"I say, hey if you needed a job, and there was nothing else around, and you were not going to school, where were you going to go?"

Bob McAllister comes from a mining background; he will be the first to tell you it is no fun, and that mining is not for everyone. He went into mining because he needed a job, and at the time, logging was shut down.

Bob’s Story

“I was seventeen years old when I started mining. I needed a job and though I had always worked in the logging industry, it was shut down when I first went into mining.

I started at Tsable River down behind Buckley Bay; I was there for a year. My uncle was killed in the mine on a Wednesday afternoon shift, and we buried him on a Monday in Cumberland, and I did not go to work that next week. When my grandmother said to me ‘well son, when are you going back to work?’, I said, ‘I am not going back down Tsable River mine, I am going to quit,’ and she said, 'well you are not going to lie around here all day.’ She was a Scottish woman, tough as nails, my Grandma, Janet McAllister. I went to the No. 8 and was there until it closed, February 1952 or 1953.

“I was never a digger; I was always on the haulage. In No.8 mine, it was all longwall, it was only about four feet tall, all the guys wore kneepads; they were working on their knees all the time. The way it works is - when you are young and stupid, you start with this job, there may be five or six young kids working in the mine who always hung out together. All my uncles thought we were crazy young guys. But we did not see those guys when we were working; they had different jobs, like running hoist, or riding rope, or something like packing timber in the No.8