could plow if they still use horses now although every was done with horses and the hardware naturally we had property over on depot street which was only a hundred yards from a station the railroad station and they kept two horses over there well when I was in high school sometimes maybe even on a Sunday my dad would say why don't you go over to the barn and clean the barn out and make sure there's feed there and plenty of water and all that kind of stuff so after I went to work at the hardware I reminded him I said you know I kept thinking of those times not too many years ago when I had to go over and clean that place out I said I should mention to you they also had the Studebaker dealership for trucks there was none other in this area so we had a Studebaker truck and I asked him I said why do you have two dumb horses over there you have to go over and muck out every day or so and feed and you have a truck and he stopped and thought about it for a minute he said you got to remember every day those horses will start that's not saying too much for automobiles and trucks but that was the rule and even when I was in high school if I wasn't working on a Saturday at one of my other jobs we would take supplies to the mines oh well usually about as high as Allegheny's about as far we go we can take about five ton of powder on a two-ton truck we have a flatbed truck and we take everything caps, dynamite, kerosene, anything a burn or blow up and we had it on that truck and take all day to deliver it and of course the rule was you never put caps and dynamite together so I asked the driver one time I said where's the caps he said oh we keep those up in the front seat with us of course the dynamite was only about that far from us too but anyway it made an interesting an interesting Saturday I learned an awful lot about mines because we would get to go in their warehouses and they and see how they were handling things so so when we opened the mine exhibit well I had all this firsthand information and especially about explosives that other people did not have now our hardware is a block long those from Mill Street to Church Street but you gain about 22 feet in elevation so you came back level from Mill Street then this now is dirt so they just started a tunnel back underground and that's where we store dynamite black powder fuse all the oils a raw oil boiled oil kerosene diesel oil paint thinner 55 gallon drums all lined up across that wall with the dynamite and the so forth so finally the city got real unhappy because we were storing two or three hundred pounds of dynamite in downtown Grass Valley so we had a powder magazine that was up on out of hill finally the houses got so close to it that we had to move it so then we moved it out in sunset district where you go down to cool beach mill down to where well cool beach has a mill there now sawmill has for many many years well we had a powder magazine on one side and eventually when the alphabet chased out of there's in town they built down there also very very close to it and then you know we're fine at that point the black powder always was a problem because although we can keep that in the store you would take it out of the containers and you put it in copper containers like a pitcher and with a very small neck the idea was you wanted to buy two or three pounds well how did you handle it you didn't want to have a spark of any kind so these were made of copper so they wouldn't spark and you would then just pour it out into your scale and then from the scale into a bag or whatever container what would people use black powder for usually for blowing stumps they didn't want to fool around with dynamite or they didn't know anything about it some people would load their own shells they weren't interested in smokeless powder if you were going to make a put a shotgun shell for rabbits or whatever you wanted the smoke doesn't bother anybody but other than that blowing stumps out on their properties usually but then it got so we had so many miners in this area that were familiar with it on a Saturday or Sunday the guy would come out and you know start to do it himself and I went had my brother and I we lived out on Butler Road after we got married and we had a walnut tree a big tree and it was right in the way so we decided we're going to get it out of there we chopped on the thing for a couple weeks and still had roots bigger than a basketball so we decided we're going to blow it out of there so we we had a chop down so it wasn't too big maybe full 14 inches in diameter so we took a third of a stick of dynamite and dug down put it up put it under the roots cut back out of the way big noise went off stumping everything so then we put a half a stick in down on the same idea bang dust flew in every grip stumping everything so we thought well we had two sticks so let's put three quarters of a stick in but then we remembered that we needed to pack dirt and mud all around that then you had much greater efficiency out of it well we were about 50 feet back from Butler Road there's a big power line transmission line it was across that way there what 40 feet off of the ground at least we shot that sucker off and that stump come out went up and went over top of the power line and ended up in the middle of Butler Road.

We never fooled around with dynamite anymore after that.

I was never so surprised all my life.

We just looked like a bird flying as we looked through the air.

Oh Lord.

We also sold groceries in the hardware store.

It was a common thing.

Cam goods of course were popular even through the 30s as I agree because I remember them.

Did you sell fresh groceries? I mean fresh fruits and stuff? No.

The Chinese people out of their gardens and their delivery trucks just about took care of that.

Now as I say even in the 30s there was a purity store and a safety store which were full-blown grocery stores.

Not like they are now.

They had virtually nothing in frozen foods.

What was the depression like when you were? Well in Cross Valley there really was no depression.

The rest of the country as you know was a depression.

And we had workers come from really the whole west especially Arizona.

A lot of people came here in the 30s from Arizona and Colorado.

They had mines there but they were not as well operated as let's say ours was.

And I think we were paying a few cents an hour more than what they were paying.

And the many parts of Arizona as you know was miserable to live in many months out of the year.

And so Grass Valley was like going to Hawaii to them.

So they came there.

They worked three shifts and I can remember as a child seven, eight years of age since I worked and had big money from my paper up we could all go to the movie at Friday night.

And in mines you get wet and dirty when you're working.

But you go through a system called a dry.

And a dry is a change room, showers, you can clean up, put on your street clothes and you can go home.

Or you can go downtown.

Now if you just worked eight hours and you're nice and clean and you got downtown at 11 o'clock you're not too wild about going home.

There's all kinds of things you can do.

Talk, go to the bars, play pool, cards, whatever.

So there was virtually no crime.

There was one constable in this entire whole area who walked.

He did not have a car anymore.

And we had one person who would go down and turn off the lights in stores.

Like the window lights.

They all had an outside switch.

And that was his job every night before midnight.

He'd make the rounds in the whole area.

So everyone felt very safe and all the kids, you know, were out on the street at 11 o'clock at night.

So what? It was just the way.

There was a lot better lighting at that point.

Because the electricity didn't come to Grass Valley until right at the turn of the century when the PG&E, 1900, they started.

They would have one light in the center.

If you had, let's say, pick up four-way corner, Maine and Colfax Avenue or whatever, there would be one light bulb in the center of the street hanging on a wire.

Would it be an arc lamp or would it be? Oh, shoot.

No.

You look at it, you'd think it was a 60-watt globe.

Is that right? There was virtually no light.

It was better from dead darkness, that's for sure.

But there was only one at each corner.

And like we would come out of the movie house, I'll say there would be one at Mill Street, then church, then school.

Then you'd go all the way to the top of the Main Street Hill before you got to High Street, then there would be one light there.

Then one at Alice Street and down.

So you could stand back and just see these faint little glimmers.

You know, the sidewalks were still dark, but at least there was some light there.

But, you know, your parents, I don't remember ever worrying that we didn't get home until 11.

30 at night.

They knew the movie didn't get out until maybe 11 o'clock or so.

So being no depression, everybody had work that wanted to go to work.

That's for sure.

You say they worked three shifts a day in the mines.

Were those three eight-hour shifts? Just about, yeah.

And when did they do the maintenance? Was there any particular shift for that? No.

A lot less people worked graveyard.

And at that time they would go in and service the pumps, which is interesting because you know your house has one can and then it stepped up to 220.

Well, many pumps worked on 440, and you would be underground standing in water working on the pumps.

Now there's something in the Blue Jackets manual where there's a no-no from doing that, but that's what happened.

Most of the bigger mines had their own sawmills, and they would, in fact, if you go out and guide them to Maryland, as even today, you can see where a sighting comes off and goes down pretty close to where the new is out there now.

And they would just bring in their own logs and they'd cut it right there.

Almost all of mines had lumber stacked out close to them because timbering went on continuously.

We didn't have to do too much in this area.

Many tunnels, you know, were hundreds of yards long and no timbering.

Would you like to take a break? Whatever.

I should tell you about the mining exhibit if you haven't been there.

If you pick up the trade magazine, travel magazine, and 3/8 was disappearing.

So the Grass Valley Rotary Club decided as a yearly project they would start a mining exhibit.

Everybody in the country around here, for 20 or 30 years, wanted a mining exhibit, but nobody did anything about it.

So the Rotary Club made it as their project.

And I was a Rotarian, and for some reason I was appointed chairman or head of the committee, or I don't know how I got involved in it.

But that was 37 years ago, and I'm still there.

I'm looking for a replacement, anybody that's dumb enough or not dumb enough, take my place where you can build it.

But we started the mining exhibit and decided that we would only have mining equipment in it, and it had to come from this area.

Most museums can be spoiled by ending up with Indian beads and quilts and clothing and everything under the sun, and that's not what you went there to see.

So the only place available was right on Mill Street, and there was a gold rule store there, a clothing store.

And so the building had been empty, and so the owner said, "Well, we'll rent it to you for $100 a month, but I won't spend any money.

The furnace doesn't work, and the roof leaks, and the paper's falling off the wall, and everything under the sun.

" But we decided to do it anyway.

So people every night would go down there and work, just volunteers from all kinds of organizations.

So we finally moved in, and we were there for two years, and we fixed it up so it really looked nice.

So the owner came in and said, "You know, this building looks so good now.

I think it's worth at least $300 a month now.

" So at that point we decided we were going to move.

Now, the only building available was just the skeleton of the compressor house where the air compressors were for the North Star Mine.

We had pictures of it where there's no floor that blew everything up when they took the equipment out of there.

And the walls were caving in, so everything had to be reinforced, and then no roof, no floors, nothing.

So it became quite an undertaking, but we had to move out of there, and we weren't going to pay the $300 a month of this guy.

So we started moving equipment down there.

We had to have everybody's help, so we tied in with the Nevada County Historical Society because they would have lots of information that we would need, and pictures and so forth.

And we went to the ten most popular organizations in town.

We needed, we thought, about $50,000 to get started.

So I went to each one of these organizations and requested a minimum of $5,000 to help us get started.

Not one of them refused.

Everybody gave us money.

So we were really off and running.

We covered the first third of the building so we could move in.

And a few years later we started the park, which was across the creek.

And then eventually it went into the city.

This was now not city property, so we gave the building to the city so that we would be under their insurance bracket more than anything.

And then they would help us financially from now on, hopefully.

Well, to this day they still have.

They are our great aid.

The exhibit still continues to grow.

We tell people if they are cleaning out their garage, don't go to the dump.

Come by us first.

You might have just the piece that we are looking for.

And sometimes we will go down there and the door will outjunk out all over the front of it, rather than them take it out to the dump.

But we would still rather go through it.

Sometimes you will find just the item that you are looking for.

Everything down there is connected to a mine somewhere.

So historically it is quite an education.

We have thousands of school children that go through there every year.

And they are usually really amazed at what they can see.

And most adults by this era have forgotten all about mines.

They remember, like me, their fathers or grandfathers.

So somebody worked in the mine, but they don't know anything about it.

So there is people there every day who will handhold you going through the exhibit and answer any question that you have.

And they are quite intelligent.

They have been doing it for quite a while.

And as I say, I have been the director of it for 36 or 37 years, which seems to be an awful long time when I look at it now.

But it was always interesting and fun.

Why people who live in an area don't go to local facilities I have never understood.

I don't care where you are in the world, the same thing happens.

Yes, that's true.

Let me ask you a question now and let you expound on it.

But it seems to me like this is kind of a retirement community now.

And people are not very sympathetic with mining operations because they are noisy and dusty and whatever.

But back when the mines were operating full strength, the populace put up with a lot of noise, with a lot of commercial operations that would not be expected today.

I think you are going in the wrong direction.

In the first place, there wasn't noise.

Now, the Empire eventually ended up with 80 stamps.

In most cases, they run 24 hours a day.

The Golden Center, which was right where Safeway Store is now, downtown, had 40 stamps.

The Scotiemine, which is right at the end of West Main Street, had a ball mill, which was quieter than a stamp mill.

But stamp mills are working inside of a big cast motor box.

It has water and mercury in it.

The front is encased off so that there isn't a splash coming out of it.

So it is virtually soundproofed in its own.

Now, I'll admit there is a low roar, shall we say.

Now, I only lived six blocks from the 40 stamps that were down at the right in the center of Grass Valley.

And I never did hear the stamps.

Now, the Scotiemine, all I would hear is when they dumped their cars.

A car has usually 12 to 14 ton in a car.

And they would dump it onto a metal grizzly, like railing, to start to sort the gravel.

Well, you would hear that crash and rocks running down the steel.

And I would hear that.

I was not offensive.

I can remember awakening at night when it was dead quiet.

They had shut everything down for some reason.

The closest mine had closed everything.

Nothing.

I could hear nothing.

And you would wake up.

Now, they tell me that happens in San Francisco.

They've heard the street cars running so long that all of a sudden if it's dead quiet, they will awaken.

Now, so I don't go along with this.

No dust.

Everything that was in a mill was encased again.

And in the surplus of sand, instead of having trucks haul them away, they had the cable that ran from the North Star all the way to Whiting Street.

And every -- let's see if I can get this right now.

Every four stamps -- no, every two stamps in eight hours will develop four pickup loads of waste sand.

They have to get rid of.

Now, the sand pile ran from the Alisant Ranch Road all the way to Whiting Street.

And the angle of repose on the bottom was about 125 feet.

And the cable was so -- I suppose about 30 feet off of the ground.

Maybe a little more of that in some places.

Dumped automatically.

Now, that is an awful lot of sand.

And I can remember my dad saying they'll have sand here from now on.

Because if you were building a foundation or you wanted to level off for a sidewalk, you'd just go out and get the sand.

That sure level's a lot easier than dirt and you don't have to pick it.

And I remember one time I was hauling sand on a weekend for something we were going to do.

I had this great big pile of sand and I was shoveling it and I thought, "Oh, a lot of you have to tell your way in this.

" So I put the cable that up.

I took the pickup out about 20 feet and I roared back into the bank.

But it slid down until it covered the windshield.

Buried the whole car.

Fortunately, I had the windows open about that far.

And I would roll them down a little bit and I kept pulling the sand inside until I had enough that I could crawl out the window.

But I didn't save any time because it took me the rest of the day to shovel the truck out and get out of the sand pile.

And then there was a big deal about cyanide poisoning.

Well, that's a bunch of baloney, too.

Our family home, that is my parents' family home, and all my cousins lived right opposite where the tennis court is on the old high school.

Well, you weren't really far from Whiting Street and that's where the sand pile was.

We used to go down there every Saturday and play in that thing all day long.

We'd stop by a Safeway store, pick up a piece of cardboard in a box, and we'd make a sled out of it.

Start at the top and sail down the sand.

Great sport.

Nobody worried about cyanide poisoning.

That's a fallacy.

You hear about it all the time.

Yes, you do.

That doesn't look that way.

Were you aware of any kind of scandal going on about high-grading? There is always high-grading.

And high-grading means you are taking something that doesn't belong to you.

So now you could be in a retail store, butcher shop, anything where something isn't yours.

Technically, you are high-grading.

Now, in the case of gold, many times you would blast and you would win and you could see gold in the courts.

So this is the item that would be high-grading.

And for a while, you couldn't put it in the pocket and nobody paid any attention to it.

They didn't know it was there.

But when they knew this was going on, that's when the dry started.

Now you're going to change your clothes.

And there's always little stories about two people switching lunch boxes.

I have a high grade of my lunch box, so I bring it up to the dry.

So then the person who is going home, we switch lunch boxes.

So the person who did not fill it now picks up the box and takes it home.

Now, I mentioned to you that almost all the mines had wood stored all around it for buildings and timbering, whatever they were doing.

Well, you could have a high grade and as you walked from where you came out of the power of the shaft going to the dry, you could stash it in between the lumber, hide it anywhere, and then later you could go back and pick it up.

Now, them mines got smart and they did not come to the surface.

They stopped like 100 feet underground or 50 feet or whatever, and then they tunneled over to where you went up inside of the dry.

Now you have no place really to hike this.

Now, I recently heard a story when they started using the metal equipment, monitors that would detect gold.

They would go up just like they do in an airport now with a metal detector and they would stop about up here because if you had gold teeth, it would turn the alarms off.

So they would stop about the neck and then they would go down.

Well, they did this for quite a while.

And finally somebody figured out that what they were doing, they would take their hat off, put the gold or the specimen on top of their head, and put their hat on.

Nobody found it because they stopped the metal detectors at their neck.

So no matter what you do, there is always somebody trying to beat you out.

Oh, sure.

But high grade, no doubt, always went on.

And, you know, Prince Albert was a tobacco can.

Well, that was a common thing you could do.

You could dump a bike apple in the back of your hand and put a few choice pieces of gold in the tin and then fill it back up with tobacco.

And it was a good chance nobody would ever find or ever see it.

And one day at our home, while I was working under the house, fixing some underpitting of some kind and laying on my back, and I looked up and here on the subfloor choice was a tin of Prince Albert can.

So I thought, now, if there was high grade, that's where they would hide it, you know, in the garage.

I thought, maybe I'll luck out here.

So I picked it up and I slid it off and there wasn't much of any weight to it.

I opened it up and the only thing in it was a dead ear wig.

So much for my wealth from high grade.

All right.

I should mention winters in the Grass Valley area.

All the recent arrivals have no idea what could have been here.

You have to go back, I can only think of the times in the early 30s.

Several times we've had like four feet of snow on the ground at one time.

But the thing is, there was no way to get rid of it.

There was no big front load dump loaders where you'd pick up two yards or four yards at a time and put it into something and haul it away.

There was no motor graders.

The city eventually got a grader, but it was pulled first by trucks.

So if you had three feet of snow or four feet, you couldn't do anything with it.

So it just stayed there.

But it was great if you were only eight or nine years old, no schools, no businesses were open.

Main Street was not a state highway then, along with the city.

So it was a perfect place to sleigh ride.

You did have a few lights.

You could scale them.

You could go out all night if you wanted to.

Once Caltrans took it over, well then they no longer would let you just shut it down.

So we moved over on Richardson Street.

Now that was better yet.

It was the same elevation.

But when you came to a street, it would flatten out and it would go for maybe 40 or 50 feet.

And then it would turn over and you'd start down to the next block.

Well, this was like going off of a ski jump.

When you hit that with a sled, you never know, you're going 35 or 40 miles an hour.

You would take off and you'd bang down and you could go all the way down Richardson Street, go to Washington Street, turn to the right, and go down and cross Main Street.

And at that point the Diamond Match Lumber Company was there.

And they had a great big door so they could bring in their big trucks and an alleyway where they could unload lumber and so forth.

So we would get permission from the manager of the lumber company and he would make sure that nobody would be out there.

There was no traffic.

And we'd come screaming across Main Street and go through his front door.

Then it was dirt for about, well all the way to Wolfrey, which was what, 50 yards? Quite a way, 40 yards.

But now you cleaned your runners.

You polished the runners on the dirt as you went through slowing down.

Then you'd drag it all the way back up on top of Main Street Hill again, or Richardson Street.

One of the blakes had a toboggan and it would hold 20 people.

So you can imagine how long that thing was, well at least 25 feet long.

Well, it was great shore going down the hill, but to pull a toboggan that big all the way up off of Main Street Hill, that didn't work too well.

But even in later years we had a real heavy snow, I'd say about 1955, and it broke all the wires down.

And in those days the PG&A did not have a way to circle the wires.

Like I lived on the end of Butler Road.

I was four houses outside of City limits.

We had no power for five days.

But three houses in, they had power.

And the reason was that power went all the way to Penn Valley.

Well any place those lines broke, they'd shut the whole system off right because it left the city limits.

And they'd keep repairing it, but they'd get down maybe a mile and then it would break behind them because the snow was so heavy.

And I would go to work in the morning and I remember that the all of Church Street was completely covered with PG&E utility trucks.

They brought them from all over Northern California.

I think one day we counted 53 or 56 big line trucks just all over the whole downtown area because there were so many broken wires all over the area.

And in later years too, 51, 53, 54 or so, we had 41 in 48 inches of snow.

I took a metal tape and pushed it down to the driveway, then went in the side of the garage and then took a picture out of it so you could see the 48 inches.

So we have had heavy snow here.

But in later years when they became the power loaders, that helped because they could put them in trucks, even if they only had one path going down Mills Creek, and they were dumping in Wolf Creek.

Now you have a way to get rid of the snow.

You know if you go to a parking lot now they keep bunching it up in big piles.

Sooner or later you can't move anyway because you have just big piles of snow.

But that was an ideal way to get rid of it.

And I can remember in '33 we went ice skating on Lake Olympia.

It stayed cold a number of days and the lake froze over.

And we made our own skates.

There was a person named Ken Adams, who was right down below us.

I'd take just a 1x4 and cut the front out of it and dial lace around it or rubber bands or anything on a 1x4.

That was the top of the skate.

And being in the hardware store, well we had jazzy ones because they had a product called linoleum binding.

Years ago when two-piece linoleum come together, they had a binding that was about, well, a little over 3/4 of an inch wide.

Two nails about every 4 inches.

So we would cut that off.

We'd have our dad bring it home.

We would nail that.

And that now became a metal runner on that ice skate.

So you could really fly on those.

You couldn't make a sharp corner.

You'd start to turn and then you'd slide sideways.

But anyway, you were ice skating.

That made it really interesting.

Did the bad weather and the snow ever incapacitate people, make things dangerous? Well, I wouldn't say dangerous because you just couldn't move.

There was no traffic.

You either walked or you didn't go anywhere.

And people were prepared for that sort of thing.

Well, yes.

Almost everybody had sellers, as I say, in the early '30s.

I can remember the first time we got the icebox where they delivered ice.

And then eventually, you know, a member of the Westinghouse and GE, they had the great big cone on the top of it.

Once in a while you'll see them in an old movie.

That was the first ones that were out there.

What did you pay for delivered ice? Do you have any idea? No idea.

I didn't pay for it, so I have no idea.

Do you know how much money did miners make? Do you know that? I was afraid you were going to ask me that.

We have checks down there, and it was a really weird number, like $9.

79 a shift, $9.

So you were making a little over a dollar an hour at that time, underground.

And we have stacks of -- What year would that be? Well, I'm saying sometime during the '30s, during the Depression.

Well, for goodness sakes, now, my understanding is that the miners were making $3 a day, and right up to the Second World War, they got up to $4.

50 a day.

Well, it's possible that I was going to say I used to keep some books and checks that we had here that you can only display so many of them, and we have a book down the mine exhibit open, and it'll say carpenter or whatever.

Now, the salary did go up.

That's true.

But I think after the -- when the gold standard changed, you know, a few people realized that the price of gold stayed the same all around the world for 200 years.

It was about $20 an ounce.

And when they went off the gold standard in the United States, Roosevelt brought that on.

Gold went to $34 an ounce or $32 -- $32 or $34 an ounce from $20.

And salaries did increase then.

And I can remember checks like $78 for the week or $69 for the week.

So that gets closer to what you're talking about.

But I'm sure all that happened after $34.

Okay.

[ Silence ]