• born September 9, 1939
• in Nowata, Oklahoma

Father:

• Christfor B. Bauman
• born in Notawa, Oklahoma

Mother:

• Hazel Bailey Bauman
• born June 23, 1916
• in Notawa, Oklahoma

Brothers and Sisters:

• Bill (1937)
• Frank (1943)
• Ray (1945)
• Steve (1949)
• Sheriee (1951)

interviewed by Beth Smith

transcribed by Phyllis Smoak

This is Beth Smith. I’m talking to Tom Bauman and he’s going to tell us about some of the things he remembers about early Salida. Hi Tom.

TB: Hello Beth.

BS: What can you tell us about yourself. When did you ah, where did you come from?

TB: Well, I was raised in North Eastern Oklahoma and as soon as I turned seventeen I enlisted in the US Army. Spent 5 ? years in the army.

BS: What were you doing in the Army?

TB: I was in anti-aircraft guns and then we converted to anti-aircraft missiles. And, my last station was down in the Dallas-Fort Worth defense area, Denton, Texas.

BS: Were you overseas at all during your service?

TB: Yeah. I spent 2 years in Germany. And that’s when we converted from guns to missiles, while I was in Germany. And that was interesting. We went down to El Paso each year to qualify. We had to do a firing qualification down in El Paso and we were fortunate enough to, or good enough to win the “best missile battalion in the US Army” trophy for one year. I think that was ’61.

BS: Well congratulations.

TB: Yeah, so we were proud of that. We got to keep the, the traveling trophy in our day room for one year until someone else got it the next year. And, when I got discharged from Germany, I was lookin for a … I mean discharged from the Army I was lookin for a job on the outside. I was tired of the army by 5 ? years and thought there was better things for me to do. I didn’t want to make a career of the army because it had gotten kinda boring or something to me at the time. So my Mother and Step-Father were livin at Climax and he was employed with Climax. And she told me about the employment possibilities up there. Oh yeah, they wrote and told me about the job opportunities there, so I decided that might be the best place for me at the time. So I got on the bus, and it was April of 9th, 9th of April, 1962. And when I left Dallas why I was in short sleeves, nice warm weather, and I got off the bus at Climax. And Climax is on the top of Fremont Pass, at 11,560 or 70 feet. And it was snowin, and I got off the bus in the knee deep of snow, still snowing. Snow banks around the parking lots where they’d plowed the snow off were like 20, 25 feet high all the way around. As it turned out that was the largest snowfall in like ten or fifteen years at Climax. There was like 365 inches of snow that year.

BS: That was 1962?

TB: Yeah. And so that was pretty interesting for me. I thought I’d maybe come to Alaska, or something instead of Colorado. Well, you know, a lot of people think that that’s the type of weather we have in Colorado anyway, like Alaska, a lot of snow and cold. So I wasn’t really too surprised. I was because of that time of the year and what not. And so I went over and hired out and got orientated. And I was working 7-day production when they put me on. I was on a repair crew. And what the repair crew does is they go in and repair these, they call ‘em “drifts”, but they're a tunnel in the layman’s language. But in mining language a “drift” is a, is a tunnel. We go in, when they’ve caved in and we repair ‘em. We take all the broken rock out and timbers and rails or whatever else is in there that’s been damaged from the cave-in. Caving in is what’s it doing. So, we remove all that and we go in and put new tracks and new timbers and timber sets and sometimes we’d have to bar down some of the loose rock so that it don’t fall down while you’re in there workin on it. And I worked at that for a year and a half and then I decided that there wasn’t much room for advancement on that job. So I transferred to the production crew, which they call the “muck” crew up there. And that’s where they load ore trains. And I was transferred over. Well, actually I got a loaders bid, is what I did. Which, up at Climax, when you want a job, you bid on it, and if you have the seniority and the know how, you know, if you know how to do the job and you have the seniority, they award you that bid. And that’s how I got over onto the muck crew. And I worked on the muck crew for about three, three and a half years. what we do on a muck crew is we load the ore trains, or run the ore trains. Operate ‘em

BS: Just a minute Tom. Are you calling that a muck crew? It is muck. Ok, it’s just a new word.

TB: Production crew, muck crew. The production crew was called a muck crew. Ah, production is kind of a general term for the people who work for wages. They have management that are, that are on the staff. And then they have production and maintenance; P&M hands. And the term was “muck”. Muck is a term for broken rock, loose rock. And whenever you want to clean a drift out you muck it out. And then you most of the muck that is found underground is ore. so that’s kind of a word that works for both ore and, and broken rock, stuff like that. So I worked there for about three and a half years. We, we had to shoot a lot of dynamite while we were on that crew to get the, to keep the rocks flowing into the, the loading dashes that we loaded the muck trains with, or the ore cars. And ah, so we had quite a bit of fun shootin, well it was fun for a young guy to shoot a lot of dynamite and stuff up there. I was up there in 1964 when they had what they called “the big blast”. And what they had done is they had found an ore body in a spot up there in the center of their “glory hole”. Their “glory hole” looked like a donut. That’s the way their ore body was formed, like a donut. And the center was mostly waste muck. And so if you ever look at the ah, it doesn’t look that way now because of the open pit operations, but at that point in time it looked like a bundt baking dish. You had the center that stuck up and then you had the trough or whatever, that when around the outside of the center.

BS: About how big was it?

TB: Ah, how large was the opening? It was probably a mile across. At the time I hired out up there it was the worlds largest underground mine. Er, wait a minute, I, I gotta correct that, I think North America’s largest underground mine. I think over in South Africa they got diamond mines that are probably larger underground. But it was North America’s largest and supposed to be the safest mine to work in North America. Which still wasn’t that safe. We still got a lot of people injured. And once in awhile we’d get one or two people ah, one or two fatalities a year. On a, on a bad year we got four or five people killed, up in the mine there. And ah, I decided that the more I could learn the better off I would be, so I decided to change jobs again. And I wanted to become a welder, to learn how to weld. I wanted to do something that I could possibly use other than at a mine. So, welding came to mind. So I transferred from the production of the muck crew over to the mechanic crew in 1966. And I worked there as a mechanic for about three years. And then a welding bid came up in the outside shop. The, it was called the Phillipson outside mine shop. And I bid on that, and I started welding and I welded for about eight years in the Phillipson shop, above ground. And after eight years of that, I wanted to learn some more stuff, so I transferred to the electrical crew in 1979. And I was working at the electrical crew until I was retired. I got a disability retirement from Climax in 1982, because of a heart condition that I had.

BS: Now when did, when did Climax close?

TB: I think they closed finally in ‘84.

BS: So you were out of there by then.

TB: Yeah, I’d already left there.

BS: Can you tell us something about molybdenum?

TB: Well, molybdenum has a lot of uses. And ah, back when I first went there they used it a lot in the space age, in the nose cones. It has a real high heat resistance melting point. And so they use that in in a compound that they make their missile nose cones and stuff with in order to keep from burning the tips of their missiles and their rockets and stuff that they were using in space exploration.

BS: Well, did you live up at Leadville all this time?

TB: No. I ah, started out, I was at Fremont Pass, top of Fremont Pass with my Mom and step-Dad. And then in 1962 they had the strike. The laborers went on strike. And so,…..

BS: How long did that last?

TB: It was six months. So, we had to go out and… they had picket walkers and people that lived actually in Leadville that probably couldn’t just go out and find another job, so the people that could, and I was one of them; so we just went and looked for another job while the strike was going on. And I went to Denver and went to work at a warehouse there, as a warehouse man. For “More Value” ware, stamp, “More Value Stamp” warehouse. And that was kinda fun, but it wasn’t very profitable. They didn’t pay near the wages that Climax did. And so in January of ’63, Climax settled their labor dispute with the Union and we went back to work. Ah, the guys at the warehouse in Denver wanted me to stay there, cause they liked my work. But I told them I couldn’t afford to give up that much money and stay there and work. So I went back to Climax. And then when I did, we didn’t live up in Fremont pass anymore, we’d rented a place in Buena Vista.

BS: Were you married by that time?

TB: No. And so we lived in Buena Vista for about a year and a half. But my step-Dad, he was kind of a ranch person and he wanted to find a place sort of out of town where he could keep some horses. And after a year and a half in Buena Vista we moved down to Poncha Springs. And we rented a place on Gene Adams' ranch there in Poncha Springs, and had about five acres where we could keep horses on, plus the house that we rented from them. And so we lived there about four years. And ah….

BS: So you commuted to Climax all that time

TB: Yeah. Every time, each time in Buena Vista and in Salida, I would car-pool or ride up in a panel that some of the other workers used to operate.

BS: There were a lot of people that were commuting up to Climax weren’t there?

TB: Yeah, I understand that when Climax closed down they displaced about 300 families here in Salida alone. And that was probably 300 men that were workin up there in the mine. At the time there were a few women working up there. That was kinda interesting, to be workin up there all that time, then all of a sudden they had to hire women to go underground. And, and they had to change some of their bathroom facilities, and, and things under there which was, and they didn’t change them that much, which was pretty comical, because the poor ladies was underground there. Our bathrooms consisted of just kinda like a port-a-potty under there, and they didn’t enclose it most of the time. But I think once the women there why they had to put a kinda of a little enclosure around it. It wasn’t sealed in or anything, it was kinda open air, but it was kinda like putting dressing curtains or something around it.

BS: There used to be quite a superstition about women going underground in any kind of mining. I know I was from Louisville where they have coalmines, and that was the big thing over there. Women didn’t go underground. In fact, I wanted to go underground one time to see what it was all about and Ed’s Uncle said “nope, you can’t go”.

TB: Well there was a few old coal miners up there at Climax that went up there and went to work, and they were pretty upset when they started lettin women go underground. I remember the first time I seen a woman underground, she was with an engineer crew that had come out of Colorado mines, School of Mines. And they were up there lookin around at our operation. Of course underground there you couldn’t tell a man from a women because they had hard hats on and coveralls and boots and safety-glasses, and they probably just looked like a small man instead of a woman. And ah, that, that was quite a deal up there, it was interesting.

Underground like that it is so dark, that if you turn your lamp off and there’s no other light around, you cannot seen nothin. It’s like being totally blind. And occasionally our lamps would run out of battery power. When I hired up, when I hired out up there they had battery lamps and you had a lamp room that you picked your lamp up before you went on shift. And then you’d turn it in and put it into the charger as you left. Well if somebody took your lamp, by mistake, you know, were in a hurry and grabbed the wrong lamp, then they would double shift your lamp and then when you went in on the second shift, it would run out of charge on you. And you’d just have to feel your way around with your feet and your hands when that light went out, unless there was someone there that could kinda lead you to a lit, lighted area, like a lunchroom or someplace like that. And so that was kinda interesting too.

BS: Scary.

TB: Yeah, it’s, it, yeah, there’s lots of scary stuff that goes on underground up there. Whenever they’d shoot a blast and the ventilation sometimes would be, wasn’t workin properly, you’d get so much dust that you couldn’t see. And, course we wore our safety respirators that kept the dust out of your lungs and stuff, pretty much. Which, while I’m on the subject, I’m happy to say that I didn’t get any silicosis while I was up there in the 20 years. I was only underground 10 years, but that was plenty of time to get it, if I hadn’t taken precautions to keep from getting “rock on the lungs” as they call it – silicosis.

And, underground, after a while you got comfortable, just like in your living room, you know. Ah, you could, you didn’t have any anxieties or anything about being underground. In fact, in the cold weather it was warmer under there than it was outside. We ah, it was probably 40 degrees year round in most places, unless you were close to a place that, that had a hole that was goin’ up into the outside temperature and then it’d get pretty cold, start freezing the ice and stuff under there. But, otherwise, you’d just wear a shirt with long-johns. Or maybe a light jacket with long-johns or full long-johns. We wore steel toed rubber boots that came up just below your knee. And inside those boots they had a little steel flexible pad that you stuck in the bottom of your boots to keep your feet from getting any nail punctures in your feet. And ah, course the boots would take the brunt of it, if you stepped on a nail or something. And, and it was really depressing, cause those boots cost like $25.00, $30.00 a pair and ah, you know they weren’t quite, they weren’t even hardly broke in sometimes before you got holes in ‘em and then if you got in water, why you had wet feet all day. So that was kinda fun.

Ah, we used to, do ah, we weren’t as safe up there as a lot, as we were supposed to be. We, we got a little reckless sometimes. And if it was the last train that we were goin’ to load for the shift, sometimes we’d jump on the train and get in the work cars and ride outside, rather than go down and gather at this one spot and ride the “man trip” out with a big bunch of guys. You’d get a few minutes jump on the people going out and going into the “dry” to change clothes. They called the, the clothes changing building “the dry”, which was kinda fun. Ah, you had benches along a row of lockers and then they had chains with pulleys in the ceiling and baskets on ‘em for your wet clothes. And, you know, being underground like that, there is a lot of water. And so your pants would probably be wet clear up to your knees most of the time. And ah, when you’d come out and change clothes, you’d open your locker and get your clean clothes out of the locker, take your ‘ol dirty clothes, which they called “diggers”, was their term for dirty work clothes. And they would hook ‘em onto this basket and then reel them up into the ceiling where the heat was and then they’d be dry the next time you’d come for the shift. Sometimes they were so stiff you couldn’t hardly get in ’em, from the muck and water and everything.

BS: Smart idea. Smart idea though.

TB: I don’t know. I guess they, that, that’s the only mine I ever worked at. I’m not sure how other mines had their drys or, or what happened, but. They had a safety method up there to find out how many people were inside, under the mine. And they did this, uh, they had a seven-day production under there, but there would, between shifts there would be, supposed to be nobody under there. And they did this for blasting purposes. If they had to do any blasting why they would make sure everybody was out from underground whenever they set their shot off. Sometimes they were big shots, and so they needed to clear the whole mine for that. Not to mention the dust and stuff that went on. And so when you checked in up there, to go underground, you went to see your boss for your crew. And he had a window there, and he had a board where he hung these brass chits with your work number on ‘em. And when you would come in, he would hand you your brass chit, you’d put it in your pocket and you’d go underground and you’d keep it all shift. And then when you come out at the end of the shift you turned it in and he hung the brass up and then he could tell how many, well tell if there was anybody that was missing, because if the brass chit was missing then there was something wrong. They’d have to go find that guy and see if he was underground or if he just forgot to turn it in or what. So that was a kind of a unique way of keepin track of the people up at the mines, which, you know, most jobs you don’t have to do anything like that. It’s just kind of a thing that has to be done for mining.

BS: I saw one of those chit boards in a coal mine too. Same thing, hang up your little…..

TB: Yeah. Yeah. They must have invented that over…. I think most of your mines were invented in England, your coal mines and stuff. And a lot of your miners in this country came from Cornish England. And so they adopted a lot of their habits and stuff. Another thing that was kind of, took a little getting used is riding their cages in their raises and whatnot under there. Sometimes their cages would be just be big enough for two people, like a coffin for two people made out of expanded wire steel where you could see the rock and everything as you were going up and down. I rode one of those one time for Phillipson, down to the Stork level a couple of times. And that was kinda scary, because if you got trapped in there, I don’t know if you could get out, ‘er you know, if your hoist quit, I don’t know you you’d, you’d get rescued. They did have some kind of a system in there where you, where you could pull a rope and send bell signals to the hoist man. But, you know if your power went off I don’t think they would .… course the hoist man would know if somebody was on there or not.

BS: It never happened to you, huh?

TB: Nah. It never happened to me. But that was kind of, kinda scary where you’d only get two or three guys in a little ol close space like that and you’d start going down, down a raise.

BS: Did anything scary ever happen to you personally?

TB: Lots of times.

BS: I’ll bet.

TB: When I was working on a muck crew…. well, when I was working on the repair crew, sometimes you would be in there where it caved in and you were removing some of the old broken rock and stuff and once in awhile a piece of it would fall out and hit you while you were under there, because you didn’t have support under it yet. You’d be cleaning everything out before you put the timbers and support under it. And ah, there was several times I got hit, it just wasn’t anything large enough to do a real, you know, lasting damage to me. You know maimed for life type thing, like some people were. And ah, sometimes your muck trains would, or your ore trains in those areas there, it would be real tight. And if you had to go by one of ‘em, you’d have to get down and crawl underneath them or just go sideways and just kinda skim along between the side of the tunnel which they call the rib in the drift. And occasionally there was people that would be trying to slip by these trains and these train drivers wouldn’t know it and they’d start the trains up and it would catch ‘em in-between there and injure ‘em pretty bad. I know two people here in Salida personally that got injured being caught between two trains like that, and it kinda broke ‘em up, ribs and shoulders and stuff. One of ‘em is George Hazel, that lives out halfway here, between here and Poncha Springs. And another one is Jim Ashsley. And Jim, he’s the maintenance man over at the Shavano Manor, at this time. Ah…then there was another guy by the name of John Hunter that was on the repair crew with me that got broken up that way. So. There was a few times I just barely missed gettin, just gettin squeezed through there and then they’d start the train up and I’d realize how lucky I was I wasn’t in there when they did that. Because those trains’ll grab your clothes, and you can’t, you know, the old sides of those trains are kinda got little barbs and stuff stickin out on ‘em, not intentially, but just through the rough treatment of rock and stuff. And they're rough, and they’ll just grab your clothes and pull you right through them tight spots like pullin you through a wringer on a washing machine.

BS: Yeah, mining’s a dangerous occupation.

TB: Yeah. A lot of people were kinda careless in their blasting and stuff and they’d get hurt that way. But I went on the mechanic crew and that was kind of fun and interesting. We had to pack everything around on our back, our parts and our tools that we needed to repair whatever we were workin on. Most of the time it was a big double drummed hoist that we were workin on. They called ‘em slushers, up there, was their name for them. And they were used to pull those folding dippers.

BS: Now, when did you move into Salida?

TB: I moved into Salida in 1964. And we moved, we moved from Buena Vista down here in ’64. And we lived on the 5th, on 5th and “G”. Ah, we lived there for, oh not too long, probably six months, eight months and then we found a place out in Poncha Springs where we moved and lived for about four years out there. Then at that point in time I moved away from home. I didn’t want to live at home anymore with my Mom. I thought I was doin’ ‘em a favor, but as it turned out I was just makin things harder for her. So I moved down to ah, I got me a Hotel room in the ah, in the Victoria Hotel. There was a nice couple there who owned it, Mr. & Mrs. Kelley. And ah, they kept it nice. I had a, I had a room there for it looks like $28.00 a week with maid service and it was just a sleeping room. And then I would take my meals at Neals Café, which was just across the street, which is now MaMa D’s. But, there was a little lady in there by the name of Mae Prunty that ran that after her husband died. Her and her husband had opened that up. And they had a contract with the Railroad, ah, they way they got started in that business, to stay open 24 hours a day so they could feed the railroaders comin’ in or goin’ out.

BS: Any time of the day or night, huh?

TB: And so, at the time I moved down there next to ‘em why the railroaders had quit runnin through here so much, so she was, she wasn’t open 24 hours a day anymore. I think she closed about 6 or 7 in the evening and opened about 4 in the morning so she could feed some of the people goin’ to work early. I’d be over that about 4:30, 5 o’clock havin breakfast, she’d pack my lunches for me and away I’d go. Carpool’d come by, pick me up. When you worked at Climax and lived in Salida, it took you 12 hours round trip. You’d leave at maybe 5 in the morning and you’d get back at 5 in the evening on the day shift.

BS: Long day.

TB: And then, course, I worked three shifts then and I’d, I’d go to work sometimes 3 in the afternoon and get back like 1 or 2 in the morning, on the swing-shift. And then graveyard, you’d leave at …. I think I’d leave at 10 o’clock, cause you’d have to be up there to go to work at 12. And then you’d get off at 8 and then you’d get back into town about 8 or 9. And ah, the guys that used to work grave yard used to have a saying: “boy this grave yard’s really got my life messed up." Says, "I go to bed hungry and I go to work sleepy. My, my life is completely turned around with this grave yard.” Some people though, that got used to grave-yard, they like it if they worked it all the time.

Because ah, usually at a job like that there wasn’t as many people up there in the mine, so you could, you could get around the mine a lot easier on swing and day shift because you only had like 1/3 or 2/3 of the people there. About 1/3 of the people that worked at Climax underground were day shift only, and they were usually maintenance and mechanic, stuff like that.

BS: How many people did Climax hire at their peak, when they were going great guns?

TB: They had about 3,000 people at their peak. And that was split up between administration and underground. We had two main mines then. We had the Phillipson level, which I worked at to start with and then they had the Stork level which they had developed, which was just below there. And then they had their outside people, at warehousing and…..

BS: Well, let’s go back to your living in Salida. Now, when were you married.

TB: Ah, I got married in 1971.

BS: Uh huh, and what was your wife’s name?

TB: Her name was Dorothy Gallegos. Her Dad was a long time railroader and they lived over at 511 W. 2nd, where they live now. And she had a sister, just the two of ‘em. And they’d been livin’ here since they were pretty small. Her Dad was, had came in and started workin for the railroad. I’m now sure when, but he had about 20 years with the railroad when he retired. And I ah, we, we'd been livin’ in this little house here ever since we got married. We bought it the same year. And since we didn’t have any children we didn’t feel the need to get a bigger house. I offered to buy a bigger house for Dorothy but she said that she was satisfied with this, with this one. And since it was so close to her parents, why she was pretty pleased with that. She didn’t want to relocate any further away or anything. So ah, we’ve been married ever since. We’ve been married now 34 years. We just had our Anniversary, the July 3rd. That’s when we got married in ’70.

BS: Fine, Uhmmm. So, what do you remember about living in Salida. Now, you were out of town most of the time working. But ah, people or clubs or something that you worked with. Ah, anything there?

TB: Well, when I was workin’ 7 day production, why there wasn’t too much social life for me, because you couldn’t really, you know, do anything at a certain time every month, like you can when you have day work. But, there for the first 7, 8 years why I didn’t really socialize with too many people in Salida, unless they were workers up there, which there was several, you know, and I’d get to meet. We would kinda’ do our own little get-together’s off work. Ah, we would have beer parties and stuff like that that would get a little rowdy at times.

BS: Mostly though with other Climax workers, huh?

TB: Yeah, with other Climax workers. And of course, since I’ve been retired, why I’ve had more time to meet more people around Salida here, but. Yeah, Salida’s really grown in the last 40 years that I’ve lived here. There’s a lot of places where there were vacant fields where they're full of houses now. Like out west of the golf course there wasn’t hardly any homes out in there and now it’s gettin’ pretty well filled up. And between, oh the bowling alley and Poncha Springs, there wasn’t much there, as far as homes and stuff, businesses. There wasn’t hardly any businesses out on Highway 50 when I first came here that I can recall: a bowling alley. And there wasn’t any convenience stores in town to speak of. They had little home town groceries. neighborhood grocery stores back when I first moved here which was kinda’ convenient. And I can recall people travelin’ through Salida back when I was first here, that would start runnin out of gasoline and they would be looking for a place to put gas in. And we’d said, well depending on the direction you’re going, your next place to get gas is either Canon City or Gunnison.

BS: Wow!

TB: And then they, then they brought in the 7-11 store. I think that was the first convenience store that came in. And then after that why they started bringing in more convenience stores. Now we got quite a few here. The one over here on 1st street near me, there used to be a little gas station just a block west of there, it was a Cliff Bryce station, but it only stayed open like probably 8 o-clock in the morning till 8 in the evening. Closed down. And then when they redone that they moved it down a block and built it where it’s at now. And it was a Cliff Bryce station then. Then it’s changed hands a couple of times since then. Now it’s called the Phillips 66 First Stop, is what they call those, all across the United States now, I've noticed. And ah, we’ve got quite a few convenience stores out on Highway 50 now. Like I said, 7-11 was probably the first one, and then, think Loaf and Jug come in shortly after that. And then the Stop and Save come in and then TravelLan Conoco became a convenience station. But they’re not open too late these days. But at first, they were a little store in the butcher market when they first stared that, kinda of, I don’t know if they sold gas, but I think they might have. Bill Manscheim built that. And then they came in with sub-shops. Which ah, I think that kinda, kinda died down now. I don’t know there’s only one sub shop, and that’s the Subway out there now that I can recall. But the first one was there near the bowling alley in that little store center by T.J.’s Liquors, there’s a little section left and they had a Moonlight Sub Shop there that was kinda nice. And our first pizza shop, per say, was down on “F” street. I think it was probably in about the 300 block of “F” street in the middle there, just down from Fabulous Finds, in that block, probably in the center of it. It was called Pizza Dispatch and they used to have some of the best darn pizzas. And you could call in and they’d deliver ‘em free.

BS: About when was that?

TB: About ’74, I think. The reason I can recall that date is my Uncle had had come down from Alaska and was in the area at that time, and he liked pizza. I was never much of a pizza person, but he did, and we’d order ‘em out. And he’d tell me how good those pizzas were, and they were good.

BS: Well now, Climax is talking about reopening. Think you’ll go back to work for ‘em?

TB: No, I wouldn’t go back to work for ‘em. I, I got a disability retirement from there. So, they already terminated me because of health reasons and, and my health hasn’t gotten any better in the last 20 years, so….

BS: Well, do you think that’s something that’ll work, if they open Climax? Is there a need for Molybdenum now?

TB: Ah, I read an article in the Colorado Central on Climax opening. And the guy that wrote it was a former Climax worker at one time. He, he didn’t work there too long, probably a year. But, he was a writer, and he wrote an article on it, cause he’d done some research on it. And I guess molybdenum is up to about $30.00 a pound now, and back when they closed it, it had, dropped down to about less than $3.00 a pound. And so, it sounds like they might. But the problem is, if they open and start floodin’ the market with a lot of “Moly”, why then it’s going to bring the prices down. And that’s gona be kind of counterproductive on their part for bringing it down. So, they're walkin’ a pretty fine line there as to whether or not to open that again. And it takes two years to get it geared back up according to the writer that wrote the article. To get it all manned and machinery and everything and start production again. And, and it’s kinda hard to say what the price of Molybdenum will be in two years, cause it’s been fluctuating pretty wildly, I guess, in the last 20 years.

BS: And that’ll take a lot of money to get it going again too.

TB: Yeah.

BS: Uh huh. Will it be the, under, underground mining or the open pit?

TB: I think underground mining up there is a thing of the past. I don’t think they’ll ever go back to that, because when I was up there and they had started their open pit mining, they could do their open pit mining so much cheaper per ton than they could underground mining. And, so I think they’ll just start from the top and keep diggin’ down, if they ever do open it, it’ll be open pit. And, ah, they’ll probably have bigger and larger trucks and shovels too to operate it.

BS: My goodness, by the looks of those pictures, they had certainly had big ones when you were workin up there.

TB: Yeah, they did.

BS: Ok Tom you got anything else you want to put on tape for future use?

TB: Well, that’s all I can think of at this time, so I guess we’ll just have to leave it at that.

BS: Alright, I appreciate you talking to us. Thank you very much.

TB: You’re welcome Beth.