Life Underground Episode 15 - Family Ties
Life Underground Episode 15 - Family Ties
This is Life Underground and I’m Clark Grant. Many of the working men we’ve profiled on this program who spent time in the mines of Butte came from large Catholic families. Many of the stories of old Butte center on the tight-knit neighborhoods that sprung up around the mineyards. Within each of those neighborhoods was a group of families. And often at the head of those families was a matriarch, a strong woman who held the family together and kept the household going.
On today’s show, we focus on two unusually large families that were among the thousands of households within the mining metropolis of Butte. We look at sacrifice, motherhood, and stories of joy and tragedy in raising families on the Butte hill. Stay with us.
Virginia Salazar, known as Gin, has roots in Washington state. We interviewed her in the living room of her small house on Granite Street, the very same house in which she raised her 15 kids. Gin is herself now a great grandmother, but her grandparents came from the Yakima area, and that’s where she was born. When she was a child, they left Washington for Norris, Montana, not far from Butte, and Gin arrived there with her mom and dad in 1939, where he went to work at the Boaz mine.
[Virginia Salazar]
Virginia Salazar and the family had moved from Norris to Pony and eventually Harrison, and after high school she got a job as a waitress in a busy coffee shop in West Yellowstone, making $5 a day serving at a 17-seat counter for smokejumpers, tourists and telephone operators.
While we were talking, one of her daughters brought some soup by and we chatted for a while as the recording continued in Gin’s living room.
[Virginia Salazar]
Before we go into more about Max Salazar, who together with Gin would have one of the largest families on West Granite Street, I wanted to ask a bit more about her work in the hospital.
[Virginia Salazar]
When Virginia Salazar says, all the kids were raised here, she gestures to her 900 square foot home on West Granite street that we were sitting in for the interview. After her marriage to Max Salazar, thus began her journey as a mother of 15 children, but of course it wasn’t always easy, and there was a bit of trepidation at the beginning. Max already had a child, so Gin was tasked with motherhood from day one.
[Virginia Salazar]
Today on Life Underground we’re talking about large Butte families. We’re going to stick with Virginia Salazar for a bit longer, and then hear about another oversized Butte family. Looking around at Gin’s house as we spoke in her living room, I began to get a sense of the serious challenge of raising 15 children. I tried to get a glimpse into what a typical day in the Salazar household might have been like.
[Virginia Salazar]
Gin’s husband Max had a long career in mining, unions, and eventually as the State Mine Inspector. He’s passed on, and nowadays the house is a lot quieter than it once was.
[Virginia Salazar]
That’s Virginia Salazar, reflecting on her husband Max Salazar, and her life as the head of a 17-person household on West Granite Street in Butte. As a matriarch of that family, she continues to help raise her grandkids and great grandkids, and at the time of this program’s production is still going strong on Granite Street in the house they bought all those years ago.
Stay with us, when we come back, we’ll turn to the story of the Rice family and speak with Irene Scheidecker, whose mother and father had 16 children, narrowly beating out Gin Salazar’s 15. This is Life Underground.
Irene Rice-Scheidecker grew up in Butte and was one of 16 kids. Ellen Crain interviewed Irene about her family at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives shortly after Irene retired from there.
[Irene Scheidecker]
Irene Rice-Scheidecker is talking about the origins of her mother and father’s relationship, and next describes examples of day-to-day life in a family of 16 children. Ellen Crain continues with the interview.
[Irene Scheidecker]
The Rice family stories are numerous, though we’re nearly out of time on today’s episode looking at large Butte families and the ties that bind them and this community together. We didn’t get to the tales of holidays in the Rice household, or the fact that the family owned and operated S&L Ice Cream in Butte for many years. To follow up, you can hear the complete conversation between Ellen Crain and Irene Rice-Scheidecker on our website, verdigrisproject.org.
The very fabric of a community such as Butte was once built on these large, often Catholic families that comprised the various arenas of life in this mining camp. From the fathers working underground on the hill to the children in the classrooms and pews of the parish churches, each of these large Butte families animated the foundational institutions of this city. And though the makeup of families and community is vastly different today, that spirit of resilience is still alive in the tight-knit community of Butte.
I hope you enjoyed this look at family life in the old days of Butte, Montana. I’m Clark Grant and this is Life Underground. Thanks for listening.