Brave Men of the Deep (ePub)

I was born in a farmhouse on the Gulf Shore below Pugwash, the third out of six children in our family, on March 8, 1928. My mother was a school teacher from Springhill, who was teaching in the country when she met my father, and when I was one year old, they moved to Springhill. As on my mother's side, they were coal miners, and they thought that our family would have a better quality of life by moving there, with my father working in the mines. In my early years, while growing up, my father never talked about his work in the mines, but I spent a lot of time around my grandfather, who was in charge of the ventilation at the mines. And on Saturday afternoons, some of the men who worked with him would gather at his house to enjoy a glass of beer and talk about what was happening at the mines, and I would listen with keen interest—and it helped me to develop a desire to become a miner.



We were brought up during the hungry thirties; money was scarce, there was no such thing as getting an allowance from your parents, so we were anxious to have money to spend, which meant going to work. In order to work in the mines, you had to be sixteen years old, so at fifteen years of age, I started working at the Springhill Dairy, with the agreement with my mother that I would go to night school to finish my education. It was a job that paid S3.00 a day, seven days a week. The day started at 6:30 a.m., and you worked until all the milk was processed and the equipment was cleaned and ready for the next day.



At age sixteen, I reached my goal of working in the coal mines. I was getting $3.74 a day, with weekends off. At age eighteen, I enlisted in the RCAF; my home base was Edmonton, Alberta. I was with the North West Command as a heavy equipment operator. I spent two winters in the North, clearing runways. But the call of returning to the coal mines was too strong to keep me away, so l received my discharge from the air force and went back to the Springhill

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