“It’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where danger is double and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.”
— Merle Travis
As most all my longtime cronies could tell you, I originally come from a mining town up in the panhandle of Idaho – Kellogg by name. A burg “discovered by a jackass and inhabited by its descendants,” as the old billboards and postcards used to say.
I always assumed that Noah Kellogg must have been quite the colorful character. I figured it had to start somewhere, and most every other person I ever met in my hometown certainly qualified as “colorful.” And who better to blame than the prospector who owned the burro whose hoof kicked up ore and kick started the town.
Many of those characters were itinerant or “tramp” miners who made the rounds through Western mining camps, including Park City, before arriving in Kellogg. Others migrated straight from the old country, adding their own ethnic sensibilities to the town’s ever-burgeoning cultural stew.
When one comes of age in such a diverse environment, there are residuals that remain forever – tragic as well as hilarious.
There’s the memory of a classmate being hustled off from elementary school to be told he was now the man of the house, his father having died that morning in a mining accident. That resides alongside the recollection of another student dropping a marble on a classroom floor and, pretending it to be his false eye, chasing it around the room to the total emotional chagrin of the already high-strung teacher.
What prompted this rush of flashbacks was my recent discovery that a friend and classmate, Julie Whitesel Weston, had written a memoir of growing up in Kellogg titled, “The Good Times Are All Gone Now – Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town,” published by the University of Oklahoma Press. The first time through, I hardly came up for air.
Of course, being a native son of the space-time in question, I suppose the fact that I found the book to be a wonderfully-rich page turner is not very surprising. Knowing the settings for most of the action, not to mention the “principal cast” as they say in the Sundance Film Guides, had me continually craving for more. And I got it! In spades!
First of all, although I referred to Kellogg as a mining town, to those of us who lived in proximity to the smokestacks, it was also very much a smelter town. It was the Bunker Hill Mining and Smelting Company, after all.
As far as sulfur dioxide, lead, arsenic, and cadmium, among other available goodies, were concerned, the smelter was, as they say in the narcotics trade, the “delivery system.” My own “hood” later became an EPA Superfund site — yet one more area of similarity between Kellogg and Park City, especially to locals who recall the evolution of Prospector Square.
But it’s the irony of growing up amid such relatively horrendous environmental carnage while, at the same time, having such meaningful coming-of-age childhood-through-adolescence life experiences that are at the center of the story. Kellogg exuded a “terrible beauty,” as Yeats would say.
Her chapter on “Lookout Pass,” the small, rope-tow-served mountainside on the Idaho-Montana border where we all learned to ski, brought back the aromas of a steamy packed lodge and bowls of chili being gulped down to the recorded strains of “Roll Out the Barrel.”
Equally engrossing is the section about Glenn Exum, our stern school-district music director, who, in his other life during the summer, ran the iconic Exum Guide Service climbing school in Grand Teton National Park. And then there is her insightful look into the rich tapestry of the mining-town brothel tradition both in Kellogg and its close neighbor, Wallace. (Straight, no frills — $15 for 8 minutes!)
Kellogg left its mark on all who lived there. It’s embedded in the rhythm of our collective heartbeat. It matters not that my family hightailed it to the quaint coastal village of Los Angeles following my sophomore year; the “Silver Valley” of Idaho’s panhandle still sticks to my ribs.
As does Julie Whitesel Weston’s excellent book, a most perceptive foray into Western mining culture and some of the more interesting people who, with their world crumbling around them, continued to improvise upon its central theme.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.