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In A Room for the Summer, Fritz Wolff takes the reader on a
memorable journey into the rough-and-tumble world of hardrock
mining, recounting his experiences both above and below ground as
an apprentice engineer during the late 1950s.In June 1956, at the
age of eighteen, Wolff went to work for the Bunker Hill Company in
Kellogg, Idaho, in the Coeur d'Alene region. Arriving in a tired
1939 Chevy coupe, with about twenty dollars in his pocket, Wolff
spent three college summers working for Bunker Hill. He learned
firsthand the pleasures of camaraderie with fellow workers and the
dangers of working underground. Today the hardrock mining industry
is all but forgotten. The Bunker Hill Company is known, not because
it produced 430 million ounces of silver and not because it
provided a living for thousands of families for more than a
century, but because it is one of the largest EPA superfund sites.
Wolff does not idealize the mining industry; for many workers the
conditions were nightmarish. But in spare, lyrical prose, he evokes
the intrinsic goodness of a simpler time, when hardworking folks
went about their business with courage, humor, and lots of
gumption.
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