The Great Depression

When Bill Taylor and Ed’s job at the Queen of the Hills mine ended, Ed and Nora moved to Butte, Montana in 1928. Ed went to work for the Anaconda Copper Company, but the summer of the following year, the banks across the country began to fail. What followed was the beginning of the Great Depression, though few called it that at first.

In Butte, the shock came quickly. Copper prices fell, and mines began to cut back. Ed was working as a foreman and managed to keep his job.

Behind the collapse were forces far beyond Montana. During the 1920s, industry and finance had expanded on easy credit, speculation, and borrowed money. When the stock market crashed in October 1929, banks failed by the thousands, loans were called in, and businesses could no longer finance production or payrolls.

Demand for copper—used in construction, manufacturing, and electrical work—fell sharply as building stopped nationwide. Mining companies cut output to survive, and whole regions built on mining wages felt the blow at once.

In Butte, men drifted away in search of work, while those who stayed faced long stretches without pay. Breadlines appeared. Relief kitchens opened. A city that had once pulsed with money and motion learned what it meant to stand still.

Lois met Ross Aaron, and though times were bleak, love bloomed.

Lorne would remember: “I was only five years old when Lois married Ross, but I remember my sister’s wedding. It was held at our house. I remember she was dressed in real nice clothes and had on a hat that had a veil. She was beautiful. She kissed me and the rest goodbye and I got lipstick all over my face. My new brother-in-law had a big sack filled with candy. He gave me a real all-day sucker and the biggest candy bar in the sack. I thought he was a pretty nice big brother-in-law.”

To keep copper from flooding the already stagnant market, production was slashed. The mine worked the men for two weeks and idled them the third.

Ed and Nora rented a larger place and Lois and Ross moved in with them to share expenses.

Merna Aaron was born at home on May 18, 1931. Nora bathed her—laughing because the baby had such a grip on her thumb that she couldn’t wash it.

When Merna was only four weeks old, Ross—who was a compulsive gambler—got into trouble in Butte. He took Lois and the baby back to the Salmon River country, settling in Gibbonsville where he hoped to escape his debts.

Life in Butte

By Lorne Callahan

My first precise recollections of life began in Butte, and I remember clearly the bustling, sprawling mining town whose houses perched on hillsides among the mine shafts, gallows frames and tailing hills.

My brother grew rapidly while I grew very slowly. Earl was nicknamed for his size as he was large and built like a bull. They called him Bull, Bulldog, Jumbo, Moose . . . and I was his “little brother.” He was always a head and shoulders taller than I.

I remember when I used to practice my “Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension” exercises in front of a mirror and he would catch me. He would stretch his two muscled arms straight out from his broad shoulders and make me walk under them. I could do it without even rumpling my pompadour.

I always felt I could do anything that he did. Wherever we lived I was always in his gang or hanging around the fringes.

In Butte, I was hanging around with a gang of older kids watching the rubber-gun fights and other activities. They made the guns out of long sticks with notches cut in them. The rubber—cut inner tubes—would be drawn taut and placed in the notches and over a string that followed the length of the board. You could fire a number of these rubber bullets by pulling this string.

The idea was to tie as many knots as possible and stretch them as tight as you could. If you were hit at close range by one of these they could put a knot on your head, black your eye, or knock a smaller child to his knees. These were our gang wars.

Sometimes B-B guns were used in the skirmishes. I recall a time when Earl was reading the funny papers to me. We were sitting on the front porch when I heard and saw the paper he was reading go “Pfft!”

He grabbed his cheek and I could see blood running from his mouth. He then spit out a B-B pellet. It left him with a permanent scar, but luckily it was attractively placed and to this day he has a nice dimple in one cheek.

Each gang had our underground “cabins.” We made them by excavating a large hole and placing old laggin—two-by-twelve boards lying around the mine yards—for ceiling beams. We gathered cardboard and sheet metal for the roof and then covered it with dirt so the cabins were hidden.

These were the hideouts used by the bigger kids when they got into trouble. It was also the club room where all the planning, plotting, and strategy was done for the numerous rumbles. It was a place where we little ones listened to the big ones talk and brag.

It was also a place where we could have parties, eating burnt potatoes cooked in coals covered by the good earth. Somehow these potatoes always seemed to taste delicious, even when we ate them without salt or pepper.

One of my last recollections of Butte was the day my brother and I were playing pirates.

He had just returned home from school. I was home looking through a picture book of pirates.

Mom had just walked to the store for groceries, so we were alone. Earl decided we should play pirates and I was with him in full accord. He explained how the pirates boarded ships on the high seas and fought sword fights when the ships sailed side by side.

We looked around for ships. There they were—Mom and Dad’s old-fashioned rocking chairs. We dragged them into the center of the kitchen, one facing one way and one the other.

Now for swords.

We got up on chairs and looked into the cupboards. Somehow I ended up with a “broadsword”—our mother’s long bread knife. Earl could only find a “dagger”—an ice pick.

With our weapons in hand we boarded our ships and began rocking wildly. We had quite a duel.

About the time poor Mom opened the kitchen door with her hands full of groceries, I was stabbed in the nose with the ice pick. It went completely through the middle of my nose, somehow missing the bone. It was buried to the hilt with the point pressing on my eyelid.

The blood sprayed as well as the groceries.

Mom got her wits about her and got me to a doctor. He removed the ice pick and soaked my nose in ice.

The doctor finally calmed Mom down, saying, “He is hardly hurt at all. He could have lost an eye.”

Earl and I received a good American spanking and never fought again with ice picks and knives in rocking chairs.

To this day that is the only nosebleed I have ever had.

Dad was foreman of the mines and I used to wait for Dad to come home. I would meet him before he got to the house and he would hand me his lunch bucket.

I would always ask him if I could eat his leftovers and he always replied, “Yes, if there is any left.”

I would search and search and would always find something—an orange, apple, or half a sandwich. I enjoyed the sour musty taste of this food. None of the other kids wanted to eat it, but to me it was something swell.

For the children, Butte was not remembered for bank failures or copper prices, but for scraped knees, gang wars, and adventures that might easily have ended far worse.

For Ed and Nora, however, the years in Butte were only another stop in a life that rarely stood still.