Janice Johnson was born in Tonopah in 1936, a fortunate event for her and her mother, who normally lived in the smaller community of Silver Peak. Johnson’s childhood in Silver Peak immersed her in both the vibrant community and harsh realities of a mining town. Johnson was interviewed by Victoria Ford in 1996. When I was a child in Silver Peak in the 1930s and 1940s, we had total freedom. There was an old mill across the road, and as I recall, it was already closed. I don’t think they used the mill. Maybe it was just shut down for the time being, but we used to go up there, and it seemed to me like the size of a roller coaster. It was so huge. And we’d climb every single inch of that mill. And it would be these old iron beams all over the place with these cars that came and went, and we would pretend that it all worked, and we were in there. It was great, great fun. And you could climb up inside this mill? It wasn’t locked or anything? Oh, no, no. It was just rusty steel beams. The other thing that we used to climb, and that we did have to either ride the horses or drive to, was the volcano. It was an ash cone, and it was just fascinating, because, as small as I was, that thing must have seemed like a whole mountain. The view from the Coaldale Junction highway was this perfectly round cone, but in the back of it, it had been blown out, so you could walk into the cone from the back without going all the way up to the top of the mountain. But it was just huge, and it was very steep and very hard. Were there any community activities, community potlucks, or picnics or anything like that? There were, always. And every Saturday night there was a dance in the bar, and these cowboys would come in and miners, I assume, with great big boots. The kids, everybody came, and the band would play, and these people would stomp around. And my memory of that is that they were going to step right on top of me, and I was going to be squashed to death by these boots, because I didn’t feel any higher than the boots were. [laughter] But it was community. Every Labor Day they had a huge parade and a fight. There was a famous boxing match there, and I don’t recall who it was. |