ODDS’N’SODS — High water and base language

I was employed at New Ontario Machine Works for many years, and it was 1936 when the shop received an urgent telephone call from the Desantis gold mine’s master mechanic, who was sending us the project’s 3-ton triplex pump.

The mechanic informed us that there was an emergency at the mine: The underground pump had stopped working and water was rising in the shaft.

The casting arrived from the mine, near Timmins, Ont., in several pieces, having broken apart when a misplaced charge detonated under the discharge pipe. The repair job would take at least three days, however, and the mechanic was forced to procure portable pumps.

A job this size had never been attempted in the north, and everyone in the shop was put to work. Another welder and I brazed non-stop for 28 hours. When that monster was lowered into the asbestos to cool, we slept for 12 straight hours.

Not long afterwards, my wife and I drove to the mine to visit her father (one of the superintendents there), and I talked him into letting us go underground so that I might look at the pump. (In those days, women were not usually welcome in a mine, but my wife managed to convince her father she would not hex the place.)

I was examining, on the 700 level, the newly repaired pump when my light picked up a nice piece of high-grade gold protruding from a vein about 25 ft. from the shaft. I was busy removing the nugget with a piece of starter steel when I heard a loud roar behind me.

The roar was accompanied by some of the choicest language imaginable and I was confronted with one angry and red-faced superintendent.

“You stupid s.o.b.,” he screamed. “Do you realize that was the only visible gold in this whole freakin’ [not his exact word] mine? We were keeping it there to show to those beady-eyed directors when they come up from Ohio next week.”

With that, he rang for the cage, bade goodnight to his daughter at the top — completely ignoring me — and stomped into his office.

My wife and I broke out laughing on the way home.

“At least I got to see the pump,” I said.

“Yes,” said my wife, “and I learned that my father has both a surface vocabulary and an underground vocabulary.”

I never did find out how the directors’ tour turned out.

— The author, a frequent contributor to this column, resides in Boyertown, Pennsylvania.