John Gomes, born in Oakland, California in 1925, lived there during the school year and worked on family owned mining claims with his father during the summer. In 1942, Gomes went to work on the Crown Mine near Golconda, where his father was already working. He eventually attended the University of Nevada to study metallurgy, and after graduating, he worked briefly for Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation in Peru. Eventually he made his way to McDermmit, Nevada, working for the Cordero Company. Gomes was interviewed by Victoria Ford in 1999. The managers at the Crown in Golconda lived in housing right there at the mine and the mill. Where did the workers live? In bunkhouses. Actually, there were three. There was one like the staff house, and that’s where the assayer, Harry Lee, lived. The boss for the Dodge Construction Company was Chic Thomas; he lived up there, too. And there was one other—Heavy Phipps. "Heavy" was his nickname. He was the grizzly man. He broke the rocks on top of the grizzly, or blasted them. They lived in that one. That was more like a staff house. We had two more bunkhouses. One had ten or twelve miners who lived in it; and the other, the smaller one, was mainly the mill crew, because they sleep, you know, did shiftwork. And there might have been six of them living in that smaller bunkhouse. We had a cookhouse or boardinghouse. The cook was Big Ed. [laughter] I don’t know what his last name was, but he was a good cook, because he made pies and cake every day. They did feed you real well. For breakfast you always had ham and eggs or bacon and eggs and hotcakes and toast, and you could have cereal, too, if you wanted it. The cookhouse was also run by Dodge Construction Company. They got paid so much to run it, and we only paid, like, a dollar a day for board—I think that was it—at thirty dollars a month. And then the bunkhouse was free? Yes. We had a couple of showers in the bunkhouse. I lived in the bunkhouse in 1942, because my mother and father lived in a small trailer that wasn’t quite big enough for me too. |