ODDS ‘N’ SODS — Enlightened

After spending three years in the South Pacific, the Philippines and Japan during the Second World War, I returned to the U.S. in 1947 and spent a year in college as a chemistry major.

That summer, I got a job at the Champion copper-gold mine, a snakebite and baling wire operation in the defunct Bohemia mining district of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains.

In the early years, the Champion had been run by an outfit called H & H Mines, which had honeycombed the mountain, put the ore through a 100-ton-per-day mill and ran the tailings down Champion crick (only flatlanders called it a creek), where they made their way, via the Wilamette and Columbia Rivers, to the Pacific Ocean.

Bill “Doc” Caldwell, our chemistry professor at Oregon State, hired me and some others to reopen a portion of the mine for him and his partner, Ken Watkins.

Among the crew was “Doc” King, a chemistry professor from Washington State; his 16-year-old son, whose eating habits threatened to consume our smelter return; Little Joe Thompson, who could do everything in a mine but none of it well; Myrt, the best camp cook in the west; and Gordon Card.

Some of us worked underground, cleaning up after 20 years of idleness. When we started mining, we used 90-lb. stopers to get at some high-grade ore in 30-inch-wide vertical veins.

The rest of the crew, which was headed by Doc King, surveyed claims that would increase the size of the bonanza we were going to uncover and that had been, of course, overlooked by the former owners.

Oregon is rugged country, and, one day, the surveyors got lost. We were ready to send out a search party, but they came straggling in just before we went out to look for them. The men explained that they got into trouble when they realized, as it got dark, that they lacked one of the reagents necessary to light their carbide lamp. Although they had carbide, the crew had drunk the last drops of water, the second reagent.

Doc King postulated that he could create, with an alternative reagent, a concoction that would fuel the lantern. Alas, not one of the dehydrated surveyors was able to answer nature’s call, which would have provided the all-important second ingredient.

Doc King’s always-hungry son became the hero, however, when he found an orange in his pack. It turned out that a mixture of orange juice and carbide will also produce light, a discovery which, to our minds, rivaled any of Issac Newton’s accomplishments.

— The author, a semi-retired metallurgical consultant, resides in Grass Valley, Calif.