Art Bernard

Art Bernard was born in 1910 in Italy to American parents and first came to the United States at the age of five, in 1915. Bernard’s experiences in mining began at a young age, when he got a job in the Bristol underground mine at Pioche, Nevada, even though he was still underage. He would go on to work for the State of Nevada as a Deputy Inspector of Mines and as the State Mine Inspector. Bernard was interviewed by Victoria Ford in 1999.

     When the people came to Gabbs, they tended to stay. A lot of families stayed right there. They had nice housing. It was certainly better than your average mining camp. It was put up by the government when the plant was first started.
     It was a company town. There were two companies operating there—Basic Incorporated and Standard Slag. And houses were allocated according to the size of the payroll at the mines mentioned there. The housing wasn’t elaborate by any means, but it was better than adequate for an out-of-the-way mining place in Nevada. You couldn’t call it a mine really, because there was a lot more processing than there was mining there.
     Gabbs was very good. We had a nice social life there, I thought. We had a couple of tennis courts, and I think we had an Olympic-sized swimming pool there. One of my engineering friends and I designed the pool. We had some Olympic specifications as guidelines, but the companies built it.
     Someone asked me if we had any recreation up there. I think the most notable event was what we called “Gabbs Day,” and this was pretty widely promoted in central Nevada. We had quite a few people come from Reno, but the original poster work was done by a Reno ad firm. It was Thomas Wilson; he was a very well-known PR man and did a great job. But we used to put out these orange and black posters. They were about three feet long and about two feet wide, and they would catch the eye, if nothing else.
     Basic Incorporated put on Gabbs Day. We got our own barbecuers up from the Mina area, for the barbecue pits, and it was quite a deal there, but unfortunately, it had to terminate while I was manager. We started to draw a pretty troublesome crowd. I won’t mention any names or places where they came from, but they were a trouble-making element. It was a pretty tough decision, and I took a lot of heat on it, too, for terminating it, but we did do it for that reason. We never had any—hardly any—law enforcement people there. We just didn’t need them. But the last one we had was a little bit out of hand.
     The barbecue was free, and there was always a very long line there by the beer kegs. As a matter of fact, some of our good friends from nearby would come there and get in the line, and they would just make a circle there. They wouldn’t go anywhere else all day, except for the free beer, free food. [laughter]
     And we had some awfully good drillers there. One of them that I can think of is a fellow I have known for many years. His name is Louie Gibellini, and he had a bar over in Eureka, Nevada. He was over eighty years old, and he could swing that hammer just like a twenty-year-old. His daughter would turn the steel for him on the double jack, and on the single jack he would have to turn his own steel.

L: Were they having the drilling contest in Tonopah at this time, or was Gabbs the first place?

     Well, I think that Tonopah came after we shut the Gabbs thing down. Tonopah has had it every year for quite a long time now.
     They have a good representation from the Mackay School of Mines, and some of those boys have done very well. In fact, they have a practice yard right there at the university. They get pretty good at it. Well, the drilling contest goes way back to 1906. I have newspaper articles from the old Round Mountain Nugget that described the drilling contests on the Fourth of July. They also had mucking contests, and that’s a lot of work. This was held in September, so it wasn’t too awfully hot.
     We also had a golf course that was laid out in a dry lake bed. They had sagebrush and everything, and then most of it was dry lake material. You would have to tee up for every shot, but it was a lot of fun. We used oiled sand for the greens. We would get the company to furnish the oiled sand for us, and then we just turned that into a green there. Then we had some flat rakes, and you just rake every time you get on a green.