“Mr. Cope the policeman, coached the boys’ basketball team. He said, ‘if there is any fighting to be done, I will do it!’ so there was never any trouble! Our baseball team always won because they had the best pitcher, I was the catcher. Cumberland was the best at men’s soccer because Canadian Collieries put former soccer players on the payroll to stack the team!

“When I was fourteen, I went to work on top at No. 5 mine picking table, picking rocks out of the coal, and in 1928, when I was fifteen I went underground. I took empty coal cars down the 3000 foot slope into the mine and brought the full ones up. This was called riding rope. My mother did not have much to say about my becoming a miner, because her father and her father’s father were miners back in Scotland. Who knows how many generations…..way back. My dad was a miner, and his dad was also a miner, he was one of the men who lost their lives in the No. 1 mine.

“At one point, wages were only four dollars and twenty-two cents a day, and the miners had to buy their own coal or burn wood. It cost three dollars and twenty-five cents a day for a long tonne of coal and one dollar to have a couple of teamsters deliver it.

“My favourite memory is of meeting my wife, Mattie Price. She was born in Wales and came to Canada when she was ten. Her parents thought money grew on trees here! Well, the family eventually wound up in Cumberland and her dad worked in the mine. I met her on the front street, Dunsmuir, and just started talking to her, and I really liked her. Well, I guess she really liked me too! I married my hon’ on Valentine’s Day 1936, had a son, Bob, two beautiful daughters, Pat and Judy and we shared sixty seven happy years together. Both our daughters were May Queens.”