by Gregg Olsen
Wava left the office with paperwork outlining the money she and the kids would receive. The benefits would end when the youngest, Matthew, turned eighteen. It amounted to less than $8 a day. That and $5,000 in life insurance didn’t seem like much, but Don Beehner’s family was better off than most. His tightwad tendencies and his wife’s part-time cleaning job at the bowling alley had allowed them to build a nest egg of more than $2,000. Outside of a $25 monthly payment on a ’59 station wagon purchased the month before the fire, the Beehners didn’t owe a penny. Wava wasn’t getting calls from motorcycle shops or the car dealerships demanding payment before the men were in the ground. She didn’t have to add insult and financial worry to her thoughts—at least not right away.
Norman Fee’s mother, Elizabeth, was unique among those qualifying for death benefits. She was a dependent mother. She’d have given anything to have another woman receive her son’s benefits. She wrote to Sunshine, “You have no idea how much I wish that he had been married, that he had had a child.”
Like many of the survivors, shell-shocked Buz Bruhn also stumbled through memories to make sense of the fire. His thoughts remained fixed on Mullan carpool buddy Casey Pena. Two weeks before the fire, the fifty-two-year-old World War II Purple Heart and Silver Star recipient had been saying that he was “ready to die.” He brought it up several times, in the way men sometimes do when they are disgusted by something over which they have no control. The words, of course, by themselves might have held no special meaning beyond a man letting off steam. That’s what Bruhn had believed when he first heard them. He knew uneasiness sometimes came with the morning drive, and a feeling of impending doom was a part of mining. But Pena had seemed to hint at more than that. He’d announced that he had finally taken care of some paperwork that he had put off for almost a year—he’d put down his new wife’s name as his insurance beneficiary. Bruhn began to believe Pena had had a premonition.
Out of the four men with whom he carpooled May 2, Bruhn was the only survivor.
Inside the little house in the shadow of KWAL’s signal tower, a parade of food arrived on an endless conveyer belt from everyone who knew, or had ever heard of, Louis Goos. Homemade pies, pasta-packed casseroles, and Jell-O salads practically spilled from the refrigerator and made a food mosaic of the countertop in Howard and Susan Markve’s tidy kitchen in Osburn. It was a bottomless buffet line with no takers.
Why, Susan wondered, do people bring food when eating only makes the grieving vomit?
Partially because he’d told her his wishes, but also as a final way of making that lost connection with her father, Susan took charge of the burial. Her dad’s body would be transported to Sturgis, North Dakota. Louis Goos, the man who everyone thought would be the sole survivor of the fire, the fellow who’d survived fourteen car wrecks and a dozen serious mine mishaps, would be planted in the dark Dakota soil that looked and smelled like fresh-ground coffee. Not long after they learned he was dead, Goos’s landlord told the Markves that his live-in girlfriend had ransacked his house. Every single photograph, every personal item, was gone—guns, cowboy hat and boots, everything all the way down to his underwear—gone. Susan Markve broke down when she saw the mess. Her father had many roles in his life: miner, Army sergeant, husband, and father. But after May 2, any tangible proof that he had existed vanished.
Howard Markve contended with more than the loss of his father-in-law, Louis Goos, or the death of partner Bob Follette’s son, Bill. Not only had the men died, they’d vanished. Markve understood why the grieving needed to see the bodies of their men. People needed to see for themselves to make it real, otherwise a mind played games. Markve caught himself thinking about heading over to his father-in-law’s place in Wallace. Let’s go drinkin’. And if Markve needed help, he didn’t ask for it. Instead, on his own he fought to suppress the mental pictures of Norman Fee on the floor of the cage, or Bob Goff staggering across the station. He worked at washing it all away with beer and silence. Even so, he planned to return to the mine. Miners faced everything head-on. New guys are coming. If you don’t claim your stope or your raise, you just might find yourself looking for a new job.
A string of funerals ran throughout the brokenhearted district. Two were double services with side-by-side caskets; one was a triple, with a father, son, and cousin. Elaine Bebb told her daughter Lou Ella Firkins that she couldn’t survive the agony of two separate funerals. Mrs. Bebb had been in bad shape since the fire; she’d even passed out in front of the Jewell. So Lou Ella mourned her husband, Don, and her stepfather, shifter Virgil Bebb, at a double funeral in Shoshone Memorial Gardens.
And over in Coeur d’Alene, Delmar Kitchen said good-bye to his dad, Elmer, and his brother, Dewellyn. They, too, were side by side, together always. Kitchen knew he could no longer handle the drive from Hayden Lake after the fire. There was too much time on that drive to listen to the thoughts in his head. There was too much time in a car that was no longer chilly from keeping an open window to let out his father’s and brother’s cigarette smoke. Donna agreed that they’d have to give up their house and move back to the district, to a mobile home in Pine Creek. No more two-car garage; no more two baths. She could reason that it was okay, though. Great as the family’s loss had been, she still had her husband. Her dream home, well, it had only been a dream. It just didn’t seem right to dwell on that kind of loss.
Bob Launhardt was missing among the pallbearers at Duwain Crow’s funeral following services at the United Church of Kellogg. Neither did Launhardt stop by to see Lauralee Crow. His absence was strange, considering the friendship he had shared with Duwain, dead at thirty-nine. Mrs. Crow didn’t hold it against him. Launhardt needed to find out what had caused the fire. Crying over old times could wait.
Tom Wilkinson joined an overflowing congregation at the United Church of Christ–Congregational in Wallace to mourn the death of Johnny Davis. It was the only funeral he attended. Wilkinson let a what-if mess with his head. What if I’d been more persuasive and Davis had dumped shift to celebrate his birthday? Ron Flory also would attend a single funeral, Clapp cousin Mark Russell’s. The Sunshine survivors said there were too many memorials and they couldn’t get to all of them. Some didn’t buy the excuse. They thought Ron and Tom were embarrassed about living when so many had died.
And over in the big white house in Big Creek, Marvin Chase contended with a few threats: phone calls motivated by grief and the need to place blame. One caller warned Chase not to stand too close to the shaft. Lee Haynes and a few of his fellow Army reservists led a reconnaissance operation of sorts, surveying the perimeter of the property and peering under the family’s cars for bombs. A few nasty letters came through the mail, one in the guise of a cheerful Raggedy Ann and Andy card. Viola Chase could never stand the sight of those two rag dolls after that.
TWO HOURS BEFORE SUNRISE, MAY 13
Sunshine Portal
THE LAST OF SUNSHINE’S DEAD WERE REMOVED FROM THE MINE on May 13 at 3:38 a.m. From darkness to darkness. The last body was that of Mark Russell, Ron Flory’s best friend. The young man was just thirty. He’d always described his job as “working in the black.” It was so true.
A couple of days later Garnita Keene slipped into a spot in the rear of Kellogg’s Lutheran church and listened to the minister eulogize the short life of Billy Allen, a local boy, Army reservist, and Sunshine miner trapped on 5200. Billy’s mother, Winnie, melted into a pew as her own personal what-if scenario continued to plague her. The morning of the fire, she’d run out of their Pinehurst home with Billy’s diggers. Having missed shift on Monday, he’d forgotten them on Tuesday. If only, she told herself, she hadn’t done that, he might have gone to work and turned around and come back home, and just maybe stayed there. He might never have been down on 5200 on May 2. Myrna Flory’s sister lingered in the back of the church because the estranged Mrs. Allen and her two children had arrived from Arkansas. She looked around at their faces and felt it was selfish to hold on to grief as if her l
oss were as great as theirs. She knew it wasn’t. Even so, the what-ifs hold great power. She followed the funeral procession up the road to Greenwood Cemetery.
And on and on the funerals continued. The toll of the tragedy was greatest on Kellogg. The town had lost twenty-five men. Wallace had also been hit hard, with eighteen gone. And tiny, tiny Big Creek had lost six of its fathers and sons. The oldest victim was pumpman Floyd Rais, sixty-one; the youngest was Michael James Johnston, nineteen. The Sunshine fire left seventy-seven women widowed and more than two hundred children fatherless. Three were yet to be born and would never know their dads. The dead had shared much beyond a love for mining and the tragedy that took their lives. More than half had served their country; twenty-eight were Army veterans. In all, it was the worst disaster in Idaho history, supplanting the historic forest fires of 1910 that killed eighty-five people.
After the fire, men blamed themselves for surviving when their partners had perished. Widows felt resentful of friends who received more aid and attention than they did. Children were angry because their dads never came home again. Girlfriends of married miners grieved in silence. Cads looking for widows with insurance bankrolls moved in. The district had been turned upside down.
And a safety engineer named Bob Launhardt was dealt a dark and heavy burden.
Epilogue
AFTER GENE JOHNSON’S BURIAL, BETTY CONTINUED TO SET A PLACE for him at the dinner table. She removed knickknacks and whatnots from tabletops and replaced them with photographs of her husband, taken at all times of his life. She hung his miner’s hat on the gun rack of his pickup and swore to God she’d never take it down. The new Dodge Power Wagon, with its special tri-tone paint scheme of white, blue, and green that Gene had so loved, had become a tribute to his life. For many around Kellogg, Betty was a tragic figure, like Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations, a woman who had consigned herself to wait out the hours of her own life, living with a memory. Uncomfortable with her never-ending tears, friends avoided her.
When Johnson’s $15,000 insurance payoff arrived, it came with a note from Jim Farris. The personnel director signed it “with kindest personal regards.” Betty would rather have killed him than take a dime that passed through his hands.
Once while shopping at the Osburn IGA, Mrs. Johnson saw Farris in the checkout line. She went to her pickup and waited behind the wheel, engine running. I’m going to run over that son of a bitch. I hope he goes to hell. He treated us like we were nothing. Like them guys was nothing, she told herself. She tried to follow, but she was so deep in her thoughts she lost him. Later she sent a note to him along with her marriage certificate and birth certificates for the two youngest girls. “Mr. Farris: I want to thank you for the phone call telling us about Gene’s death. I can’t think of anything as brutal as what you did to me. It will always be remembered.”
Betty Johnson went missing the afternoon of what would have been the Johnsons’ silver wedding anniversary. Her oldest daughter, Linda, called Peggy at the bank and told her she’d been all over Kellogg but couldn’t find her. Peggy suggested they go together to the cemetery. Their mother had been there every day since the funeral.
The sisters drove up the narrow road toward a big white cross fashioned from a telephone pole on a hillside above downtown Kellogg, past the Italian section, and farther on up the hill before turning toward the place where their father had been buried. Shepherd’s crooks held plastic flowers, and some graves were marked with little wrought-iron arches; a few spelled out names, others only initials. Their mother had ordered an arch with the letter J and a double headstone. The date of her death waited for the mason’s chisel.
The sisters found their mother sprawled out on the grass, red roses scattered beneath her tiny frame. Betty Johnson was convulsing with tears. Next to her was a little banner: Happy Anniversary Honey.
“Why can’t I go with him?” she asked. “I don’t want to be here by myself. I don’t want to live this way.”
“I think we’ve lost her,” Peggy told her sister. “She’s never going to let go.”
Betty Johnson was not alone. Across the mining district there were other wives, sons, brothers, and best friends who were never going to let go. No one really could.
INDEED, ALL LIVES IN THE DISTRICT WERE REWRITTEN IN THE smoke of May 2, 1972. In both direct and subtle ways, many would never get over the fire. And no matter the outcome of myriad state and federal lawsuits that sought to fix blame and responsibility, only Bob Launhardt would devote himself to discovering what had caused an impossible fire. Whether he was motivated merely by a personal and professional need to know, or by undeserved guilt, it did not matter. With ninety-one dead, answers become a necessity, and for Launhardt they were an obsession. A congressional probe spotlighted blame and the cause of the fire, but did not answer why a fire had ignited in Sunshine Mine. Hundreds of men testified, and throughout the proceedings, emotions remained on high boil. Driven by the USBM and the Interior Department, the testimony had the distinct feel of scapegoating rather than fact-finding. The House Labor Subcommittee heard damaging and bitter testimony from cager Byron Schulz and Lavern Melton, president of the local Steelworkers. Melton claimed management had not only ignored safety concerns, but had frequently retaliated whenever any were brought to the attention of the company. He told about Don Beehner’s complaint of a safety violation concerning accumulated garbage in drifts: “He was rewarded for his effort by being required to clean it out.”
Outsiders who’d pushed themselves into the story grabbed headlines. Nader’s Raider Davitt McAteer divided culpability by telling the subcommittee that not only was Sunshine criminally negligent, but the USBM was blameworthy for its lax manner of dealing with violations. Sunshine, the twenty-eight-year-old lawyer told the panel, had the worst safety record of all metal mines, but had never been fined or assessed any penalties.
The Kellogg doctor who volunteered at the mine, Keith Dahlberg, sent a letter to his family back East. He was irritated by those grandstanders: “A lot has been said by Ralph Nader and others about the deplorable safety conditions at Sunshine, which is always easier in retrospect. One wonders why if he’s such an expert on safety, he did not warn us a couple times.”
Most of Sunshine’s management testified locally, so they could remain at the mine to help fight the fire, which continued to burn for weeks. Launhardt went before the investigative committee in the auditorium of the Washington Water Power Company in Kellogg. He faced a wall of lawyers and experts from Interior and the USBM. He answered each question coolly and professionally.
Sunshine’s lawyer pushed the point that the government had done a poor job of educating mining companies.
“Did the Bureau of Mines ever advise you that all old workings should be sealed?”
“No,” Launhardt replied.
“Did they ever advise you that the hoistman should have oxygen apparatus for survival and be trained to use it?”
“No.”
“Did they ever advise you that there should be a self-rescue unit for each employee?”
“No.”
“Did they ever advise you that you should have an accurate record system to determine what employees were underground at all times?”
“They never advised us of this.”
The only time emotion flickered was when he had to answer questions about Don Beehner.
“Do you know why he would have removed his face mask?” a lawyer asked.
“I can’t answer that,” he said, hesitating slightly. “I don’t think anybody knows. An act of heroism.”
After two hours, Launhardt finished what would be the first of seemingly countless depositions that in many ways would consume his life.
Certainly during the initial investigation, Launhardt was convinced the catastrophe was mostly a product of ignorance, bad timing, and poor ventilation, none of which he could have done much about. Always a great student, Launhardt was the kind of man who devoured every detail on a
subject of interest. The USBM and the Department of the Interior had conducted the biggest investigation in the history of mining, and Launhardt supported their efforts in every way he could. But they had their own agenda as the governmental agencies responsible for ensuring that mines comply with federal law. For Launhardt, to comprehend what happened on May 2 was to dissect what had led to the mind-set that had everyone in the district asking the same thing: What can burn in a hardrock mine? But there was also one other question on Launhardt’s mind: Why was the smoke so toxic?
It didn’t take long for him to find some answers. The USBM had recently sent two ventilation experts to Big Creek, first in November of the previous year, and then a follow-up a couple weeks before the fire. Launhardt believed the USBM should have recognized the potential for a short circuit of the mine’s ventilation system, which ultimately led to poisonous outtake air being pumped in with fresh, breathable intake air. They had been through Sunshine at the exact location where the exhaust airway intersected with the old workings, and had seen firsthand the ventilation fans that were in place upstream from those mined-out vein structures. They’d walked right past the leaking bulkheads. They’d seen it all and never remarked about it. They’d never said, Hey, Sunshine, move the fans downstream from 09, so that if a fire ever occurs in those bulkheads, the smoke and gas will be blown out of the mine—not back through it.
Everyone knew that Sunshine’s ventilation system was completely inadequate. The deeper the working levels, the hotter the temperature and the greater the need for enhanced air movement. The dead-end stopes with dangerous gases or low oxygen levels were found below 4800. The USBM knew that, and recommended in its preliminary report that the company straighten out and enlarge sections of the exhaust airway on 3400 to allow greater airflow.
