Jack Flanagan

Jack Flanagan was born in Virginia City in 1905. His family had been on the Comstock for years, helping to build Virginia City, and he worked as a hard-rock miner in the Hale and Norcross tunnel during the 1930s. He left mining and Storey County during the World War II, but came home to eventually become the county’s tax assessor. After initially retiring in 1978, he returned to the mining industry by working for United Mining Corporation. Flanagan was interviewed by Ann Harvey in 1984.

     In Virginia City when we were young, we used to go on hikes and do a little horseback riding. There were no swimming facilities here, but the flume ended up in Byrne's Ravine, and there was always a stream of water running down, so we kids built a dam across there and formed our own swimming hole. The water coming out of the flume was pretty cold, but we fixed that by taking up old washtubs that did not have holes in them, and we would build fires of sagebrush in them and then float them on the water. After waiting for about twenty minutes, the chill was off of the water, and we were able to swim. The pond wasn't very deep, but we did a lot of practicing and mud crawling, and eventually we learned to swim. More kids learned to swim in that old swimming hole than you could shake a stick at. [laughter]
     In wintertime back in those days they didn't have a lot of road equipment to remove the snow. That slowed down the automobile traffic, and many of these streets—like Taylor Street—we could sleigh on. Taylor Street was one of the main sleigh-riding tracks in town. We would gather on Howard Street and have a traffic lookout on C Street, then we would get on our sleds and go down Taylor Street, turn right behind the Catholic church for one block, turn to the left, and then on down Washington Street. This run was close to a mile, and we would be down there in less than five minutes. The hills were steep, and the track was fast. Then it would take us another half an hour to walk up, so after about three rides you were ready to call it a day.
     Then we had another deal. The mine dumps were real steep, so we built "Yankee jumpers." They were like skis, and they were built from the staves of a big fifty-gallon barrel. We would pick out a barrel stave and then nail a two-by-four board onto the back end of the stave in an upright position. Across the top of that you would nail on a small board, which you sat on. So we would climb to the top of the mine dumps and ride down them by balancing on this one barrel stave. We would pile up snow on our track at various places, and when we hit the snow we would fly through the air and then light again down the hill. This was really exciting.

     In the 1930s, I remember they had Fourth of July events that the miners participated in. They used to have two boxes made out of timber about six feet long, about five feet wide, and a foot deep. Into this they put a lot of waste rock, and they had what were called mucking contests. The job was to get into one of the boxes that was full of dirt and muck it into the other box. It was a race against time. Another event they had was the tug-of-war. These two events were the big thing for the miners.
     There was another deal, too. In the early days they had what they called single jacking and double jacking. Now single jacking is when you had a piece of steel in your hand and a small sledgehammer that weighed about six or seven pounds. You had to strike this piece of steel that had a sharp head on it and drill holes into solid rock. There were various lengths of steel, and you would change them as you went along. That was called single jacking. In double jacking there would be a two-man team, and they would use the same type of steel as in single jacking, only they would use a huge sledgehammer. One man would be down on his hands and knees holding the steel. The other man would swing the sledgehammer to drive the steel. Each time the man with the sledgehammer would hit the steel the man on his knees would give the steel a twist. This was really the same operation as in single jacking, only there was a two-man team.