Episode 3 - Aili Goldberg

Finn Town in Butte, Montana

Welcome to Mining City Reflections where we illuminate the history of Butte, Montana through the stories and observations of 20th century women who lived there. I’m your host, Marian Jensen. The oral history collection in the Butte Archives has preserved the personal reminiscences of such women. In vivid detail they bring to life the challenges and achievements of the boom to bust town.

During the first half of the last century, more than 20 ethnic groups sought a new life in the city. By 1917, the Finnish population had jumped to 3,000 as Butte offered the highest industrial wage in the country. But the Finnish language created barriers. With a mother tongue that few others spoke and English equally difficult to learn, the immigrants gravitated to the east side of the city and Finn Town was born.

In this segment Aili Goldberg, reminisces about her Finnish immigrant mother, Mary Maki, and their life in Butte. Her recollections are documented in an oral history recorded by Professor Mary Murphy in 1980. A detailed glimpse of the city, particularly its boarding houses, comes to life.

“Of course I lived on the East Side all my life. There were lots of boarding houses. I know I was never afraid to walk anywhere; you’d meet all kinds of drunks walking down the street but nobody ever bothered you.”

Mary Maki, Aili’s mother, had immigrated at age 16 from Vaasa, Finland to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where she married a Finnish miner and had three children. Mary’s husband died in a mine accident when she was 25, so she moved her family to Butte because she had heard women could find decent work. She found a job as a cleaner and then a cook in a boarding house.

“Mother cooked all the time. And that’s where we had our meals, wherever mother worked. We would have our meals there because that’s one thing she wanted to be sure that we had a hot meal, being as she was gone all day.”

Many immigrant miners were single, having left their families at home, with the intention of returning with the money they saved. Such men needed food and lodging at a reasonable rate which led to the era of Butte’s boarding houses. By 1916 Butte had 53 such houses. The legendary Riipi House, which Mary Maki would one day run, provided more than three hundred meals a day from morning until the last shift ended at the mine and the bars supposedly closed.

“We lived in a little house, a little 3-room house. We didn’t ever want. One of the boarding houses that mother worked in was really quite a walk for her every morning. And that was seven days a week; there was no six days (five days we’re talking now). And no eight hours; you worked until you were through.”

The boarding houses served an international clientele though Irish, Serbian and Finnish miners dominated the East side. The melting pot of immigrant adults meant children like Aili had to learn English at school.

“My mother never spoke a word of English, not a word. In fact, I didn’t either when I started the 1st grade. But it wasn’t that unusual because it seemed like all the rest of us were in the same boat. We were the first generation and the language was spoken at home; we didn’t speak English at home.”

Throughout high school Aili and her brothers worked to help support the family. By 18 Aili joined her mother to work at the boarding house. Despite feeding two hundred hungry miners a day, seven days a week, without benefit of running water or refrigeration, the boarding house meals were legendary. Served family style with a steady stream of refills, 3 times a day, miners paid a fixed price of seven dollars a week. In the Finnish Houses this also included a meal at 2AM when the night shift ended at the mine. The holiday menus were even more elaborate.

“Christmas was always the time for your turkey and your cranberries and your pumpkin pies. It was all very festive, and it was very much so in demand. I mean, a lot of people came and ate Thanksgiving dinner; they didn’t even fix it at home. They came with their families.”

The buckets the miners took to work for their mid-day meal was another gargantuan job at the boarding house.

“Ohhh, the buckets! Of course you have to know about the buckets. Different men wanted different sandwiches and of course, come Friday it was fish day. It was just a matter of remembering who didn’t eat meat on Friday. It had to be cheese, or some men wanted a jelly sandwich. I couldn’t see that for a sandwich, or an egg or something. Who had milk, or who had buttermilk, or who had coffee? Cream and no sugar or sugar and cream? Yeah.”

The boarding houses employed cooks, dishwashers, and waitresses, all of whom were women. But there was always one man charged with among other things, the unique job of making salt bags.

“He used to go down and help peel potatoes and he’d go and sweep out the men’s sitting room and pick up the papers and empty the ashtrays. There were spittoons that had to be picked out. He stayed there and you paid him a little bit. He would be glad to do it for his meals and stuff. And he’d make salt bags. That was something else you used to have in a bucket. You used to take a little piece of wax paper, just a little tiny square. And you made a little funnel and you filled it with salt for the men’s buckets. You had to have a lot of these made the the men who wanted salt in there.”

The boarding house-sitting rooms and front porches became a place for political discussion. The Finnish miners often carried their socialist leanings to the new country, and frequently felt a greater allegiance to them than the church. While Mary Maki did not necessarily approve of the politics, Aili and the other children enjoyed their holiday celebrations.

“And then we had what we called the Finnish Hall, which was a cross-section again with the Finnish people. You either belonged to a church or you belonged to this group of people. And it was really - we always called them Wobblies, my mother did. They were IWW, Industrial Workers of the World. They would have big doings, always, for Christmas. There would always be a Christmas play for children and a dance afterwards, and there was presents for all the children. Mother never approved of it too much.”

Despite the family’s hard work and long hours, the Maki’s lives were not without adventure. By the late 30’s they’d pooled their savings and bought a car.

“Mother made her first trip back East with our first secondhand car, which was a 1929 Chevy. We bought it in the late 30s. We went back East and mother went back and seen her brother for the first time. I was almost 18 years old then. There were six people in a small car with our luggage. They used to have the small running boards and a rack on the front with windshield wipers that didn’t work. You tied a string and one pulled on one side and the other on the other side [laughter].”

Aili’s days on the east side overlapped with Butte’s bootlegging era. Not surprisingly, the Mining City took a wide-open approach to the production and distribution of illegal liquor.

“Oh yes, the done it pretty much in the open. It seemed like every other house has somebody who was bootlegging, you know. Some sold the liquor in the house and some sold by bottles. You went to the door and got your bottle and that was it. They didn’t want you in; there was a lot of them. But a lot of them had them at home, just people in and out making merry. Single people, mostly, single men going in and out. You didn’t find married people mixing with it.”

After high school graduation, and working in the boarding house for 8 years, Aili finally married Clarence Goldberg, the son of Swedish immigrants who ran a dairy.

“So I met him, he delivered milk to us when I was 16, but I never knew I was gonna get married to him. But they ranched and they were in the ranching business. Although, he’s a native and he was born here in Butte. His folks were immigrants from Sweden and I met him in the boarding houses. He was working; he worked in the mines sometimes in the winter times and when there wasn’t that much to do, he’d go home to the ranch on the weekends to help feed stock.”

Like many immigrant parents, the Goldbergs worked hard to provide a better future for their children. Their son, William, became a geophysicist. The nearly thirty-year span of boarding house operations came to an end after World War II. By then Mary Maki, was running the Riipi Boarding House. But the floating population of single miners had been replaced by families who created their own homes. The boarding houses were no longer necessary.

Aili continued to work in the restaurant business while her mother, after a part time stint as an office cleaner, finally retired. With Aili’s help, Mary Maki learned enough English to become an American citizen and continued to live in Finn Town until the Anaconda Company bought her out to make way for its pit mine. Her final years were spent living with her daughter’s family. She died at age 86, having never remarried.

At age 76, when asked what growing up on the east side meant to her, Aili said:

“It was the best part of my life, living on the East ride. I wouldn’t change the home I have today. We’re living in a little three-room house down on East Broadway. Neighbors were neighbors. Everybody shared and everybody was pulling for each other.”