Paul Gemmill (1907-1992) grew up in a mining family, whose travels took them to California, Nevada and Mexico. Gemmill attended the University of Nevada, graduating from the Mackay School of Mines. He worked in many different capacities in the mining industry, ranging from a mining engineer to the general manager of Combined Metals to executive secretary of the Nevada Mining Association. Gemmill was interviewed by Mary Ellen Glass in 1974 to 1975. What did I do for fun in Pioche? Fun was easy. Well, I know I mentioned some of the miners would just go out on a bender, but obviously that isn't what everybody was doing. There's a tendency, I guess, to think that most of the miners were wanting to do that. But really, most of the people that were working in the Bristol Mine, for instance, were serious. They were there to earn money for their family, even if the family wasn't there. And maybe their family was over in Utah, and they were there to accumulate a stake, even if they were leasing. They were serious about it. And when the time came where they could take some time off, they'd probably go back home; or some of them, of course, lived in camp and had their family in a cabin. Most of the single people stayed in bunkhouses, but we had a few cabins, and some of the families lived in them. But half of the people in bunkhouses were married and had their family back home. There really wasn't, in that period, an awful lot of this business of fighting and having brawls in the town of Pioche. It wasn't too bad. We saw a period later, during the war years, when the Army took the cream of young fellows and even had let some out for the mines to operate. And you had a crew working, a crew on the road going, and a crew on the road coming. [laughter] We saw a lot of rough business going on on the streets of Pioche on weekends, and Saturday night especially. There'd be a dance or something. But I think during the 1930s there wasn't much roughness. If you wanted to have a community party it was easy. Everybody would attend, and you'd get a tub full of weenies and boil them, I guess, and buns and go have a ballgame. It was something like that, see. And you'd pitch one side against the other. Maybe the gals against the boys sometimes, in a softball game. And some of them liked to play cards. Oh, I remember before I was married, we usually had card parties in the boardinghouse. Of course, the Pioche Theater was going all that time, and you'd go in to see a show every once in a while, and they had dances. Entertainment wasn't very much of a problem. |