John Emmet Murphy, Miner & Historian

Oral History Transcript of John Emmet Murphy

Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview Date: October 25th, 2019
Location: Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives
Transcribed by Clark Grant, October 2022

[General chatter & setup prior to interview beginning]

[00:03:22]

Aubrey Jaap: So alright John, are we ready to get started?

John E. Murphy: Sure.

Jaap: Alright. It's October 25th, 2019. John Murphy. Would you get started - you've done some great preparations - do you wanna get started on your father's side of the family and we can kind of start rolling through that and tell me how they arrived here?

Murphy: Sure. I'd be glad to. Our association with Butte started in the late 1880s before Montana was a state. And my great-great-grandfather came over from Ireland. A couple years ago, I had the opportunity to - my wife and I went to a family reunion back in Minnesota, it was. And then after that, a cousin of mine, a Murphy cousin from Iowa that we just met a couple years ago - he took me up to the upper peninsula in Michigan to a town called Rockland where they lived. And we went way out in the boonies to this real overgrown cemetery called Irish Hollow. And we went out there, and out in the middle of this jungle, here was this big obelisk and it said ‘Murphy’ on it. And it had a black cast iron fence around it. And inside were the graves of my grandmother - great, great grandmother and grandfather Cornelius, or they called him Curly Con Murphy. And his wife was Catherine Harrington. And on their tombstones it said that they were natives of Castletownbere, County Cork, Ireland. And they also had - a lot of their children were buried in this plot. And the plot was starting to kind of cave in and the fence had been vandalized a little bit, but my Iowa cousin Pat Murphy was working on getting it restored through the local museum. But Pat has since passed on, so I don't know where that project is.

But anyway, that was kind of where we started. I tried to locate where they came over and where they landed, but the earliest thing that I can find is when they were in Virginia in 1855 - that's when my great-grandfather was born. And what they were doing there - I've looked around to see if there was mining because they were - Curly Con was a miner. There was some limited mining around there, but there was also a lot of turbulence at the time regarding the Irish in that area. They'd actually burned down an Irish town there because there was an outbreak of yellow fever that they thought the Irish were responsible for because they were vermin. And so in order to get rid of the vermin, they burned the town down. And it was right about that time that all of a sudden they showed up in Michigan.

And there was a place there called the Minesota mine, m-i-n-e-s-o-t-a, because somebody had dropped the N, the second N in there. And that's where - I think it was my great-grandfather's sister [who] was born there. And then they started showing up in Rockland. So my great-grandfather grew up in Rockland, and then as family legend has it, there was some kind of an altercation in Rockland when he was a young man and somebody wound up hurt or deceased or something like that. And my grandfather left town and went to Canada, and then he went across Canada. He was a blacksmith. He had worked in the mines in Rockland and he - the mines in Rockland were underground copper mines. And so he worked on the railroad till he got over Montana, and then he dropped down into Montana to Marysville and then wound up at a little tiny town up there called Vestal. Vestal no longer exists.

But a couple years ago, I tried to track it down and finally through DNRC, one of their people up there knew where it was because they were doing a reclamation project and he was interested in history. So he met me in Marysville and he took me up to Vestal and he showed me the Penobscot mine, which is where my great grandfather worked. And Vestal now is just an open field, but you could see these flat spots, little indentations where the privies were. And you could find pieces of pottery. Found an old shoe.

Jaap: Oh, fun.

[00:09:17]

Murphy: And I found some metallurgical brick that they used to make the kilns for heating the iron and stuff, because he was a blacksmith. And I found some formed metal there. So I have those as souvenirs. They could have been touched by my grandfather, or great-grandfather, 130 years ago.

And so anyway, the Penobscot mine gave out. Oh. But first, while he was in  Vestal, he and a bunch of the Irish boys up there formed a group, the first Montana group of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. And J.D. Murphy or Jerry was the first president of the AOH in Montana. So then the mine played out and he moved to Butte. And in Butte there was - or not in Butte, actually in Walkerville - they always made that distinction. There was a boarding house up there called the Sullivan boarding house. And the Sullivan boarding house was run by Margaret Sullivan and her brother Eugene. And so he, my great grandfather, moved in there and he worked in the Lexington Mine, which is just across the street from where they were up there. And so it turns out, a couple years later, Jerry wound up marrying the proprietor's daughter, Margaret's daughter, Honora, or Nora, she became known as. Their wedding certificate shows that they were married in Walkerville, Montana Territory, because Montana still wasn't a state yet.

So anyway, they got married and then they moved to a house, and it's still standing - it's up here on Pacific Street. It's just a couple blocks up the hill from the Archives here. And they started setting up housekeeping and - I think my grandfather and - I think there were four, five kids all together, but one of them died. But they were all born in that house on Pacific Street. And then, in the meantime, I guess while he was still living in the boarding house, he started the second chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and they built a hall - I don't know if they built it or whether they moved into one that was on the same block as the boarding house. And so two years, two or three years after Nora and Jerry were married, that whole block burned to the ground. The boarding house - there was a Chinese laundry. There were a couple other stores and the AOH Hall. And it happened, I guess, in the middle of the night. And the miners that were going to work in the mines up there fought the fire on the way to work, but they were unsuccessful and the whole block went down.

And so in order to thank the miners in the morning, they had a party and they - as the article in the newspaper reported [on] the fire said they were passing out buckets of whiskey.

Jaap: Buckets of whiskey. [laughs]

Murphy: Yeah. Except that the whiskey was full of fight. And the whole thing erupted into what they called the Donnybrook Fair. And they said these miners were settling old scores and new scores. And by the time the thing settled down, a lot of the miners - as they put it, the language in the newspapers at the time, it's very colorful - they said many of the eyes of the miners were in mourning, which refers to when you were in mourning back in those days - you wore a black arm band around your arms. So anyway, that's kind of an aside. It starts another whole chain of events - where they went after the block burned down.

But anyway, my great-grandfather and by now, my grandfather and his brother and sister were born and living in that house. And my grandfather, as he came of age, he went to work as a miner and a timekeeper and a clerk. He also went to the School of Mines when it had just been created. It was just Main Hall at the time, up on the hill. And my father said that grandpa was smarter than all the professors, so he decided he couldn't learn anything up there. So he quit. And so eventually he wound up being the paymaster for the Anaconda Company. Now the pay office for the Anaconda Company - we can see it from here. It's just across the street. It's that pink building over there. And my father said that grandpa, as we called him, could remember the working number for every man on the hill at the time.

Jaap: Wow.

Murphy: So anyway, his brothers and sisters went on to - his brother Jeremiah Daniel Murphy, or Uncle JD as we called him - he went on to become some kind of big wig on the sixth floor of the Hennessy building. He worked for a guy who was a vice president named Hobbins, I think.

Jaap: J.R. Hobbins, I think. Yeah.

Murphy: Yeah, and whenever he shows up, he's listed as the secretary to J.R. Hobbins and evidently, that was some kind of big deal.

Jaap: I think Hobbins was maybe president of the company for a while.

Murphy: Oh.

Jaap: I'd have to double check that.

Murphy: That'd be interesting to check out.

Jaap: He has a big name.

Murphy: Yeah. But anyway, he bore the subtitle of Hobbins. Well anyway, then my grandfather - when he came of age and stuff, he met my grandmother through the church choir. Well, he didn't sing, but she was singing and he kind of became enamored with her. And so they got together and fell in love and eventually they wound up being married. I think it was in 1906, across the street here, at St. Lawrence.

[00:17:30]

And she came from - her last name was Sullivan - and she came. And we got lots of Sullivans going on here. We got the boarding house mom of Nora [who] was a Sullivan. And my grandma, she was a Sullivan. She came from a family of 13 kids. Her father had been married previously and had three boys by that woman, and she died. And then my grandmother's mother, my great-grandmother -  her name was Ann Pendergast, and she married a Leahey. And when she was married to Leahey, she had three boys. And then when she married Patrick Dennis Sullivan or P.D., they had - was it six more - six more kids. And so all together they wound up - I don't know if that got that right or not - the math might not work, but I know it was 13, including my grandmother. My grandmother I think was the oldest one of that bunch. But also in that bunch, she had three sisters.

But it's really confusing to sort out the family history because both of those people - before they got married - were using the Irish naming convention, you know, where you name your first child after the father, and then the second one, you know. It's really regimented as to how they were named. And then when they got married, they followed the same convention, so there's like two or three Jacks, there's a couple Pats, there's a couple Timothys. And there's Big Jack, Little Jack - and they're all mixed together.

But anyway, her mom got sick - my grandmother's mom got sick - and the dad couldn't handle raising all those kids. And he was a miner. And so he bundled ‘em up and sent some of them up to Sacred Heart Academy in Missoula. And Sacred Heart Academy was run by the Sisters of Charity of Providence. And it was kind of a boarding school/orphanage/parochial school. It served a lot of different people. And anyway, they were up there for a while. I think it was the eldest daughter - now my grandmother wasn't the eldest. She stayed home and helped take care of her dad and the boys that were remaining there, cooking and cleaning and stuff, because it was - [I’m] not being sexist - it was just the woman's job back then. The guy's jobs were to work in the mines and the women were to keep the house and keep 'em fed and stuff.

So she stayed home and eventually, I think the mother died and my grandmother and the other kids came home. But in the meantime, her three sisters had decided to become nuns of the Sisters of Charity of Providence. So my grandmother was at home taking care of her brothers and her dad and the three nuns went on, or became nuns, and they worked at Sacred Heart Academy and other different places that were run by the sisters.

[00:22:04]

But the oldest one was Mother Lucia. There was Mother Lucia, Sister Margarita, and Sister Mary Dorothy. The oldest one eventually wound up in Great Falls where she started what they called the Great Falls Normal School. Now back then, a normal school was a place where they taught teachers. She was a visionary and she and a Catholic Monsignor set up the College of Great Falls, and she did the normal school. And my dad said she was a brilliant financier. She really understood how to do money and everything, so she was able to put the whole thing together. And then her other two sisters eventually wound up moving up there to the school and teaching and doing other things.

So when my dad was still alive - he died in 2001 - and maybe a year or so before that, we went up to the College of Great Falls and they had a ceremony up there where they were naming one of the halls after the Sullivan Sisters.

Jaap: Oh.

Murphy: And they had a brass plaque there with the pictures of the three sisters and their story. [laughs] This might be an inappropriate story, but my -

Clark Grant: No such thing.

Murphy: My dad - the president of the university gave a talk and the Sister that was in charge of the buildings and stuff gave a talk. And my dad's cousin, Father Joe Pat Sullivan, got up and gave a talk. And then they asked my dad if he wanted to say a few words. So my dad got up and he told the story that I just told you about the four girls and going different paths. He said that the three sisters were real religious and he said, ‘I guess my mother was just a little more…’ and my dad was searching for a word. Dad was not an English major. So I was dying of anticipation of what he was gonna say. He said, ‘I guess my mother was just a little more… promiscuous.’ [laughter] I about fell over and everybody started laughing and I slugged my dad. I said, ‘Watch what you're saying!’ ‘What!’ [laughter]

Jaap: That is really funny.

Murphy: He was a miner. He wasn't a linguist. But anyway, that's the story of the three sisters. That family had a lot of tragedy in it too. A couple of her brothers drowned. One of her brothers, Patrick Q. Sullivan - I was looking him up here at the Archives and I found an article where he'd been murdered during a robbery. I started investigating it and I talked to one of Patrick's descendants who lives down in California. When it said he was murdered during a robbery, it made me think, ‘well, did he get shot because he was the robber or was he a victim?’

But anyway, there was - just over the street here on Woolman, just on the other side of the road from the Archives here, there was a bar, I think it was called Liggins Bar or Liggett's Bar. And he had gone in there late at night asking for one more drink, and so the barkeep obliged him, just to get rid of him, to get him out of the place. So Pat got his drink and then he went in the back room and passed out. Then it came time to close up - this was in the middle of July. I think it was 1910. So it was warm outside, so they just picked Pat up - they took him out in the alley and put him on a boardwalk that was out there. It was warm enough. He just needed to wake up. So anyway, they went back inside and they were closing up and there was a knock on the back door. And this guy comes in with a mask, brandishing a gun, wanting their money.

So the barkeep went over to the till to get the money - and the owner lived across the alley from the bar and he managed to get out and run over to his house and hide what money he had. And he picked up a gun and went back to the bar. He decided, as he was going back to the bar, to fire a shot to draw the police in. So he fired a shot and he heard a moan.

[00:27:57]

And so when he got back to the bar, the thief was gone. So the police showed up and they were doing their investigation, walking back and forth and stepping over poor Patrick in the alley. Then when it got light enough, come to find out that poor old Patrick had been the guy that moaned and he'd been shot accidentally by Liggins. It was through the help of the Archives that I was able to track down the [coroner’s] inquest. They had the inquest here of the whole thing and the whole story. They exonerated Liggins from having any responsibility for the accident, but old Patrick Q is in St. Patrick's now. But anyway, that's an aside.

But then Woolman Street - my grandfather and his new bride, and a bunch of her brothers moved into a house up on Woolman Street, and it's just exactly across from the Original mine up there. I didn't know this until - and here it is, you know, we're standing there watching the Folk Festival and An Ri Ra, and there's their house sitting right there. One time, I think it was in the 1900 census, it listed out everybody and there were 13 people living in that house. I went and measured it out using Google Earth and that was like a 730 square foot house.

Jaap: Gosh.

Murphy: And how they ever managed to do that, I don't know. But in that house - my father's two sisters, my father and his younger brother were born in that house. And then I guess they finally outgrew it because they moved down on South Montana Street to 620. All of these houses are still standing. In fact, I think 620 is up for sale. That had been a Murphy/Sullivan house. It had changed hands about three or four times. My dad said that his dad bought the house about three times, because you know, somebody would die and will it to him or he'd buy it back. I remember going there as a kid and there were big apartment houses on either side of it. Here was this little brick house in the middle and there were houses all up and down that street. It was a pretty middle class type of a neighborhood. Montana Cash Grocery was right across the street. They were right practically on the corner of Platinum and Montana. Dad always told the story that my grandmother would go out at noon and watch for my grandfather, who would be walking down from the pay office. And when she'd see him turn the corner up on Park Street, that's when she'd put the food on the table, so it'd be ready when he got home, so he could eat and get back to work. So that was kind of a significant place for the Murphys.

[00:32:07]

My dad grew up on Montana Street there, and his oldest sister Margaret - she went to the University of Montana. She became a teacher and she taught in Melrose. One of the things I learned in doing some preparation for this talk here was that back in those days, apparently in order to be a teacher, you had to do almost like a student teaching thing and teach in a rural setting. She spent a year in Melrose and then she got married. She married a doctor. His name was Edward Carroll. He was from Montana. And eventually they wound up moving to California and they had five kids. Then his next sister Dorothy - she was the second oldest - she went away and became a nurse. By then, World War II was on, and so she joined the Army Nursing Corps and she wound up in Normandy and landed the day after the invasion started. She was on the beach. My dad said that when she went to Europe, her hair was totally black. When she came back, it was totally white, from the things she had seen.

She had a friend that we met later in Anaconda that was also a nurse that was there, but they didn't want to talk about it. So Dorothy wound up marrying a lieutenant colonel in the Tank Corps, as they called it. They wound up living in California. They had one son and he's still alive and lives down in San Francisco. And then my dad's younger brother, Jerry - he married one of the McGrees from town here, Edda McGree. Her father was Tucker McGree and her mom was Lucy McGree, and they lived down in the 600 block on Main Street. Her mother ran a candy and ice cream store down there. If there’s anybody alive from Butte High at that time, they still remember going in there. And I still remember going in. They had a soda fountain and candy, and it was great. Later, her daughter ran it as a health food store. But anyway, Jerry wound up going into the Army Air Corps and he wound up flying B-25s and he flew in that big military operation in India called the Hump. He always talked about that. I think he got a distinguished flying cross for being in that. Anyway, he married Edda.

Then my dad - he was the third oldest. I gotta take a drink for a second here.

Jaap: Yeah, you're fine.

Jaap: But actually he went to Carroll College first. He graduated from Boys Central or Butte Central Christian Brother High School, whatever you wanna call it. He decided to go to Carroll College. He wanted to be a priest. Dad was pretty religious. He got over there and decided that he - well, he didn't decide - they decided for him that he couldn't learn Latin. So he and Carroll College parted company and dad came back to Butte. Dad was in Helena during that big huge earthquake that they had over there. He had a lot of stories about that. But then he came back and started - he'd been working in the mines, so he went back to working underground. Dad loved to work underground. That scared me to death.

But anyway, he was working in the mines and World War II was going on. If you were working in the mines - copper was - they called it a strategic metal. They needed it for the war effort, so the people that were producing copper were exempt from the draft. So dad couldn't get drafted. And so with his brother and sister both in the military, he finally couldn't stand it anymore. So he quit and enlisted in the Army and he went into the Engineer Corps. He was supposed to be a demolition engineer and then they chose him and sent him to officers training school, which was back at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, which is just outside of Washington, D.C..

And so while he was there and going to school, a lady from Butte, this woman named Helen Lowley [sp?], was working back there too and she called him up and she knew he was there and said, ‘Do you know that Rita Kelly is in Washington too?’ And dad said, ‘No, I didn't know that.’ So she said, ‘Well, I'm gonna have a dinner and have you and Rita over.’ Meanwhile, she had called Rita and gave her the same story. So she put together this dinner with my father and mother. Anyway, they got back together. They'd known each other since third grade maybe. It was never a real friendly type of thing. They were all kind of doing things as a group back then.

So anyway, they got together and after a while, they fell in love and got married. They were married in Fort Belvoir the day after my dad got his commission in the Army as a second lieutenant. They were married the next day. Like my dad used to say, ‘nine months and four hours later, you came along.’ [laughter] Don't put that on the air. [laughter]

Jaap: Your dad seems like a pretty funny guy.

Murphy: My dad was - he had kind of that accidental Irish humor. [laughter] But anyway, my mother was in Washington D.C. because she was in the WAVES, which was the first time that women had been allowed into the Navy.
And so she was a first class yeoman and she worked in the Pentagon for the signal core.

[00:40:42]

But anyway, after they got married, she got out of the Navy and then she came back to Butte to live with her parents, and my dad got assigned to the Army of Occupation, they called it. It was just - they got married in December of ‘45, so it was just after the war ended. So dad got assigned to Germany, and I think he went over there like in March of ‘46, and so he was over there. He was the officer in charge of a whole company of African Americans. Back then, they used to segregate the troops. It was a transportation group and he was in charge of the whole gang. He had some fabulous stories to tell. He loved working there.

One of his favorite people in the whole company was this guy whose name - he was from New York - named McKinley Murphy. My dad got quite a kick out of that. Fifty years later, after the internet was created, my sister was home. They googled him and got a phone number and dad called ‘em up. They always used to have kind of a joke between 'em. McKinley Murphy was wondering if Emmett Murphy ever found the Northwest passage. So when dad called him up, McKinley Murphy answered and Dad asked him if he was in Germany after the war. He said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘I wanted to tell you I found the Northwest passage!’ And the guy goes, ‘Lieutenant Murphy!’ [laughter]

So anyway, he had a lot of great stories like that. And also while he was over there, they insisted that in this little town that he was living in - the occupying soldiers lived in the - or the supervision - would live in the Burgermeister’s house, which was the mayor's house. Dad didn't like that at all because it was displacing a family. So he got to know the Burgermeister and his wife and all the kids - dad was a very much a people person. He got to know ‘em all well. Dad got out of the army and he came back to the States and he traveled from Europe to the United States on a ship. Then from where they landed, wherever that was, to Butte, he took the train - and this was all in one shot. He got home to Butte the night that I was born. So he was so tired that my mother got out of her bed - she was at the old St. James Hospital there on, was it Idaho Street? Right below Butte Central. So she got out of the bed and let my dad sleep in the bed because he was pooped. She sat in the chair and labored. And my dad's brother was there - the one that had been the flyer in India, in Burma. So he held my mom's hand and coached her through the labor and dad slept. Anyway, I came along and then dad and his wife and Jerry and Edda - they all were living in Silver Bow homes because they had built the Silver Bow homes for the homecoming servicemen for World War II. So the place was full of service men and baby boomers. I mean - that's where all the kids were. So anyway, my dad and Jerry started going to - back then it was the School of Mines. So they were going to school and working in the mines at that time.

And they both - two years later, they got degrees in metallurgy with the mineral dressing option. My dad kept working for the Anaconda Company and Edda, which was his brother's wife, was really afraid of Butte because within the last few years, there'd been a strike and the strikers had gone after one of the supervisor's homes and vandalized it. And this supervisor’s daughter was about to be married and they took her wedding gown and stuff and ripped it to shreds and threw paint on it and everything. So Edda was really fearful that the same thing would happen because Jerry was probably gonna wind up being a supervisor because of his degree and stuff. So she insisted they move out of Butte. So Jerry went into the aluminum industry and moved all around the town, or I mean all around the country. Then they lived in Mexico for a while and they wound up having five kids.

[00:47:19]

But Edda - when I was - actually, when I was writing up some notes here, she just died last week. She was 97. She was quite a feisty young lady. She was only about maybe five feet tall. Like I said, she had five kids and each of those kids when they were born were over 10 pounds. They all went on to - they had three boys and two girls and one of the boys played for Louisiana, LSU. And one of them played Northwestern and the third one played for Iowa, I think. So they were all Big 10 schools, so they were big guys. But I still remember her getting right in their face and wiggling her little finger and these great big guys would just jump to attention and do whatever she wanted. [laughter]

But she was the one that - we visited her a couple years ago. She and her daughter lived in Chicago. Some of her kids went into the automotive industry. The two daughters became engineers and they worked for 3M. They were some of the first women engineers. Edda had all of these stories that she'd tell us about Butte and the people she knew. Actually, she knew my mother's family quite a bit because she worked for one of my great uncles for a long time. So she knew my mother and her family long before she really knew my dad's family. So she was kind of a support group along with my mother because you got these two guys coming back from World War II and getting married and having kids and trying to go to school and work in the mines at the same time. And she said, ‘those Murphy boys, they were a little hard to control.’ [laughter] So she and my mom would get together and devise strategies on what they should do and hug each other when things didn't go right and everything. So that was real helpful.

[00:50:08]

So anyway, I guess the next in line after my dad would be me. I was born at St. James and then we moved out on Florence Street. Well, we moved to the Silver Bow Homes and then from the Silver Bow Homes, we moved to Florence Street. Right where Wayrynen-Richards [Funeral Home} is now, there was a two story house there and it was kind of just the neighborhood. Gribbons Plumbing and Heating was across the street and Clark's Park was on the other side of the street. We moved in there when I was four. And I still remember there was a great big ballpark there in Clark's Park, a baseball park [with a] great big wooden structure with a fence around it. When I could, I'd sneak over and peek through the knotholes and the fence and see what was going on with the baseball. Then one night, there was a huge fire and I remember going out with my dad and watching the whole stadium burn down. I guess that was my first big Butte conflagration where - after that, dad and I would always follow fires. Whenever we'd see a fire, we'd go. As I said when I was talking to you earlier, that's kind of a Butte thing too, chasing fires.

Jaap: Mm-hmm.

Murphy: My wife couldn't believe it. She said, ‘You're still chasing fires!’ Whenever I see a glow in the sky, I gotta go see what it is. It was kind of a great social thing in Butte too. You get down and everybody would stand around and watch the firemen work and give a critique on what they were doing and what they were doing wrong. [laughs] You know, it's Butte. So I remember going to the Penney's fire and the old library and the Winter Garden Bowling Alley. That was that time when there was kind of an active arsonist in town doing some urban redevelopment.

But after - when I was about four, my little sister Jeanette came along and then the house was too small, so Dad took us out Jeanette and mom and me. We went out to North Drive and dad showed us this two story house that was being constructed out there and told us he was gonna buy it for us. There was nothing across the street. There was a fence and a horse pasture and horses out there grazing, and a couple of these houses under construction. So we moved out there and that's where the family lived for 50 years until my dad died in 2001. Then it took me about five years to sell the house after that. We lived out there, and again, it was all of these young families. There were kids all over the place out there. It was really great. The Sullivans were living next door. All up and down the street - then I started going to St. Ann's School, which was a block away. And again, we hit the baby boom out there. The Sisters at Charity of the BVMs - I think there were 60 kids in our class. One teacher, a Sister, no aides - but you've probably heard this before. Those nuns used to be totally in control and they would snap their fingers. Or if you're in church, they wouldn't snap their fingers so much, but they'd rattle their rosary beads and it was like a rattlesnake. Everybody would just shut up [laughs] and snap to attention. They had discipline down to a fine art.

But I went to school - and then we’d go to church over there on Sunday and there were all of these really big families there. There were Murphys and Sullivans and Orozottis and Bartolettis and the Keanellys were there. All the Butte names you hear all the time around here. We only had five kids, so we were kind of a medium sized family. So then from there I went on to Butte Central. While it was strictly the Christian Brothers, the Irish Christian Brothers and a few priests that would wander in that were teachers up there - totally segregated from the girls, who were over in Girls Central. Some of the Brothers used to kid and make fun of the nuns over there too. It was kind of a change because after being at St. Ann's - that was mixed. There were girls and boys.

Going to Central and not having any girls there was kinda different. But I remember dad, when I was in eighth grade - he took me Uptown. It was the night before the Butte High-Butte Central game. It used to be kind of a wild time and they were having some kind of a snake dance through Uptown Butte. I think we were on the corner of Montana and Park, and things got outta control. As I remember it, the firemen were using fire hoses to try to break things up and the kids overtook the firemen and started cutting up the hoses, so the police moved in and started using tear gas. So we got stuck in a doorway and got some tear gas. So my dad said, ‘Well, I just wanted to show you this. This is what high school's all about!’ So I was a little concerned about that. But the following year, because of the trouble, they had got the students together from both schools and they kind of formed an alliance and calmed things down and figured out a way where they could celebrate without burning the town down.

That was one of my vivid memories at the time. Then after that, there never was much trouble. And now the Butte High and Butte Central kids are buddies for the most part. We graduated and a lot of us went to [Montana] Tech and intermingled. Some of the people from Butte High and from Butte Central got married. So a number of years ago, they decided that - instead of having individual class reunions and having people drive from one reunion site to the other reunion site after they'd been drinking a while - that wasn't a good idea, so they merged the two of them since we all knew each other anyway. So now we have joint reunions and it's hard to remember now as to who went where. You just all kinda came together.

But still, the Butte High-Butte Central football game and stuff - it was kind of tradition. It wasn't really malicious vandalism, but we'd go over and try to avoid the Butte High kids that were guarding Naranche Stadium, because they'd guard the picture of the Bulldog there. Through all kinds of commando means we'd manage to get through and throw jars of paint on the Bulldog. I think the way we didn't get detected is because the kids that were supposed to guard the Bulldog were over throwing paint on the Central building. [laughter]

Then Monday would come around and we'd all have to go clean off our respective buildings, but we'd do it every year. But when I was - I think I was a junior in high school - I started working at the Columbia Gardens. The Columbia Gardens was - the people that worked there were generally kids of Anaconda Company employees. I think my dad was foreman down at the Berkeley Pit at the time. So I started working up at the Gardens and Ted Beach was my boss up there. Ted was a prince of a guy. You’ve probably heard stories about him. He and his wife Sis lived in a little house right up on the Gardens there. I got to know all the people that worked up there. There was - Lou and Joe were in the greenhouse and they'd raise the geraniums and all the pansies and everything during the winter. Then summer or spring would show up and we'd get outta school and the working crew would get up there and we’d go out and plant the gardens there.

There was - let's see - Mike Hannifin, Henry Lusee, Rich Collins, Bill Bugni. I don't know - there was just a bunch of us. And Jerry Bugni was up there too. Jerry, I don't know, you might have run into him before. He was a brilliant guy, but right after he graduated from college and got his CPA, he was in a car wreck down here and it affected his head so he couldn't work. But he still was smart as a whip, but he was just an average worker up at the Gardens. Then I worked on the grounds crew, they called it. Our job was to do the planting and trimming and pick up the garbage and empty the garbage cans every morning and clean the latrines and generally maintain the grounds.

[01:02:55]

Then the other crew was the crew that ran the rides. One of my favorite jobs was in the springtime. We'd go down and - during the winter they'd take the horses off of the carousel and they'd put 'em in Mrs. Shea's ice cream shop. They'd store ‘em there for the winter. And then in the springtime, they'd bring ‘em back. Well, during the winter, the painter at the Gardens - they call him the Dobber - and Ted Beach said the Dobber could put on three coats at once. He had to put on three coats because he was kind of slow and because he was smoking so much. I think his name was Al Wylander. He was from Finntown. But anyway, I enjoyed putting up the horses.

One of the other fun parts was - they had a crew of girls up there that’d watch the playgrounds and make sure the kids were safe. And I don't know whether - you've probably gone to Clark's Park and seen those big heavy swings down there. Well, if one of those swung and hit you, you'd be toast. So it was their job to make sure nobody walked behind the swings or fell off the slides. It probably wasn't OSHA approved equipment. But anyway, we got to socialize with the girls and the girls' supervisor was Zorca Milanovich. The girls on the playground were Zorca’ girls. Anyway, we got to know them pretty well. Sometimes, we'd go out and party together.

I remember the stars lined up one time and my folks were outta town, so Mike Hannifin and I, and a third unnamed party -because he still lives in Butte [laughs] - went down to the Club 45 in Meaderville and I got introduced to alcohol because they served kids there. Then we went up to the party at the Gardens and the playground group was up there, and all the people from the rides and the grounds grew and Ted and Sis Beach and some of the other adult workers were up there too. So after a while, they left and somebody produced a keg. That was my first experience with a keg and I kind of overdid things and made a fool outta myself. Mrs. Beach found out about it, Ted's wife, and she was quite a feisty lady too. She always walked like she was running away from a fire. She was just really feisty and full of energy. She called me aside a couple days later - she had heard about it and she dressed me down and told me how surprised she was and how disappointed in me she was. That was a life lesson I still remember, and that was probably sixty years ago now. [laughter]

[01:07:00]

But anyway, that was kind of my Gardens experience, except for - I skipped a few things here too. Another thing I used to love to do was to go to the Gardens on Miners Union Day because they would have their big safety contest up there. And I used to love - Dad was really big into safety, and he eventually wound up being the head safety engineer for Anaconda. And anyway, he'd take us up there and we'd watch the contest. I liked it when it was inside, in the Gardens pavilion, the dance hall up there. They had a big wooden floor. They'd have all of these big squares of canvas taped down on the floor and they'd have a name placard by each mine that was participating in front of the different squares. The first aid teams would come out and they had on their brand new blue bib overalls and white shirts - they looked like a million dollars.

They’d get ready to start the contest and somebody would blow the whistle and one of the guys would go out and lay down on the canvas. Then the whistle would blow again and the team captain would open an envelope, and in the envelope was - they call it ‘the problem,’ and that was the description of what had happened to this person. Then they had to figure out what they were gonna do, and then they gathered together their equipment, all their stretchers - it was all older type first aid gear, a lot of splints and that type of thing, triangle bandages. It was state of the art at the time, but nowadays, it'd be pretty antique. They'd blow the whistle the third time and the teams would just rush out onto the floor and they'd slam their stretchers down and they'd slam the splints down. There was this big crashing going on. It was really pretty cool, I thought.

So then they'd start bandaging these people up and they'd get 'em all bandaged up and they'd have to prepare the patient, or the victim, so that he was secure on the stretcher, because the stretcher wouldn't fit sideways in a [mine] cage, to take him to surface. This was supposedly happening in a mine, so they had to secure 'em so that they could set the stretcher vertically, so they could get out. So he had to be secure on there, as well as stopping all of the other bleeding and splinting up broken bones or whatever was going on, or wrapping up their heads. Some of these poor victims look like they really had been in an accident. Then when they were done, they would grab the stretcher and walk off the canvas, turn around, then walk back onto the canvas, indicating that they were done. Then they'd time them as to how long it took 'em to do that.

Then the judges would come out and start checking the bandages, making sure they were applied right, that they were secure, and that the stretcher would be able to be lifted up. They'd award 'em points for time and for effectiveness and a bunch of other stuff. So then they'd give safety awards to the best teams. It was really competitive between the mines as to who would have the best team. It was really important because - it was a contest, but it was - in real life, it was a matter of life and death, and there was a lot of death that went on on the [Butte] Hill.

So anyway, that was the contest and then we’d go outside and all the miners’ kids were out there and they'd have free ice cream and free rides - it was really a madhouse up there, and I wasn't working up there. Later I'd work up there during Miners Union Day. It was a long day because you were constantly pushing out cars on the roller coaster or helping kids stay in line to get on the merry-go-round or the airplanes. But they had free ice cream and I thought that was a really cool thing.

[01:12:43]

They also had other contests up there. They had like drilling contests and mucking contests - but I always liked the first aid one the best because dad was involved with it and he was always coaching teams and stuff to be in the first aid contest. But to him, safety was really personal because he was a supervisor in a lot of the mines on the Hill and he had seen a lot of men hurt. Although there were a lot of men on the hill, there weren't a lot of men in each mine, and he knew 'em all. Dad was a real friendly guy, so he knew all these guys personally. When they got broken up or killed, it really affected him. Sometimes I remember him coming home and being really quiet, and then I could hear him telling my mom that there - ‘so and so, you know so and so - we knew him from such and such. There was a rockfall and he got killed.’ Or ‘he's in the hospital.’ And especially when there was a fatality - that really affected dad. Dad would come home and just sit and be quiet and drink for a long time, just to try to numb the pain.

Later on when I got old enough, he'd tell me what had happened and all the gruesome details about how one of his friends had fallen down a shaft. When you fall down the shaft, the body starts bouncing from side to side and getting ripped apart…they couldn't find this guy's head. Finally they found it in a bucket of cement down on the bottom of the shaft - things like that. I was probably late grade school, maybe high school, when he started telling me this stuff. So that really affected him, and it did his whole life. I mean, he lost some friends.

I think it was in the Badger that he was supposed to go down with them. They were gonna open up a new area of the mine. They went down. I remember the story one way, but I ran into somebody the other day that knew the story and they told it a different way. As I remember, something happened - my dad couldn't go down to inspect with them. This other guy said that he was with these four guys and they had walked in and dad was lagging behind, checking something. They walked in - the people in front of him had walked into what he called a pocket of bad air. Because down in the mines, after they close 'em up for a while, there's still oxidation going on. That's where the acid and stuff comes from in the mines, and it uses up all the oxygen in the air. So if they open up a mine and go walking in there and there isn't adequate ventilation, there's no oxygen to support life. And anyway, these four men collapsed, four of his best supervisor friends - and they all died. Dad was supposed to be with them. He dodged that bullet, but I remember that really affecting him.

One of the guys' names was Ernie Brisbane. I can't remember. I used to know all the names of all his bosses because dad used to bring me to the mines all the time. From the time I was a little kid - I think when I was in grade school - dad was at the Badger. I think he was an assistant foreman or something up there. But he'd go up to line out a shift and he'd take me with him. Then while he was in the office lining up the shift, he'd let me go roam around the mine yard. At the Badger, down at the end of the mine yard, they had a stack of timbers that would go underground to shore up the mines. And hiding in the timber were all these rabbits - they had all kinds of baby rabbits over there. So I’d go down and catch baby rabbits, and when I’d get bored with that, I’d go over - since he was lining out the shift there - it was a change of shift.

Men were coming up and going down in the mine. I'd sit and watch the cages come up with the miners, and then the guys loading up and then going back down. I'd stand and talk to the miners that were all lined up, getting ready to go underground. They were all - most of 'em were dads themselves, so they talked to me and would give me candy and whatever else they had in their buckets. So I did that. Under today's OSHA rules and stuff, that would've been so out of place. I couldn't have gotten within a hundred miles of that mine probably! But that was just life.

Then after the shift was lined out, dad would come out and get me and then he always wanted to go into the engine room, the hoisting house, and talk to the hoisting engineer. I hated that because if you went into the engine room, there was all this huge machinery and it was roaring and there was steam and the drums were going around. It was making huge amounts of noise and it just scared me to death. I’d do anything to get out of going in the engine room. I got to watch the engineer raising and lowering the hoist. Then when we'd finish that, we'd go over and he showed me where the battery room was, where they'd take and charge up the lamps for the men's helmets. They'd get a new battery and lamp every time they go down. Then they bring the old one up and recharge it and they’d use 'em over and over again. I liked that.

[01:20:15]

Or he’d take me into the powder room, which was where they prepared the fuses and the blasting caps and stuff for blasting underground. I like those two better because it was quieter. I wasn't too keen on going into the blasting room because that didn't really look too safe to me, [laughs] being a grade school kid. But when I was in grade school at St. Ann's, I remember as we started school, the first week of school or something, there would be - I can't remember whether it was a fireman or somebody from the Anaconda Company or a policeman [who] would come in. And they'd give us a big talk about blasting caps and show us what they looked like and what the fuse looked like. Then they'd show us gory pictures of what would happen to you if you picked one of these things up and it went off. They were trying to scare us. They did a pretty good job, but once they finished their talk and school got out, everybody went out looking for blasting caps to see if they could find some. Since it was so prevalent in the mines, they'd show up at random places around, all the time. So it wasn't uncommon for kids to find blasting caps. Or, sometimes some of the miners would bring home dynamite and use it for firecrackers on the 4th of July. There was always some very large booms on the 4th of July - most of them were out of town.

But I remember this one time - I think I was a senior in high school - I went everywhere with dad. In looking over, jotting down these memories for our little chat today - it really made me realize how close I was to my dad and how much stuff I did with him. And he always treated me like an adult and just took me along. I mean, who'd let their kid roam around in a mine yard? But I mean, he thought that I could handle it and I could do that, and so he did.

But anyway, one night we were watching the Gillette Friday Night Fights on the television and they were just getting ready to announce the decision and all of a sudden the house kinda shook, and the back window just bowed in. Then it bowed back out and there was this tremendous explosion that just shook the house. Dad was kind of one of these guys that reacted to things instantly, because you had to, you know, both in the war and in the mines, because your life depended on getting out of harm's way. But I remember him clearing his chair and he said, ‘I think my powder dump just blew up.’ He was at the [Berkeley] pit at the time. He said, ‘grab your helmet and coat and come with me.’ So I grabbed my coat and my aluminum pit helmet - I could do anything if I had a pit helmet on. I was Superman. [laughs] But anyway, we took off and we walked out in the street and all up and down North Drive there, people in the houses were out looking, wondering what was going on. So we went roaring up the street. Dad had a company Jeep with a radio in it. We got up to Farragut there, where St. Anne's was. Father Joe Pat Sullivan, dad's cousin, was standing out in front of the church looking around like everybody else, trying to figure out what was going on. Dad leaned out and told him, he said, ‘Get in Father Joe. We might need you to give the last rites.’ So Father Joe jumped in the car with us and then Dad was talking to people on the radio trying to figure out what happened.

Finally he got it narrowed down to the area around where the Pittsmont smelter used to be. There's a big slag heap over there, a big slag heap on one side, a big huge open field, and then the road going up to the Columbia Gardens. And that particular night was a Friday night. They were having a prom or something up at the Columbia Gardens for the high school kids, so there were all these kids going up and down the road. But as it turned out, some guys had gone out and stolen a bunch of dynamite from this place called the Lavelle Powder Company, which was located out at Ramsay. They had it for a while and then they decided to call Lavelle back and hold the dynamite ransom. They said they'd sell it back to ‘em, so they set up a meeting. Of course the police got involved in it and they had set up a stake out and everything. So when the Lavelle people met with the robbers, the police were around, and I think the police reported and the paper said that somewhere along the line somebody yelled, ‘Sheriff’ and shot in the air. Another report said they yelled ‘police’ and shot in the ground. But anyway, one of the shots hit the van with a hundred cases of dynamite in it, and the thing totally blew up. There was one guy sitting in the van and he was literally vaporized along with the van. When the sun came up in the morning, you could go - and the only thing left of the van was the engine block, and the engine block had been blown apart and the pistons were hanging out.

So anyway, dad dropped Father Joe and I off, and we started walking around looking for survivors. We found two different body parts. One was a finger and one was a part of a hip bone. This was back in the days where there wasn't a lot of crime scene control, so there were all kinds of people roaming around. So we gave the body parts to the police and eventually they were able to identify who the person in the van was by getting a fingerprint off this part that was left of this guy. But it was just a miracle that those kids on the road or the policemen or the people from Lavelle - it broke windows all over and it was…

Anyway, I remember another time that dad - there was another huge explosion and he jumped in the car. We went roaring out. This one was up on Anaconda Road. I think I was talking to Larry Hoffman. I might have had my details a little mixed up on this. He could fill you in on what exactly went wrong, but it seemed to me it was like one of the compressor lines blew up up there. Dad dropped me and my hard hat off at the bottom of Anaconda Road and said, ‘Stop all the traffic. Only let the authorities through.’

So, I mean, I'm what - 16, 18 years old or something like that? I'm supposed to stop all these people. But I did. Then he went and took care of that. As I recall, nobody was really hurt in that incident. But the first time I really saw anybody that was killed from an accident was in - I think it was in grade school. We were going over Front Street and there was a - we came on an accident scene that - they were repairing a water line or something, and they dug a deep hole. Again, this was before OSHA and all the shoring up regulations. The ditch had collapsed in and buried a guy, and dad was over helping him pull him out. Anyway, they pulled this guy up and he was all white, and then he was gone. That was the first dead body I ever saw from an accident.

Kind of a funny story about - the week after the Pittsmont thing - a couple of my friends and I - this was in the sixties, when the race to the moon was going on, the space race. So my buddies and I, we were like nerds. So we decided we'd build our own rockets and have our own little space race. So we couldn't figure out what to use for fuel, so we decided we'd use gunpowder. We got out the encyclopedia and they had an article in there on what gunpowder was made out of. It was sulfur, charcoal saltpeter.

[01:31:28]

I think those were like the main ingredients and they gave the proportions. So we figured a way to ramp up the proportions using an old gold scale and some carpet tacks. So we went into kinda mass production of gunpowder , which we would then take and jam into a pipe that we'd seal off at one end and have a nozzle at the other end, a wooden nozzle with a hole in it to be the motor, along with the fuse to light it. I didn't find out till I was probably 50 that that's called a pipe bomb. [laughter]

Jaap: Oh, that's really good.

Murphy: So anyway, these rockets kept exploding, but they’d go really high. And so we decided we'd have - the moonshot was getting real close - and they had Saturn rockets. So we decided we'd build our own Saturn rocket. So we got an inch and a half diameter piece of copper pipe. It was about 18 inches long. This was like a mega rocket. And we jammed that thing full of gunpowder, and then we decided it wasn't safe anymore to just stand there and put a pile of gunpowder underneath the rocket and then light it. [laughter] We figured out an electric ignition system. So we went out to Father Sheehan Park with. This is the week after the Pittsmont incident.

We had this real fancy launch pad, you know, made out of two by fours, and a launching rod and rocket fins. And our payload was a turtle that we were gonna send into low earth orbit and then recover with this parachute that we designed.

Jaap: A real turtle?

Murphy: A real live - then - turtle. [laughter] And so anyway, we set this up. My two friends were with us and they were brothers. One friend was Fred Caprich and the other one was Chuck Caprich. Their father was a dentist. He used to practice on the second floor of the Rialto Theater Building on the corner of Park and Main there - we'd go up and see him. He died when we were in the sixth grade, so this was sometime after he died. And, oh, poor Mrs. Caprich, she was a saint. We'd do all this stuff down at her house and she'd look out the window. We'd be out there playing and all of a sudden there'd be this huge flash when we'd set off some gunpowder out there. And her favorite saying was ‘Emmett, Go home!’ When I was growing up in Butte, everybody called me Emmett because most Irish people went by their middle name. So she was always sending me home for stuff that we did down there. Anyway, Fred went on to be an aeronautics engineer down in Texas. Chuck wound up designing and building the carousel in Missoula.

Jaap: Hmm.

Murphy: So anyways, I was with these two guys. We got ready to launch and we were hiding in the dugout. We tried our electric ignition thing and it didn't work. We tried it a couple times. So then we went out and put a pile of gunpowder underneath the rocket and a trail of gunpowder leading up so that we could light and then run away. And that didn't work. So we took all our leftover gunpowder and put it under the rocket. And…[laughs] I shouldn’t laugh. This was really bad . But then I said, ‘Well, how are we gonna like this?’ They said, ‘We'll just put a match in it.’ I said, ‘I'm not gonna do that. You guys are crazy.’ So I said, ‘I'm going back and hiding in the dugout’. So Rick and Fred, they stuck a match in this gun powder underneath the rocket.

And all of a sudden there was this puff of smoke and this huge explosion, ‘ba boom!’ And they were gone. I couldn't see 'em anymore. There was just a cloud of smoke out there. What I was laughing about was - my first thought was - how am I gonna explain this to my mother? [laughs] Anyway, I looked up and all of a sudden here the two of 'em come running out of the cloud of smoke like crazy. We ran back out and looked - fortunately the pipe had just uncured rather than gone into shrapnel. The launchpad was toothpicks. There wasn't anything left of that. The turtle was in heaven somewhere. [laughs] I don't know where he was, but he was gone for good.

Jaap: Poor turtle.

Murphy: Then we realized we were probably in trouble because somebody probably heard that. This was at Father Sheehan Park - that was way out of town then. It's kinda where the I-15 interchange on Harrison is. I think the ball field is there in the area where it was, but there was nothing else around there. So we hopped on our bikes. Rode back. And as we were going up Massachusetts Street, all of these people were standing out on the street wondering what happened, because they heard this explosion.

We dropped Fred and Chuck off - they lived on the corner of North Drive and Massachusetts. I went home and I walked in. My mom said, ‘Did you hear that explosion?’ ‘What explosion?’ And she coyly looked at me and she said, ‘You and Rick aren't playing with rockets again, are you?’ I said, ‘No.’ And she said, ‘Well, you better not be.’ But being so close after the Pittsmont explosion, and nearly getting killed, we decided that that was kind of the end of our space program.

[01:38:58]

Jaap: [laughs] So did your mother find out that you were letting rockets [off], that that was you?

Murphy: Oh, she knew.

Jaap: She knew?

Murphy: I mean, you didn't pull anything over on Mom. As long as you came home and weren't too bloody, she was happy. Those were in the days - nowadays, I suppose you'd call that a play date, but, unauthorized. But they used to turn us loose. In the morning and after chores, you’d just go do your thing all day. And as I told you once, we kinda - our lives ran around the sounding of the mine whistles. Each mine had a separate whistle and a different tone. And I think it was at eight o'clock you'd hear 'em go off one after another. Then at noon again, they'd go off and you knew it was time to be home for lunch. And then at five o'clock they'd go off again. And then you knew it was time to be home for dinner. We lived close enough to the Racetrack Volunteer Fire Department. I don't know whether they still do that or not, [but] at nine o'clock every night they'd sound the siren. At least our folks would tell us that was the curfew for you and you could get arrested if you were out after that whistle, so after the siren sounded, we stayed home, but that was kind of the life we, we led. And, you know, we didn't have TV or some of that stuff, so we'd entertain ourselves by making pipe bombs or whatever - rockets…whatever.

[laughter]

[01:40:56]

Before that, we had decided [that] we needed to move into liquid fueled rockets. And we knew this kid - he went to high school with us. He was from Meaderville. He was experimenting with liquid fuels, and so we asked him to cook up a batch for us. So he did that and we didn't get it for a while, so I called him one night and I asked him where the rocket fuel was and he said he’d get it to us. Then there had been an article in the [Montana] Standard - I think it was that morning or the day before - about somebody had set off a smoke bomb at the back door of the Arrow Cafe in Meaderville. So I asked the guy, I said, ‘Bill, did you know anything about that smoke bomb at the Arrow?’ I said, ‘That sounds like something you’d do.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I did that.’ And the phone went dead! He wasn't at school for a couple days. Then my dad came to me one day and said, ‘I gotta talk to you.’And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘You're in trouble with the police.’ I said ‘What!’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘uh, they're doing a big arson investigation and you're involved in it.’

And I’m like, ‘what!!’ And so I told him the truth and evidently they were tapping this kid's phone. When he admitted that he had set the bomb, they cut off the phone conversation. I never did see that kid again. He and his family left town - never saw him, never heard from him. I think they just got him out of town.

Jaap: Hmm.

Murphy: But my dad said - after I talked to my dad and told him the whole story, then he went and told the sheriff, and then they were okay with that. That was really the end of our space program right there. The jail was just a little -

Jaap: Yeah, space just got real. [laughter]

Murphy: But I’m trying to think. Oh yeah. And then we got to play with real explosives when I went from the Gardens to - when I was old enough, I went to work in the [Berkeley] pit. I started as a laborer shoveling rocks that had fallen off the conveyor belt down at the bottom of tunnel one at the old crusher, or the new crusher - I guess it was. And then I moved up and worked on the powder crew for a while. They were the ones that were involved in setting off all the explosions to break up the rock in the pit.

[01:44:42]

So the drills would come in and they’d drill the holes and then the powder crew would come in and arrange all the explosives for setting off a blast. And then they'd move the shovel or drills out of the area and they'd leave two guys in the area and everybody else would clear out. The two guys were the ones that were gonna set off the blast. They'd be by a shovel or a drill so they could hide underneath it. I always enjoyed being the blaster because you get to blow things up. [laughs]

Jaap: You had a passion for that.

Murphy: Well, inadvertently, I think. [laughs] Anyway, this one day we were working on the - it'd be the east side of the pit - it was kind of up in a new area they were opening up. There was a lot of water under the ground. Now you've probably been around Butte long enough, and firecrackers, to know if you want a can to go really high, you put it over water and then light a firecracker under it. Because the water compresses and shoots the can twice as high.

Jaap: I wanna be with you on the 4th of July. You sound like you'd be fun. [laughs]

Murphy: Oh no, I'm a piker compared to my brother Dennis. That guy's a pyromaniac! But anyway, we had to do special blasting up there. Instead of - usually they'd bring in a powder truck full of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel mixed together in a certain ratio. I never did figure out the ratio. I could never get that to explode at home. [laughs] But anyway, they’d pour the ammonium nitrate down the hole and then you’d do a few things and then blast it. In this part of the pit, with the water down there, you couldn't just pour the ammonium nitrate down into the water because it would just dissolve. So they'd put the ammonium nitrate into kinda like long plastic bags. They called them bolognas because they looked like a hot dog. So when it came time, we'd put the primer down and then we'd take these bolognas and drop 'em down in the hole. And then you were - after you dropped the bolognas, you were supposed to measure the hole and make sure they went all the way down.

Well we always blasted at noon. The powder crew was really hungry that day for some reason, plus in this area, you were only supposed to set off 50 holes at a time. But that took a lot of time. So did measuring the holes, so we were kind of not doing that all the time. And so anyway, we went and set up the blast and they said, well, uh maybe we could shoot more than 50 holes. We could shoot the whole thing at one time, which is 150 holes…and we can go to lunch early.

So I think it was at ten till 12. We had the blast all set up and ready to go. This other guy and I stayed back by this drill. I was the blaster. One guy would go out and - all the blasting caps were tied together in a loop so they wouldn't ground out. Then that guy would break the loop apart and hook it onto the wires going back to the detonator. The other guy would be the one to set the blast off when the guy got back.

So, Ord Mitchell was the blasting boss and Bill Renoir was the assistant boss. So they left us and they went - and the blasting boss always got to where he could see the whole area. And so when they got ready, Ord waved his helmet and gave me the signal. And so I yelled, ‘fire in the hole’ three times, and I set the blast off. Well, it was like we launched the island of Hawaii up into the sky. This big island [laughs] goes rising up into the sky and then ‘BABOOM’ - the whole thing explodes. There were rocks everywhere coming down on us and we climbed in under the drill. A rock hit and rolled in and broke this guy's arm next to me. And finally it all settled down. We thought, ‘Ooo, probably shouldn't have done that.’ [laughter]

So anyway, Ord and Bill come running down and [say] ‘You guys, alright?’ And I said, ‘Ah, we need to patch this guy up.’ So they took him to the hospital and then Ord started getting calls on the radio, ‘Get the whole crew and bring your shovels and come up to Park Street right now.’ And so we went up on Park Street, and the blast had showered Park Street with all these boulders. Most of 'em, you know, like a foot, foot and a half in diameter. And one rock the size of a desk or a refrigerator had gone through the roof of this house and landed in this guy's living room. And fortunately, we'd shot it at like ten till 12 and there was a school up there that would've been out. There were all kinds of rocks in the school yard. But since it was early, the kids weren't out yet.

And so while we were shoveling rocks out of Park Street, this whole cadre of lawyers from the sixth floor of the Hennessy Building came down and started making settlements with people over property that had been damaged. But the thing I remember most about being up there on Park Street were these two old Finnish women came walking up to me and tapped me on the shoulder. And I learned later - I think their name was Lukannish. They called them the Lukannish women. But they came up, tapped me on the shoulder, and looked me in the eye and they said, ‘Get out while you can!’ [laughs] They said, ‘You don't wanna do this all your life!’

So that was an interesting thing. And of course my dad was the supervisor down there at the time.

Jaap: I was wondering, okay.

Murphy: He got me in the kitchen again and said, ‘Oh, about that blast today.’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘Did you measure all those holes?’ ‘I think so.’ [laughs] ‘How many did you set off?’ ‘50?’ [laughs] But anyway, I think it's humorous now. It wasn't quite as humorous when it was going on, but fortunately nobody got hurt. There was a guy going down Park Street and this boulder about the size of a bowling ball went through the rear window right behind the driver's side of the car, just missed him.

[01:53:35]

But, you know, that was just one of the incidents that happened down the mine that - there was one other incident when I was on the blasting crew where we were preparing for a blast. When you prepare for a blast, you have to pull all the electric cables out of the blasting area. So those shovel cables are probably two inches in diameter and they're really heavy. So they'd hook up, tie 'em onto a truck, and then pull 'em out of the area. And they were big, long cables. And the cables were joined together. It wasn't all one cable. They had these big connectors they'd push together and then they had a thing that they'd screw together to hold it. But none of those worked because they'd been in the copper water and they were all corroded. So they'd push 'em together and then they'd lash 'em back and forth with a rope, and that's what held the cables together. Well, Ord Mitchell had tied up to this cable and he was pulling it out of the blast area because it was all set to go except for the blasting caps. And this cable was bouncing by and I was watching it to make sure it didn't get hung up on anything.

And this connector was coming by and it got right in front of me. All of a sudden there was this pop and I looked down and the rope holding the connector together - it separated and the coupling pulled apart. And as it came apart, it started drawing an arc, and the arc was about three or four feet long with this tremendous roar and this huge cloud of smoke. Ord said, ‘I looked up and I couldn't see you anymore. And I thought, Oh God, Murphy's dead.’ And so he said, ‘Then I looked up and you came running out of that cloud of smoke.’ That scared me pretty bad, but what scared me worse is that when we went back into the blast area, the arc had gone through the primacord, which was the thing that detonated the blast. All that heat and everything had gone right through there and it should have set off all those holes. And it was right next to me and it didn't. So I kind of believe in guardian angels that - that was a close call.

And I told you about - when I started going to Tech, a bunch of guys and I'd always hang out. Well it was the school of mines then. A bunch of guys and I would hang out in the student union building up there. Maybe we were fire maniacs because we’d - [laughter]. We'd build these big structures outta straws and coffee cups and a couple times, somebody set 'em on fire.

Jaap: In the student union building?

Murphy: Yeah. [laughter] We got kicked out a few times. This poor woman that ran the student union and was behind the counter - she kinda hated to see us coming. But anyway, this was in the mid sixties and the Vietnam War was going on and escalating, so we'd sit around and we'd talk and try to guess who was gonna wind up being drafted and who'd come back and speculate about if anybody wouldn't come back. You know, all that kind of cheery stuff. And so I think it was about in 1966, Fred, my nerdy friend - he and I and a guy named Fred Bates decided we'd start a rock band because I played a little guitar and so did Fred. Freddy was the drummer and we were gonna call the group Freddy and the Nightcrawlers. And anyway, we were just starting to ramp up to do that and Freddy was working in the mines to pay his way through the School of Mines. And one day he got killed in a rock fall in the High Ore mine up there and that was the end of the rock group right there.

But the old-time miners could tell when things were gonna, [when] the rocks were gonna fall or the ceiling was gonna come in because of the fine dust that’d start trickling out. And they knew all the signs. But Fred didn't. And when it started to come down, he was trying to get out, but it was too late and it all came down on him. And the same thing happened to me down the Pit - not the same thing or I’d be dead. But when I was working down in the pit, I was on a shovel crew with a guy named Bob Henderson. We were digging one night and when we were digging into the bank, the cable on the shovel broke, so we had to replace the cable. And so the cable crew came down and there was ropemen and welders - there was a big crew to get the cables replaced because they were big, thick, heavy cables.

The shovel was right up against the 33 foot benches, they called it, or bank. The boilermaker's truck was backed down in, by the bucket. We were in the process of putting the cable back on and all of a sudden everybody started yelling. And this guy grabs me by the arm and he said, ‘Run!’ And this other boilermaker jumps in the truck and goes roaring out of there. And just as we - this guy was pulling me along, getting out of the way. Then the whole bank came down on the front of the shovel. And it was just the same type of thing - they had heard the little rocks coming down and the dust coming out, and they knew that it was gonna collapse on 'em. Fortunately, the guy was right next to me and pulled me out. So working in the [Berkeley] pit wasn't all that safe either.

But I went to the pit. Again, my dad would take me over there. Well, he took us over there in 1955. I remember he came back, came home one day. He didn't even have a company Jeep then - he had our old Plymouth station wagon. So he loaded up my mom and whatever brothers and sisters were there at the time. And he said, ‘I got something I wanna show you.’ So we drove over, drove way out in this field and there was a shovel there and a couple trucks. Somebody gave a signal and the shovel started what they call ramping down, digging down into the ground. And that was the start of the Berkeley Pit. And my dad said, ‘I want you to see this because this is really gonna be something someday.’

[02:02:09]

But all his time at the pit - whenever there was trouble or a breakdown or something, he'd get called out in the middle of the night, or during the day or weekends. On weekends and stuff, he'd always take me with him. We’d go over and I learned about all the things that could go wrong in the mining operation, and he told me all about how it worked. Every time we’d go, he'd give me a new update on how many millions of tons they'd moved, and how many tons a day. I was there when they built the new crusher load out facility that sent the ore to Anaconda, and later for the concentrator when they built that. But it was really interesting because I knew a lot about it.

And then dad would also - sometimes - Route 66, the television show, was filmed in Butte. You've probably seen that in the papers and stuff. Well, dad was in charge. These two guys, the two stars, were supposed to be truck drivers down at the pit. That was the plot of the show. And they were in love with some Butte lady. Anyway, Route 66 wasn't on the local station, so we had no idea other than - this was a Hollywood TV show. So dad took me with them when they were filming down at the Berkeley garage where they repaired all the trucks, because they had big scenes set up in there because they could get all their lights and stuff inside. And I got to meet this kid - the guy played the kid on - there was a show on television called Rin Tin Tin, about a dog. And Rusty was the kid that owned the dog. And anyway, Rusty was there and I got to meet and talk with him. I thought that was pretty special till I found out that Rusty was really about 26 years old. [laughs] He was just made up to look like a kid.

And then I was sitting watching them film inside the garage - I was sitting in my dad's jeep, so I'd be out of the way. This guy came up and sat in the Jeep with me and he was sitting there reading the script. So I was chitty chatting with him about how he felt about Bute and ‘did he like it,’ and that kind of stuff. And he was, ‘yeah, you know.’ It was kind of a minor conversation. I had no idea who he was. And then he left, and it turned out his name was Marty Milner. And he was one of the stars of the show. He went on to star in a lot of Hollywood stuff, but I didn't know him. I mean, as far as I was concerned, he was the same as you - a guy reading a book. [laughs]

[02:05:49]

So anyway, I was at Tech for two years and then we had - Tech and I had a mutual agreement that we should part company. [laughter] So I wanted to join the Navy, but my mother laid down the law and she said - or no, it was the Air Force. And she laid down the law. She said, ‘Now listen, you owe me.’ And I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘I've raised you all of these,’ what was it, 18 years or something? ‘And I put all this effort into you and you owe me one. And so I want you to change schools and go to MSU and try it for one quarter. And if you don't like it, then you can join the Air Force.’ So I agreed to that. I transferred to Bozeman that summer.

I was gonna work in the pit, but Dad said there was gonna be a strike and there wouldn't be any work, so I might as well go to school. So I transferred over there and lived in the dorm. I kinda liked school. It turned out to be better. I think I was a little more focused because I wasn't around so much of this nonsense that went on in Butte. So then fall semester came around. I was rooming with - I got a call from an old friend of mine I'd gone to high school with - he was a Cuban kid. His name was Hector Lot. And back in the, I think the mid sixties, Castro had taken over Cuba and it was really oppressive over there. So some of the kids whose parents were a little better off - Hector's dad was a doctor. He taught at the University of Havana Medical School. And so they paid, and with the help of Catholic Charities, there was a boat lift that came to the United States with a whole bunch of Cuban kids because the parents didn't want their kids to grow up there. Catholic Charities brought a bunch of 'em to Helena and they were over there for a place, lived in a place called Brondel Hall. And they went to Carroll for a year or two years, I guess. And then - no they didn't go to Carroll. They were in Brondel Hall and then they came to Butte. Monsignor Harrington had a home up here in Centerville, not too far from here. There were half a dozen or a dozen boys that lived up there, and they were all going to Central. I think they came when I was a sophomore and some of 'em were freshmen. So I befriended them. My mom took 'em in. She really, really liked them, so she'd have 'em out for dinner all the time. So we became good friends.

[02:09:40]

Later after we graduated, that's when they went to Carroll, at the same time I was going to Tech, and then we both transferred to Bozeman. And so Hector said, ‘I'm running this house, Do you want to come and share it?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ So we rented this little tiny garage that had been converted into a room. It had a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom, and that was it. And the whole house was maybe the size of this room, well maybe the place was smaller. We joined the International Club over there and we had all of these students from all over the world coming to our house. So Hector and I lived there for a year, and then Hector dropped outta school and got drafted, so he went in the Army. But Fall semester, when Hector and I transferred over, they had a dance for transfer students. The Newman Club had a dance. So Hector and I went to that and he started talking to this gal, and the gal he was talking to had a cousin that knew Hector in Helena when he was over there going to school, so they had a lot in common.

Hector said, ‘I want you to meet my roommate.’ So Hector came over and this gal named Judy Armstrong was standing over there and she said, ‘I looked across the dance floor and here comes Hector dragging you. And your feet were skidding on the floor because you didn't want to do it.’ [laughs] So he took me over and introduced me to this gal…52 years ago, she wound up being my wife. But anyway, Hector went to the Army and I finished school. And when I graduated, Vietnam was going full war then. When you were going to college, you had a college deferment, or a 2S deferment. As long as you were going to school, they weren't gonna draft you. Well, it didn't take long for the kids to figure out - stay in school. Well, then the president decided that, ‘well, yeah, we'll give you like 16 quarters to get out of school and then we'll change your draft classification so you can't hide in school.’

So anyway, I graduated and nobody would hire you because they knew that you were gonna get drafted and go away. But it was illegal for them to ask you what your draft status was or anything, but they had ways of figuring out whether you were gonna go. So I had a couple good job prospects and then they found out I was gonna go and they said, ‘Well, come and see us when you're done.’ So I interviewed with FW Woolworth Company, which was a big outfit back then. It was kinda like the Walmart of the day, because Walmart and Kmart hadn't been invented yet. And so they said, ‘Yeah, we'll hire you.’ They had a policy of hiring people and then if they got drafted, they'd hold their job open for 'em until they were finished with their service and then give 'em their job back.

So I went to work with them up in - I was the assistant manager of the store up in Lewistown. I think that was in August, and then in December I got a letter from the president saying, ‘Greetings from the president. Please report to Butte for your draft physical.’ It wasn't an invitation; it was a demand.

[02:14:38]

So we drove down to Butte. As I recall, the intake station or draft place was right across from the courthouse up here. There were a lot of protests and riots going on in the country. It was really a turbulent time. And so we were all sitting out in front - all the inductees or draft, people [who were] gonna take their physical - the police were expecting trouble. They told us to be careful. So they decided they'd do some surveillance of the area, but they didn't want to be obvious and have the cop cars driving around or [any] police presence, which would kinda instigate trouble. So somebody came up with a brilliant idea to use a street sweeper. They had the guy driving the street sweeper and a plain clothes cop riding with him, not that two guys in a street sweeper was unusual, but.

So they started going around and around the block. Every few minutes, the street sweeper would come by again, and they went around so many times they wore the lines off the street. [laughs] I don't think that street has ever been that clean, since the sixties. But anyway, I took my draft physical and then they - I passed it. [That was] one test I didn't particularly care to pass. I asked them what to expect and they said, ‘Oh, in a couple weeks you'll get a letter telling you to report and you’ll report and you’ll get 13 weeks of basic training and then two weeks after that you'll be in Vietnam.’ I decided I didn't particularly want to do that. The options at that time were - you could either get drafted, you could go to Canada and seek asylum, but you could never come home again, or you could go to prison, or you could enlist.

Some pretty gruesome things were happening to the infantry over there, so I decided that - well, first I tried to join the Air Force, but I got washed out because of my eyes. So then I joined the Navy because they said that I could get into officer school. So I enlisted, but the tradeoff was - rather than getting drafted for two years, you had to enlist for four. I thought that was okay. Oh, and that Judy Armstrong and I had gotten married that August, or no, that June, before we went to Lewistown. So I was married then. That was the other thing he could do to avoid the draft was - at first, if you were married, they wouldn't draft you. Then they changed it to - you had to be married and have children to avoid the draft. We were married, but the children rule was already in effect.

So I went to bootcamp in San Diego and I was supposed to - after that I got selected to report to an officer's company where they were gonna select the officers. And I reported to that barracks after bootcamp. And there were 500 other college graduates in there. And I said, ‘How many officers are they gonna select out of this?’ And they said, ‘Five. And one of 'em has to be African American.’ Well, there were doctors and lawyers and stuff in there, and I didn't make the cut. So then we went to Virginia and I went to communications school there. Then we came back and I got assigned to a Naval air station, the NAS Lemoore in the Central Valley in California.

We came back through Butte on our way to California and while we were here, my mother's father - her folks lived next door to us - and we got a call one night and my grandfather had keeled over as he was getting ready for bed. So mom and I ran over and she started mouth to mouth and I called the fire department and an ambulance, but it was too late when they got there. So we had that funeral to go to while we were home. Anyway, then we went to California.

[02:20:18]

Can we take a break for a few minutes?

Jaap: We can, of course. Yeah.

Murphy: My tongue's getting tired. [laughs]

Jaap: That works. Perfect. I'm gonna use the restroom. You need a pop or more water or anything?

Murphy: I'm good. Thank you.

Jaap: Okay.

[RECORDING PAUSES]

[RECORDING RESUMES MID SENTENCE]

Grant: …and in particular stories about Butte. I mean, yeah. That's what this project is for. We're doing a hundred oral histories and it's all life history, so people tell the story lives. Yeah. You’re doing perfect, I think.

Murphy: Good, good.

Grant: It’s precisely what we're looking for.

Murphy: We're kinda taking an aside here. We're getting out of Butte.

Grant: That's okay. Yeah. It’s all kind of the story of your life.

Murphy: Yeah, it kinda ties together. I kinda wrote that one of the things that surprised me when you think about it - I put all this stuff together and I was trying to keep kind of a Butte focus on stuff that happened in Butte, but you look at the way people kinda influence the environment and the environment influences the people.

Grant: Mmm-hmm.

Murphy: And they're like one and the same type of things. So it's all interwoven and makes you wonder what the people would've been like if they hadn't been in Butte or, or vice versa. What Butte would've been like if those people hadn't been there. Cause I missed part of the - my great-grandfather JD - he was the undersheriff of Butte for a while, and his brother-in-law was the sheriff. I got a picture I'll show you later of him sitting up there in the courthouse with all the guns and handcuffs and stuff on the table. My great-grandmother's sister - her sister was Margaret Hogan. I don't know whether you know that name, but Margaret Hogan was - she was a pretty feisty gal and she was a teacher and she ran and became the first county superintendent of schools. And that was the only position that a woman could hold at the time and women couldn't vote.

She was the superintendent of schools and her husband was Joseph Hogan, who served on Montana's first constitutional convention, and he was also Montana's first mine inspector. And after Margaret finished her stint as county superintendent of schools, her daughter Maybell ran and took over and she was superintendent of schools for like 40 years. So you’ve got all of these little governmental ties going on in there.

Is there anything that - you read through that - that I'm missing or that you'd like to hear more about?

Jaap: Everything you're hitting - you're doing good. Mm-hmm.

Murphy: Oh good. I keep thinking of new stuff that I missed.

Jaap: That's okay. It’s how it goes.

Grant:It’s hard to encapsulate a life from the course of an afternoon, you know?

Murphy: Yeah, I kind of think that I led a pretty boring life growing up and doing stuff.

Grant: Not so far.

Murphy: [laughter] And everybody says, ‘Oh!!’

Jaap: I think you’re our first pipe bomb story. So yeah.

Murphy: Would you check and see if the statute of limitations has gone on that? [laughter]

Grant: I think you'd be fine.

Murphy: I mean it was so god dang innocent and so freaking dangerous.

Jaap: Right! Oh yeah. You guys are really lucky you didn’t get hurt.

Murphy: Well, I got into gunpowder because I was playing in dad's garage and I found all these cases of shotgun shells. So I decided to see how shotgun shells were put together. So I started prying them apart and then I found the gunpowder and that was kinda interesting the way it flamed. I decided I need more of this. So that's when we got into chemistry experiments. Poor Mrs. Caprich - God, she's gotta be in the highest place in heaven.

Jaap: Yeah. [laughs]

Murphy: One time, we were in her [laughs] - she told us that, well she told Rick and Chuck that they had to cut all the weeds out of the fence before we could go do something else. The weeds would all - grass had grown up in there and it was all dead dry grass. So, we decided there had to be a better way than clipping because clipping was too slow. So we got the idea of gasoline. So we went and got this five gallon can gas and poured a little bit along and lit it on fire. Worked perfect. So then we did a longer stretch, lit it on fire and it worked perfect. Then Chuck decided we needed to move the project along a little faster. So he picked up the can while it was still burning there.

Jaap: Oh no.

Murphy: And he started pouring gas on. Well, the fire ran and jumped right into the can. Pretty soon, the can's on fire and he drops the can. Then this area in the yard is on fire and he decides to kick the can away from the fire so that it would put it out, and he kicks the can away and the can goes like this across the yard. And about then, Mrs. Caprich looks out her back window, and the whole backyard is in flames. Emmet, go home! [laughs]

Jaap: That is so funny.

Grant: Would you like to resume?

Murphy: Okay. Sounds like a deal.

Grant: Okay.

[02:27:34]

Murphy: So after we were at the Naval Air Station - I was working in communications and the Naval Air Station at Lemoore was a base where they trained fighter aircraft that went out on the carriers. They'd be doing touch and go landings. There were A7 Corsairs and A4E Skyhawks and stuff, that generation of fighters. So you'd have a whole group there for a while and then when a carrier was ready to leave, they'd fly out and meet the carrier, and then they'd go to Vietnam. Consequently, their wives and families would stay back in Lemoore and wait for the carrier to come back. The carrier would be gone for like a nine month deployment. And the bad thing was that sometimes - well, often the planes would get shot down and the husbands would be either POWs or missing in action or dead. We'd get the messages in all the time. For a while, I was acting as the messenger where I'd take the messages from the com center down to the admin office and give 'em to the captain of the base and then the captain of the base would have to go tell the new widow that she was a widow. Uh, and a couple times I went with him. That was pretty gut wrenching to have to do that.

But anyway, we were there for a year and then I got orders to the USS Oklahoma City. It was homeported in Yokosuka, Japan. Homeport means that that's where you're stationed, but the ship has gone a lot of the time. So I packed up and flew to Japan and the ship went on a cruise down to Vietnam right away. So then when I knew about when we were coming back, Judy flew over - it was right before Christmas. I was working for a three Star Admiral they called Com Seventh Fleet, Commander of the US Seventh Fleet. And the seventh fleet was all the ships in the South China Sea, the whole fleet over there. So he was controlling all the operations for the Navy in Vietnam, and the area.

So when I got to go pick her up at the airport, they knew that I was gonna go get her, so I got to take his limousine and go up there and pick her up. I'd grown a beard in the meantime, so she got off the plane and in the first place, she walked right by me, didn't recognize me. And then in the second place we got out to the limousine and she thought we were doing real well. [laughter] But that went away real quick.

So anyway, we got a house in Japan and she lived there out on what they call ‘the economy,’ which was out in the Japanese people. I didn't have rank yet enough that I could live on base. And so a couple weeks after she got there, I left and she was all by herself with some of the other Navy wives there. So then we were going down to Vietnam on what they call the gun line there. We were providing - I was on a guided missile cruiser. We had five and six inch guns and Talos missiles. We were providing gunfire support for the troops inland. So most of the time, we just spent all day firing our guns inland or going on missions inland. Then the rest of our time - since it was a three star admiral, we'd make diplomatic visits to other ports like Hong Kong or Singapore, Taiwan, Okinawa, those type of things. So that part wasn't so bad. We'd have to go to the Philippines about every three or four weeks because the guns were worn out and they had to put new guns on the ship.

[02:32:41]

And so I guess my claim to fame during that time was - you both are way too young to remember this, but one of the major things they did towards the end of Vietnam was to go to North Vietnam and there was a big port there called Haiphong, where they brought in all the supplies and stuff from China. So the US decided to mine the port of Haiphong to deter the ships from going in there. So our ship and a couple destroyers and stuff - we went in the night before to take out the air defenses around the port because the mines in the sea were laid by airplanes. They'd fly over and drop 'em out of the airplanes. So they didn't want the VietCong to be shooting at the airplanes, so we went in. I was on duty the night we got the order - the chain of command was the president had let the chief of naval operations know that he wanted that done and the chief of naval operations that let the commander in charge of the Pacific Fleet know. And then the commander in charge of the Pacific Fleet would let com Seventh Fleet know. And then com seventh Fleet would tell the carriers to go ahead and lay the mines. I got to send the message from com seventh fleet to the carriers to go ahead and lay the mines in Haiphong. It wasn't a big deal because it was just one word. It was ‘execute,’ codeword ‘execute.’ They already had the battle plan, so that just meant to go ahead and do it.

But anyway, I can tell war stories all night. Towards the end of my tour over there - I was over there two years and then I was able to do some fenangling and I got to fly back to the United States with Judy. We left from Japan and flew back. The whole plane was a military flight. It was all of these, all different servicemen from the area that - I mean, mostly a lot of 'em were ground pounders that had been in-country in Vietnam and there were Air Force people and Navy people and some dependents. But I think one of the most touching things in my life was when that plane touched ground in Hawaii and we were on US soil again - everybody spontaneously burst into singing God Bless America, and there wasn't a dry eye in the place. It was just phenomenal. I'll never forget that.

[02:36:11]

But then we cleared customs there, which worked out pretty well because my wife was pregnant with our first child and we were starting to go through customs, which was kind of a lengthy process. Just when we were starting to go through, Judy leaned back against the handrail going in there and said, ‘I just gotta rest. I'm not doing too good.’ ‘Next!’ They just waved us through and we didn't even get checked.

But then when we got to San Francisco and walked out the main gate, there were all these anti-war protestors out there. You've probably seen 'em and read about 'em, you know, the baby killer, spitting on you thing, which I didn't mind for myself. But it didn't seem like that venom should be directed at my pregnant wife, you know? But anyway, we got out and a couple days later - just before Christmas - we landed at Bert Mooney. Here were our families and everybody was really happy again. And so then we settled in and I tried to find a job around. I finally got on with Montana Power and we were back. Well, we were sorta in Butte because we couldn't find a place to live that was any good in Butte proper, so we wound up living in Rocker. So our daughter was born and I was working down here in the old general office building on the main floor. It was the Butte Division offices. So I worked there and anyway, I started working my way up in the company. Our son was born a couple years later, and then I got transferred to Anaconda and I was down there for a couple years and a town manager down there. Then I got transferred back to Butte and I was working here with the large industrial customers and the general office for a guy named Bill Sherwood.

Judy meanwhile had made a lot of friends with a lot of new moms and belonged to new moms clubs and stuff. So she decided she wanted to stay in Anaconda, so I commuted for 20-some years working here. But there were a lot of Montana power stories. I could spend another hour and a half telling you about that. But two of them were that - since I was managing the large customers, I had the rural electric co-op contract as one of mine. So I arranged for Bob Gannon, who was CEO at the time, to go to Great Falls, to talk to the co-op group that was gathered for their annual meeting. He and I were driving up to Great Falls and his brand new cell phone rang - cell phones were just coming out at the time. It was John Lahr, and John Lahr was the head lobbyist for Montana Power. You have his railroad collection out here. Mm-hmm.

Bob talked to him for a while and then he said that - he got off the phone and he told me that Lahr had just told him that the California legislature had just passed the utility deregulation law, deregulating electric utilities. So they weren't really utilities anymore - it was opening it up to competition with companies like Enron. And Bob kind of got quiet and then he said, ‘well, this changes everything.’ And I think that was the moment that Montana Power started down the road to deregulation.

[02:41:11]

I got to sit in - I was kind of a middle manager for Montana Power and I got to - a lot of times, we'd have to go make presentations in the boardroom to the officers about different things. Since the industrials were about 30% of our market, I had to go up and talk to 'em about that a lot. So I got to sit in on some of their meetings and I was there the day they took a vote that they were gonna go ahead with deregulation at the Montana legislature. And they asked if anybody in the room had any objections to that. I knew some of the other middle managers objected to it, but everybody was silent because it was the officers making the decision. So they made the decision to go down that road and that set us on the path where we - that led to today.

Right about the same time - one of the most interesting things that I ever did with Montana Power was there was a mute kid named Todd Higginbotham. He was raised on the west side over here. He worked at a place called ASIMI, A S I M I, which was advanced silicon in Moses Lake, Washington. And so Todd got wind that ASIMI was gonna expand and build another plant. They were pretty far down the road with their proposal to build this new plant, and it was gonna be in Spokane. They hadn't made a decision yet and they hadn't announced anything, so Todd got together with the management over there and said, ‘You know, Butte is really a good place. You ought to take a look at Butte.’

Nobody knew anything about Butte, and so Todd set up a meeting and he called us up, called up Evan Barrett, and Evan Barrett called me because the biggest thing they needed was electricity. It was really an electric intensive plant. Evan called me, and we had just gone through an exercise a couple years before on Micron. Micron was gonna build a new plant and the BLDC and the local government and everybody put together this big proposal for Micron. But that was reaching way beyond our grasp because it was such a big project.

But we had this proposal - so I think it was about Christmas time that Evan and Jim Smith and I drove to Moses Lake and we took the Micron proposal and we met with the senior US managers for ASIMI and presented this thing to 'em. And it caught their attention. We said, ‘This is Micron. We've got this site that we scoped out and it's all in here.’ So they were impressed with that and then they wanted to know details. I came back and started working on the power end of it, and it was real fortunate because it was over the holidays and when I proposed it, the biggest naysayers at the power company were on vacation, so we kind of just went ahead and did it.

There were like three of us or four of us at the power company that made decisions that probably should have been made by the board of directors. The officers - they were sorta interested in this, but after having gone through Micron, and there was another program called LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Geological Observatory, which was - it was a really big deal, really cool, really dorky kind of thing, really scientific. But I think after crying wolf so many times with these projects, they thought this was just another one. So we went, we charged ahead on it, and pretty soon the management from ASIMI came over and they looked over the site, which was up at Ramsay out here, Silver Bow. And they liked it and I rode out there with a guy named Rick Jones from the Department of Commerce in his Ford Explorer. We showed him all around. Then a couple weeks after we did that, Rick dropped dead at his home. That's why they have Rick Jones Way out there at that site. That's - it came from him.
[02:47:19]

But anyway, we charged ahead and we formed kind of a SWAT group at BLDC and there was Roadie Holman and Evan and Pam Cote and Jim Smitham - I forget the names of everybody that was on there. But there were about seven of us and we worked our hearts out putting together this proposal for 'em. Next thing I know, the senior management - ASIMI was a subsidiary of Komatsu Limited from Japan. You know, Komatsu, the equipment manufacturer. They came over to look at it. None of 'em spoke English and I wound up with the chairman and CEO of Komatsu riding in my Explorer to go out to look at this thing, my brand new Explorer. And I feel him tapping me on the shoulder and I look over and he's holding a cigarette. He’s nodding his head up and down like, ‘Can I smoke in here?’ And I thought, ‘Oh God, my wife is gonna kill me.’ So I said, ‘Yeah.’

Jaap: How do you say no?

Murphy: Anything you want! [laughter] Yeah. So they looked at it and he spoke a little bit of English. And the one thing he said - and I'll never forget it. We're standing out there looking at the site and Mount Fleecer is in the background, and it was really undeveloped. And he said, ‘There's a part of me that doesn't want to disturb this place.’

Jaap: Oh, wow.

Murphy: And that was pretty powerful. Then we moved on from there. I remember the day that - that's right down here, right in that building, the energy building there - when they called from Moses Lake and said they Butte had been selected for the place and we made it. That kind of surprised the officers.

But anyway, that was one of the coolest things that I ever did.

Jaap: That's how I ended up here. My dad worked - I was born in Moses Lake and my dad worked for ASIMI.

Murphy: Oh, is that right? What was his name?

Jaap: Dave Kersting. And so when they built the place -

Murphy: Was he an engineer?

Jaap: Wasn't an engineer. He was like an operator at first and then moved up to different things. He's not with them anymore, but yeah.

Murphy: Well you probably - if I could remember him, you probably know some of the people that came here. Mike Kirschen - he was our main contact and Lyle…

Jaap: Mm-hmm.  Names escape me, but yes.

Murphy: But anyway, we got that and then they had a big dedication ceremony out here and Governor Rosco came down for it. We went and floated on the Big Hole with all these Japanese people and had a big barbecue and everything, and it was pretty interesting. And then deregulation came along and my job changed because I was in charge of all the largest customers and they were the first ones to get choice, where they could go to any supplier and get electricity and not just Montana Power. So we were in competition. Enron was one of our major competitors. Then after that, they decided to get out of the generation-build business, so they sold Colstrip and the dams and all that generation, and they just became a distribution company.

[02:51:25]

Well, my job just went away. It went away overnight. First, the industrials had choice, but they had to be - they could buy power from us, but it had to be from the deregulated side. Well, I could go on and explain that whole model, but it was really complicated. We started selling power competitively, and then one day they came in to me and said, ‘Pull back all the contracts that you got out. We're not gonna do that anymore.’ That was just flat the end of what I was doing.

So then they - fortunately I was on the non-regulated side and two of the officers on the regulated side, Jack Haffie and Dave Johnson - they saw I was gonna get hung out, so they pulled me back to the utility side and they knew that an early retirement option was going to be coming along. So they kinda gave me a make work job on that side till it came along. And then when it was announced, I had enough years and my age was right that it added up to the right number of points and I was able to take the early retirement, so I retired at age 54 - the first time.

And so in the meanwhile - you know, my grandfather had gone to the School of Mines when it was open and my dad graduated from the School of Mines, and my daughter had gone to the Montana Tech and become an environmental engineer, and her husband to be was an environmental engineer. And my wife Judy, after raising two kids, had gone back to school - that's another whole story in itself. She and our daughter and our son-in-law, Doug, all got their degrees in the same graduation ceremony.

Jaap: That's kinda funny.

Murphy: Doug and Annette got their bachelor's and my wife got a master's in Industrial Hygiene, and then she started her second career, her non-mom career. And that's when she wound up - well she worked for NCAT for a while out there, and she enjoyed that. They were really good to her. She knew all the people out there. She loved Grandma Rose, the one that you probably just saw in the paper here that finally retired at what, age 97 or something?

Jaap: Yeah.

Murphy: Yeah. But then she saw an ad in the paper for a job working for the Department of Labor in Helena. So she moved over there and I was still living in Anaconda trying to sell our house, and then my dad died on New Year's Eve of 2001. I had to sell his house out on North Drive. So we finally sold that house. Then I was thinking - after we closed on the house and I was driving up the East Ridge - that I was the last of the Murphys left in Butte. That after dad died and we shut the house down, there was really no Murphy presence in Butte. But I stand corrected on that a little bit because one of my grandfather's brothers - he was JD Murphy and his daughter became Catherine Rotering, who was the wife of a noted attorney in town. And a couple of his kids, her kids, are still in town. One of them just died. I think there's only one left now. But after all those years and all those people - and that doesn't even cover my mother's side, I mean. Finally, we were all gone. I mean, the legacy that started before Montana was a state, you know, it just is gone…and people move on.

Murphy: Anyway, do you have any questions or…

Grant: Well, I do, but I'm wondering if we can schedule another session.

Jaap: Would you wanna - would you be willing to come again - we could always come to you too, John, if you don't wanna drive. Yeah, I know you have a drive.

Murphy: Oh, that's okay. That's an easy drive. It's like I also get to eat at El Taco. [laughter]

Grant: I was wondering if we could schedule you for - well, are we open next Friday or the 15th?

Jaap: We just have this Hispanic event going on in the morning. We could do next Friday.

Murphy: Okay. Let me check here.

Jaap: Next Friday or November 15th are open or any Friday after that, but yeah.

Grant: Yeah. I have a lot of questions, but I also need to eat.

Murphy: Yeah, you wanna come to El Taco? [laughter] I'm sorry. That's, that's an old -

Grant: Bring my recording equipment down there in El Taco! I would like to meet again. I guess I'd like a chance to go back and listen to some of this before we do.

Murphy: Sure. Well you - you got the, I'll speak from the transcript and there's…

Jaap: I'll send you the second one too that John sent this week.

Murphy: A lot of it I skipped over and the one this week is - it's not as complete. That, and my brain gets tired after a while trying to…

Jaap: Oh yeah.

Grant: You've got a lot of history. Awesome. Yeah. So much in your life - from blasting in the pit to Vietnam to Montana Power and Enron and I just - there's so much more to explore, I feel like.

Murphy: Well, my kids have been after me for a long time and they said, ‘Dad, you gotta get some of this stuff down.’ I've been putting it off and putting it off and.

Jaap: Well, and this is a great way to do it because you don't have to go through the act of necessarily writing it down, but you're still getting your story down.

Murphy: Well, yeah. And then it's preserved. I mean, if somebody down the - my great grandkids, hopefully. We got grandkids now. Geez, great grandkids coming up. You know, [if they] wanted to look at it, they could come up here and - that's why I'm talking about, you know, getting some of this stuff to you too. The old scrapbooks downstairs. I could show you the wedding invitation for my great-grandparents in Walkerville, Montana Territories in 1882.

Jaap: That's really cool. Yeah.

Grant: Are there pictures from that time?

Murphy: Yeah. If you got a second I could show you.

Jaap: Yeah. He's got an album. Let me just close all my cups.

Murphy: Let me get a date here and see.

Jaap: Yeah. Whichever is best for you. The first or 15th, or…

Murphy: Fortunately they're both open. I know for being retired, you don't think you get very busy, but, Oh God! [laughs]

Jaap: They are both open?

Murphy: Yeah.

Jaap: So whichever is best for you.

Murphy: We could do the first. That’s a week from today, right?

Jaap: Yeah.

Murphy: Wait. Yeah. I think that'll work. I'll put it down. What time? 11 o'clock again?

Jaap: Yeah.

[02:59:58]

[END OF RECORDING]

********************************************************

Transcript of Second Interview:

Oral History Transcript of John Emmet Murphy (Part Two)

Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview Date: November 1st, 2019
Location: Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives
Transcribed by Clark Grant, November 2022

[General chatter & setup prior to interview beginning]

[00:02:10]

Clark Grant: I'll just move this a little bit closer to you. I definitely have it in my notes that I wanted to follow up more about your work with, you know, industrial consumers of energy and Montana Power.

John Emmet Murphy: Oh, okay.

Grant: So let's start with that, what you had in mind there.

Murphy: Alright. Well, this group was kinda leading the charge on it, and we had Evan Barrett and Pam Cote. So we were trying to think of things to do that we could kind of have a Butte flavor - that we could maybe impress him with. So some of the directors and stuff were going to go to Moses Lake from Japan, and they were gonna have some kinda big decision meeting over there. So we got this brilliant idea to send them lunch - and what would be more Butte than pasties? [laughter]

So naturally we called Paul Cote down at Gamers [Cafe] and we ordered up a whole bunch of pasties, and they put together this great big refrigerated box full of pasties and gravy and ketchup, you know, all the stuff that goes with pasties. And we bundled it up and air freighted it - or sent it FedEx to - Moses Lake. So after a while, we got a call from Moses Lake. ‘What was this that you sent us?’ [laughter] We said, ‘What do you mean? What was this?’ They said, ‘We opened this box and there's this mass of dough and potatoes and it's all covered with this gravy. What are we supposed to do with that?’ Apparently that pasties didn't travel very well.

Jaap: Oh, no.

Murphy: And they - it just - they just got smashed to pieces. And needless to say, the thought was there, but they weren't really impressed with the results. [laughter]

Jaap: So funny.

Murphy: But it was a good idea gone horribly wrong. But I guess that wasn't a deal breaker because they [Komatsu] still came here. But did you have some questions?

Grant: Well, I like the way earlier that you framed it as the single largest investment in the history of Montana. Can you tell us about the process? Because you said it's a fascinating process - or maybe you were referring to their manufacturing process there.

Murphy: Well, both. The process of attracting somebody like that to Montana, but along with the rockets and stuff, I'm kind of a science geek. I like that kinda stuff. One of the things we were looking for in attracting businesses to Montana is their effect on the environment. We wanted something that wasn't gonna be a big polluter, didn't use too much water or that kind of thing. So when we went over and they took us through the plant - I don't know whether you've ever been through it or not, but it's all very enclosed and there's no smoke - maybe some steam and stuff. But what they do is they get this - it's been a long time since I did this. This was Vision 2000, so it's been 20 years, and I think it was ‘89 before that when we started that - it was called Vision 2000.

But anyway, they get in this metallurgical grade sand that's 99% silicon. Then they take that and they, through a special process, they convert it to a gas - it's called silane gas. And maybe you’ve even seen trucks full of it going down the road - big long semis with big long tubes that says silane on the side. That's the gas. And the gas itself is used in etching wafers and stuff for computers. So they sell a lot of gas just by itself. And I don't know where they are in their process now, but that became their main product for a little while because the demand for the silicon wafers was down. So they - once you have the gas, then you bring it into what they call a reactor, and a reactor is like a 16 foot tall Bell jar that's all enclosed. All the air is evacuated out of it.

Then the silane gas goes in there and they put what they call the seed crystal in there. And then around the seed crystal, they pass a tremendous amount of electricity through it. And the process takes the seed crystal and keeps adding more and more silicon around it until eventually you wind up with a baloney of silicon that’s ninety-nine and then nine nines percent pure silicon, which is what they use in computers. And then they take that out - and this is all done in an ultra environment - and then they slice that into wafers and then they would sell the wafers to the computer industry and then the computer industry would take and print their circuit boards and stuff on it. But it's my understanding now that they're using the silicon in solar collectors and making photocells with it.
[00:08:57]

So anyway, that's generally the process and how many reactors they had determined how much electricity they used. Very, very energy intensive project. And one of the reasons they located it at Silver Bow, where it is, is because of the reliability of the Montana Power (at the time) system out there. They built a special substation there so that the plant was being fed from several different directions. And if there was a fault anywhere on the line, it would switch so quickly that it wouldn't affect the process. Because if the power went down, they'd lose hundreds of thousands of dollars of material at a time. So it had to be perfectly reliable, almost uninterruptible, so that was one of the reasons they chose the site. But everybody pulled together. From the time we went over, we immediately got the State of Montana working on it. The electric deal we put together with them was unique and we had to have special contracts with them. And at the same time, everything we did had to be approved by the Public Service Commission.

Grant: Oh really?

Murphy: So we had to go beg for permission there and try to get them on board with it. And it was one of those things that the stars all just lined up so fast. It was like it was meant to be. We were neck and neck with Spokane because they thought they had the project in the bag. Then we stepped in at the last minute and started giving them problems. The folks at ASIMI were running between Spokane and Butte, finding out what each of the different places could do with them, so we were constantly - not in a bidding war, because it was blind - we didn't know exactly what each side was offering. So we just kept after it. Lo and behold, I remember that day when we got the call from Moses Lake, that we got the project, and everybody was hooting and hollering and then they had a big press conference down at the business development center. We had people from the government and I was there for Montana Power and we all made statements and stuff. And so it was - it was a big deal.

Then it wasn't too long after that - they came over for the ground breaking and they had a big party and a barbecue and they went and floated on the Big Hole, had a big water fight. So here are all these executives from ASIMI floating down the river, throwing buckets of water on each other. This one guy reached in with the bucket and pulled it up, and was gonna throw it - turns out, he had a 14 inch brown trout in there [laughs]. It was kinda surprising.

[00:13:04]

When they first went out to look at the site with us, they were building roads - or when the Japanese people did - they were building roads. Like I told you before, the CEO of Komatsu was riding in the front seat with me, and we were looking around all the road building equipment. Komatsu is a big heavy equipment maker. And he looked around and he got very - turned to his helpers in the back and he was pointing out and he goes, cat, cat, cat, cat! No Komatsu! [laughter]

Grant: That's funny.

Murphy: So in the background of that picture that I showed you is a Komatsu backhoe. I think they insisted they used Komatsu equipment in the building of it. But that in the thumbnail is kind of what we did.

Grant: And that's the same guy who hesitated for a moment because he didn't want to disturb that valley.

Murphy: Yeah, he did. Yeah.

Grant: That was a profound moment, I thought.

Murphy: It was. He was like totally sincere about it. You could hear in his voice because he kinda lowered it and he was just looking and he was in awe because it was a beautiful place with Mount Fleecer in the background. I think it was springtime and there was antelope out there. It was like a Charlie Russell painting. Somebody did that. But he looked at it, and it really surprised me because sometimes you view people like that as not having a heart - it's all dollar oriented. But he took a deep breath and he knew what was gonna happen out there. But I think fortunately when you look at the footprint and what's out there - I always have to kind of remember where it is to see where it is out there. It's a very kind of contained place. You don't have smokestacks and steam and stuff out of there. So I think he was sensitive to that. I don't know whether that ever made it into his reports or affected his thinking.

[00:15:28]

Grant: Was anybody ever sensitive to that at Montana Power?

Murphy: Oh yeah, we were. I worked on the Colstrip three and four project too because - this was the 1970s and the demand for electricity was really growing up. As a public utility, we were required to meet the load when it showed up. We had all of these planners and it was big computer programs called ProMod, which was ‘production model.’ It was showing that we were going to wind up being short of electricity, and the approval for the project had dragged on and on and on. A lot of the environmentalists were very much against it, and their argument was that Colstrip was gonna become the boiler room of the nation because of mine-mouth generating plants being over there. So Montana Power put together a speaker's bureau of seven different speakers, one for each division, to go out and explain the project to the public. I got selected to be the one from the Butte division, so I was traveling around talking to Rotary and Kiwanis and the commissioners and anybody who'd listen, League of Women Voters - explaining the project. Originally I think the project started out to cost about $500 million dollars. And by the time it was finished, it had almost doubled, with most of that being in state of the art pollution control equipment that had been added on. They tried to go with the best available control technology to control the effluent from the smoke.

But anyway, they were very conscious of all the environmental effects, and along with the project was the 500 kilovolt line that you see if you go over Boulder pass. It runs all the way from Colstrip to Hot Springs.

Grant: Wow.

Murphy: And it was really the backbone of the system because that's how they delivered the electricity from Colstrip to our partners on the West coast. And there was roaring controversy over that too because - there are all kinds of arguments. ‘You should ship the coal and not suffer the losses on the line.’

Grant: Sure.

Murphy: And so there were all kinds of people arguing that. And then I remember they - a lot of work was done on keeping the line from being visible. One of the big arguments was not running it along a ridge line, so it's on top and very visible. I remember our engineers working day and night trying to find routes where it wouldn't run along the ridge line. Nowadays I kinda chuckle at that because - where's the best place to locate wind turbines? It's on the ridge line. So you wind up driving along to these different places and all these wind turbines whose towers are taller than the electric transmission towers and…I guess times change.

[00:20:05]

But anyway, Montana Power was very interested in maintaining the environment because we're all from Montana. We gotta live here too, you know? And we did the best we could to minimize the impact on that.

Grant: When did that line go in from Colstrip to Hot Springs?

Murphy: I think it was about 1980.

Grant: Really?

Murphy: 79-80, in that range. We were looking at energy shortages in ‘79 and ‘80, to keep up with the demand. Because we had a very robust demand curve at that time. And conservation was in its infancy and just coming in, and the same with alternative generation from other producers. So anyway, it was a complicated business.

Grant: Do you have any insight into the process of building such a thing? I mean, you must have to get in touch with hundreds of landowners and convince 'em to sell.

Murphy: Oh yeah. It's a huge process.

Grant: Yeah. How would you even -

Murphy: You look at just the 500 KV line where you're - Colstrip is way over in Eastern Montana and Hot Springs is nearly as far as you can get in Western Montana. And so you cross a lot of land, government land, Native American land - there were all of these stakeholders along the way. I forget who all was in our land department at the time, but they were always going out and trying to get easements, which was kind of a fluid thing too, because between the regulators and the environmentalists, the routes were kinda like constantly changing.

And then, actually there was some federal land - I don't know whether it was reservation land or something in western Montana that they couldn't get an easement across. We were talking about the five partners that were in the Colstrip project - they were all private utilities. It was kind of a bottleneck, and then Bonneville stepped in and said, ‘We won't have any problem going across there,’ for whatever reasons, because a lot of it was federal land. And so the line from Coltstrip to Townsend was built by the five partners and then the line from Townsend to Hot Springs was built by the Bonneville Power Administration. Because everybody kinda used the lines because it isn't a one way thing. Power goes in and it goes out. Like one of our engineers said, ‘electricity is kind of squishy stuff. It goes where it wants to go.’ So there's a lot involved in it.

Grant: I'd be curious to hear more about Bob Gannon as an individual.

Murphy: I went to high school with - I was a couple years behind Bob at Butte Central. I think when I came to work at Montana Power, he was a staff attorney. He was working in the legal department. And I didn't - I didn't really have too much to do with him. I knew of him in high school. I didn't know him. I knew everybody respected him. I knew he was a huge Notre Dame fan. [laughs] Montana Power was kind of like the Democrats and the Republicans. Only it was the engineers and the lawyers [that] were the two groups. [laughs] I think that's probably true in any industry. Things kinda ran depending on - [phone rings]

Sorry about that.

‘Grandpa, answer your phone.’ [ring tone]

Grant: Better answer it huh?

Murphy: I forgot to turn that off. Those are my four grandkids. I'll turn that off.

Grant: The things I've learned of Bob Gannon have primarily been from newspaper articles at the time, or anecdotes we've heard in this room from someone who lost their pension. I don't know enough about the chain of events to assign blame to him or not.

Murphy: [pause] I don't know. I really liked and respected Bob.

Grant: Yeah.

Murphy: But [pause] - and I think everybody that I knew in the company got along with him until there was a change in the company. I don't know what it was, whether it was - whether Goldman Sachs brought that along by giving him some bad information and direction.

[00:26:41]

But once deregulation happened and things started to change around the company - we had a middle manager group that met every - I think it was every Wednesday. We were kind of brainstorming, trying to figure out new directions for the company and things that we could do and make recommendations to senior management as to what to do. We had endless discussions about it. But there was just some kind of a change in there that happened, and it was like senior management kind of pulled away. Up until then it was a very collegial type of operation where they'd call middle managers in and sometimes to a fault, we'd beat a subject to death. It was analysis paralysis all over. Then all of a sudden, they started making - the officers started making decisions in a background, or I mean in a vacuum. People would make recommendations and they just weren't heard. So there were several people that changed up there. I don't know, I didn't have too much contact with them at that level on a day to day CEO level. Sometimes I'd have a major problem with a large industrial customer or something and I’d go and ask his advice and you know, ‘which way do you want this to go?’ We discussed things like that.

But when it came down to the nitty gritty of the decisions that were being made - it was kind of a surprise because I remember going into several meetings. The one in particular was when they called us all in and told us they were gonna get rid of the generation and we were just gonna become a transmission and distribution and communications company. Um, that caught everybody flat footed because I was in the middle of some big negotiations like with Exxon and stuff over electric contracts. That's after competition had opened up. My boss called me in after that meeting and said, ‘We're done with that. We're not gonna go out and compete in that market anymore. So whatever you're doing with those contracts, just drop it.’ And that was it. That was the day my job went away. I mean, it was gone. But there were a lot of changes and I don't think they were for the good at that time. That's when they came along - I think it was not too long after that they offered an enhanced retirement for people that were - they'd add your age to your years of service and if you totaled a certain number, then you could be eligible for this early retirement. And so they offered that to - I think there were like 250 middle managers and they were expecting a small, small group to take it. And as it turned out, a lot of people took it and their entire knowledge base of things went away. And, [pause] well, I'll just say that about it.

Grant: How would Goldman Sachs make money off of that? What was their role in it?

Murphy: I'm not sure. I wasn't behind that, but that was some of the hearsay that I heard. I think that was in the Montana Power, the lawsuit that the shareholders and the employees brought against Montana Power to try and recoup some of the losses. In reading some of that testimony, it sounded like Goldman was pushing them to make decisions that should have been made by the board of directors. And they were just making them and going ahead with them. I'm sure there were consulting fees and a lot of things because Goldman Sachs was very good at making money.

Grant: They still are today, I would say.

Murphy: Oh yeah. They're huge. They're huge. But like you said, a lot of employees lost a lot of money on that, including an employee in this room. The way it was set up - the company contributed to our 401ks and our 401ks were - their contribution was Montana Power stock. So after being with Montana Power for so long, I had a lot of shares of Montana Power stock.

[00:34:04]

My financial advisors and stuff said, ‘um, get out. You can't have that much in one thing.’ Except the rules were at the time - and I don't know whether they were federal rules or company rules or whatever - you could contribute into your own 401k and I did that. And you could control what to do with that, whether you wanted it in stocks or bonds or different investments. But the Montana Power stock that they contributed, you couldn't touch until you were 55. Once you turned 55, you could convert like 20 or 25% of that Montana Power stock. You could pull it out and convert it to something else, but you had to be 55 and you could only do a small percentage. I was 54 when I took the early retirement and all of this change was going on.

Montana Power stock started dropping like a rock. And once you retired, it took time for you to get your - to where you could get your hands on the stock certificates. By the time I finally controlled that stock, [it] was down to a fraction of what it was before. And I kept saying to myself, ‘Well, I'm just gonna stick it out. It can't go any lower.’ But eventually it wound up at zero, so. But anyway, I decided that I could sit around and be mad and miserable my whole life or move on. So I moved on.

Grant: Mm-hmm. Sometimes when I'm driving around uptown, I think about the callousness of financial trading that happens in the stratosphere and the effects it has on people, working people in a place like Butte. Then I see the headframes standing still now. Does it affect you to see the hill so silent, quiet?

Murphy: Oh, not just the hill. All of Butte is a totally different place from when I started remembering. Some of the things we described last time - Butte was a very vibrant place. I mean, my grandparents were here in the heyday. And I've got pictures of my grandmother and her sisters uptown and it was big city life. Women didn't go out unless they had nice dresses, hats, wore gloves, and guys all wore ties. In fact, I was looking at some Columbia Gardens pictures and everybody's out at the Gardens in suits and ties. [laughs]

But I mean, it's kind of depressing when I come to Butte now. Even 20 years ago when I was working at Montana Power, at noon, we'd go out and walk around town. Everybody would be walking around town. There'd be a lot of traffic and a lot of people and restaurants and buildings. Just one by one, they started to go away. In the sixties and seventies, places burned down, big chunks of town. Partially, the mine was still growing back then, and people weren't sure which way it was going to go.

So there was a reticence there as far as - ‘should we rebuild the uptown?’ Because people were very concerned that the uptown might have the same fate that Meaderville and McQueen did, that the pit just might keep coming this way. And I think that concern started even before the pit started, or shortly thereafter when they started the block caving from the Kelley operation. That was very close to town. There were just so many different effects coming in and it was kind of like a creeping effect.

[00:39:20]

I felt kinda hopeful after ASIMI came in that that might help kickstart Butte in a new direction. And we worked really [moves mic stand] hard with the Butte Local Development Corporation and stuff, trying to use ASIMI as kind of a hub, or a hook out there for the whole high tech, silicon industry. I think it was one of the Japanese guys that was here talking about it. He said, ‘Well, you've got Silicon Valley and Silicon Desert,’ and they've got all these names for these different places. He said, ‘You ought to call this Silicon Mountain.’ And so we did, we developed a whole advertising program around that.

Grant: Oh, interesting.

Murphy: And then for years, well probably four or five years, we went down to - every year there's a big convention in San Francisco called SemiCon, the Semiconductor Industry. So we'd take our t-shirts and our advertising material - we weren't trying to sell machines, but we were trying to sell a location. And ASIMI was really good at working with us. They gave us a lot of contacts and we were talking to Koreans and anybody that was involved in that industry and trying to find out where new plants were going to be created.

And it's a hugely competitive place. I mean yeah, the silicon business - because the Chinese and the Russians were coming into it and they were building government subsidized silicon plants that ASIMI was trying to compete with. And then we had a problem with the remoteness of Montana and Butte. We weren't exactly a San Jose or Silicon Valley.

Grant: Yeah, really.

Murphy: So we had a lot of obstacles to overcome. We were hopeful that we could build Butte up a little bit like that, but we never did get any big hits. We actually did much better in Bozeman, because they've got kind of a high tech hook over there that I think we helped jumpstart. But it is sad when you come to Butte and see - you remember what was there, you know, that Hennessy’s was a big vibrant department store and there were all these stores around town. There was another department store called Burr’s. And Pennies, and all up and down Park Street there - just tons of people milling around and it really felt alive.

Now some days you can go and shoot a rifle down Park Street and not hit anything. It's just kinda sad, but when you look at what the people of Butte have endured over the years with strikes and comings and goings and the fluctuating price of copper - they never give up. They just keep plugging along.

It was a big impact when ARCO shut down the mining activity here. I remember the big push to get the mine reopened and Don Peoples and Frank Gardner and some of that stuff. Of course, they were one of our large customers too, and we did some pretty innovative stuff as far as electric rates and stuff to try and get them to reopen, by giving them a lower rate for electricity. But we were - we didn't want to give 'em too low a rate for electricity and have the price of copper go way up and them be successful. So we indexed the price of electricity to the price of copper.

Grant: Really? Wow.

Murphy: So if the price of copper went through the roof and they started making tons of money, we'd get a chunk of that.

Grant: Yeah. You get paid too.

Murphy: Yeah.

Grant:How did those negotiations take place? Did you have any part in that?

[00:44:37]

Murphy: Oh yeah. Well that was a big part of my job. I think I was still working for Bill Sherwood at the time. He was the boss over all the industrials. I think there were like 16 major industrials that made up about 30% of Montana Power’s load. So it was a big deal and millions of dollars. But you know, we were dealing with people from Denny Washington's group, because he was thinking about opening it up. And then we had Butte-Silver Bow, you know, Don Peoples and stuff. It wasn't their contract, but they were power brokers and they were influencing us.

And of course we were Montanans and we were Butte people and we wanted it to open, but the Public Service Commission was looking right over our shoulder and they're the ones that had to approve any rates. We couldn't unilaterally set the rates. So since they did that and they were looking out for all the consumers in Montana, they were watching that we didn't do something that caused other consumers’ rates to go up. So it was a pretty complex balancing act. There were a lot of people involved. Again, the supply/demand curve went in there - was bringing them back on gonna trigger us having to build another Colstrip plant? Or if they went away, their chunk of revenue that went to supporting the system went away - it was a fixed plot, so other people's rates could go up. There were a lot of stakeholders and it was a lot of people, a lot of lobbyists and lawyers and engineers involved in it, endless meetings. But it was complicated negotiations.

Grant: Whose idea was it to peg it to the price of copper? Was that something you came up with?

Murphy: I think I give credit to Dick Cromer for that. I don't know whether you ever met Dick. He was a little bit older than I was, by about a year or so. He was town manager in Anaconda when I got transferred down to Anaconda. He and I kind of followed each other around there for a while and we both wound up somehow working on this project. We were trying to figure out, with the new operation, just what I told you - we don't want to give away the store.

Grant: Yeah.

Murphy: Because that always had a way of coming back to you from the Public Service Commission, If you did something that negatively affected the consumers, they'd try to rectify it. So I think he was the one that came up with the idea and sold it. Then we had to come up with a formula that - what index do you use? There's three or four different copper indexes and we had to learn all about global metal markets and that kind of thing. So every month when I did the bill, I'd have to go in and look at the metal markets and see which way they were going. There was a floor we could never go below if the price went away. But once it started going up, then we had to allow the rate to float up with it, and at the same time be able to explain it to the accountants and the Public Service Commission and everything. There was a lot of reporting that went with that too.

Jaap: Did you take like an average of the month's copper price, or was there a - like if it fluctuated significantly during the month?

Murphy: You know, I couldn't - [laughs]

Grant: We wanna see the formula!

Murphy: It fluctuated. I don't remember, but I suspect it was probably an average. But that was a long, long time ago. [laughs]

Grant: The Public Service Commission - they had to be tolerated because it was the law I guess, but was it adversarial with them?

Murphy: Yes. It was - I think their decisions affected everything that went on later on. I mean, I could probably do another two hours on what happened in the electric industry going back to - I think it was 1978-1979, when the federal government passed the Public Utility Regulatory Policy Act, PURPA, as they called it. That was the first start of opening up electric markets. And it also said that public utilities were required to buy power produced by independent power producers.

[00:51:15]

And then it was one thing went on to another - the telephone company had gone through this a couple years ahead of us, in deregulating it. Before deregulation happened for them, AT&T had their own lines. Then with deregulation, they came out and said, ‘Well, anybody can use AT&T’s lines as long as they pay 'em a fee for using it.’ So they went on to the same thing with electric transmission and later distribution - you had to open up the lines so that an Enron could buy power in California and ship it to the Anaconda Company here in Butte, and then they'd be charged what they called the wheeling charge over your transmission and distribution to get the power in there. But you weren't supplying the power.

So then, how do you do that for - you had residential and commercial and industrial customers in there, so you had to balance all those stakeholders, but there was just huge, huge change starting in the seventies with that. The Public Service Commission was trying to balance pretty much everybody's interests. But it wasn't the industrials and the commercial people that voted them into office - it was the residential. Often they would shift costs to the industrials to keep rates low for the residentials. There was all of this balancing act going on and shifting of costs. Then they got into - nevermind. I won't go into all of that because I could go. [laughs]

Grant: I just wanted to ask - what in your opinion is the philosophy behind deregulation? We see what it results in, but why do it?

Murphy: Yeah. I've kind of wondered that. Supposedly it's - I think people were thinking that it would lower costs to everybody. Because at the time you had - Montana was a very low cost producer/supplier of electricity and California was a very high cost producer. But residential customers in California look at a residential customer in Montana and think, ‘they're paying a third of what we are. Why can't we buy from them?’ But they couldn't because of all the different steps you had to go through. I don’t know - electrical markets are fascinating in themselves.

Grant: I’ll say.

Murphy: I remember over here in the Hennessy building - we had what they called a trading floor, which was just like the New York Stock Exchange. They had news televisions and they had weather stations up on the wall. And they'd watch the weather because a lot of times you could buy on the spot market real cheap. Like in the springtime you would have all the runoff. Well you run the water through the dams and the dams were your cheapest production. So you wind up with all of this real cheap electricity and your electric heating loads and stuff aren't there anymore, so you have a big surplus. So you sell this cheap electricity that you've kind of gotta get rid of at a real low price, but it may only last for a month.

[00:56:24]

So you have all this trading of futures and all of that kind of stuff. That's the same type of thing that got Enron into control. ASIMI was in that up to their ears - all of the industrials were. It's something that's really, really complicated and you'd have to kind of step through, step by step, to understand it. But it was this desire for really cheap electricity that was available sometimes and other times it wasn't available. What you're buying for 3 cents today may go up to 70 or 80 cents later. And if you were an industrial customer and you were relying strictly on short term power, that would be a huge impact. So we had a lot of industrial customers that were installing their own diesel generators and stuff on site at their plants. So they'd buy spot market electricity from us, but then when the price got too high - not from us, but from the market - then when the price got too high, they'd switch on their diesel generators because the price of fuel to run the generators was a lot less than the price of electricity.

And then there was a lot of - some of 'em converted to coal because there was a real coming gas shortage in the late 1970s. Literally you'd pick up Newsweek or National Geographic or any of these magazines and everybody was really concerned that by 1978 or 1979, the world was flat gonna run out of natural gas. There was this big huge discussion about [whether] we should preserve the natural gas for its best usage, which was like in pharmaceuticals and things that we really couldn't live without, that at the time couldn't be produced without natural gas. So the price of gas went through the roof. Montana Power got most of its - not most of it, but I think it was over 50% - of its natural gas from Canada. And Canada was feeling the crunch too. Gas contracts that had gone for a dollar or two dollars were creeping up around $5 per thousand cubic feet.

So I was working in marketing at the time where we'd go out and hook up customers to electric or gas. The company made the decision that we weren't going to install natural gas in subdivisions anymore. So we quit doing that and we were encouraging customers to go all electric. Well, the regulators and stuff were really concerned about that too. I don't know whether it's a federal law or - somewhere there came a regulation that you couldn't use natural gas for boiler fuel anymore, like in big industrial boilers, like in pulp mills or like the smelter in Anaconda. Our cement manufacturing facilities - they were using just tons of natural gas. So they started converting over everything from old tires to coal, coke - anything that would burn, they were converting over. Which - whenever you move a marble in the jar, everything else moves, and people were concerned about its effect on the environment. I think the mine shut down for a while because the prices got to where it was outta reach for 'em - they just couldn't make a profit.

But anyway, once the price got up around $4 or $5, the producers started coming up with more ideas on how to search for natural gas, and a lot of drilling started taking place, especially in Western Montana - I mean Western Canada. And gradually they started finding more and more natural gas. Lo and behold, five years later we've got the gas bubble, which was this huge - production had gone through the roof. And then they started doing, you know, in recent years, fracking and stuff like that, tha helped produce natural gas. So now we've gone from where we were telling customers that there wasn't gonna be any natural gas in the future, and everybody was all in a tizzy about that. You get all these scare articles in the paper and in the magazines about how the world was gonna get by without natural gas to - so much natural gas we don't know what to do with it. And now we can use it in generating plants to produce electricity, offsetting coal. So you have these great big swings up and down of things that have happened, but that's kind of that story.

Grant: How about Montana Resources and Dennis Washington coming in, you know. On the whole, do you think it's been positive for Butte?

Murphy: Oh, absolutely. I think putting that back in - because Butte was really depressed when that was down and people got very discouraged too, and they were at an all time low because there wasn't work. I mean, Butte had the hospital, it had the MHD facility out there, and a couple other small things, but you didn't have an industrial base to kind of drive things. Mining is very specialized. You don't have - those people didn't have a lot of skills that they could convert to computer programming and stuff readily. Plus a lot of those miners were getting kinda old. So it was a real down time in Butte and I think it was Don Peoples that really took the bull by the horns on that and I really respect him for doing that.

[01:04:37]

Then everybody jumped on the bandwagon, and Frank Gardner - he got involved in it, and Ray Tillman. Then they came to us and they said, ‘Well, what can you do?’ And then we started talking to the Commission, the Public Service Commission, because we couldn't do anything without their approval. They were supportive. They said, ‘Well, come up with an idea and then show us what it is and we will rule on it then.’ But they didn't discount it offhand. So it was a real community effort. I remember the politicians and the congressional level - they were helpful. And of course all the Butte and Anaconda and Great Falls politicians were very much on board with it too. So I think it was a very positive thing when it opened back up.

Grant: Well, and I wonder nowadays what the real obstacle is to Butte’s economic development, because that seems to me a primary concern in the local government. You know, and organizations like the BLDC of course are always working to try and attract investment here. And if it can't be of an industrial nature, then it seems almost impossible right now to attract those people. I wonder how much of that is the visual impact of Montana Resources. Do you ever drive into Butte now and see that second pit over there and think, ‘my god, you know?’

Murphy: I think Butte people are mining blind. [laughs]

Grant: Every time I'm on Harrison, I'm like, ‘God, look at it.’ You know? And people I'm riding around with that are from here are like, ‘Look at what?’

Murphy: Yeah, ‘What?’ It's just not there. I mean, it's just - you live with it, you grew up with it. It's there. It's your bread and butter. It's what sends you to college. It’s what supports your kids. I remember Don Peoples getting up and talking about his kids and his daughter or something that didn't want to grow up. He was really concerned about that. He said, ‘Why don't you wanna grow up?’ And she said something to the effect of ‘Because then when I grow up I'm going to have to move away to find a job.’ And she wanted to stay home.

So I think people understand it. I mean, you look back - well I didn't tell you those stories yet about when my grandmother and great aunts and stuff were little kids. They used to talk a lot about having to wear masks to go to school because the smelting activity was so bad. In fact, I just found a newspaper article from one of my great great aunts and she was talking about that and she said, ‘and we went and it burned our eyes, but we didn't mind.’ I mean, it was just the thought process. They also used to, on weekends, sometimes they'd hop in the car and they'd drive way out. They lived on the west side. They'd drive way out on the flat because there was a tree out there that was alive. And they'd go out and look at it because everything was dead. There weren't any cats in Butte because the arsenic would settle on the ground and the cats would walk in it and then they'd lick and clean their paws. Goodbye cat, I mean.

They'd talk about having to walk to the street car to go to school and sometimes their parents would have to take 'em because the smoke was so thick they couldn't see the end of the block and the parents wanted to make sure they got there. But when you live there, it's a fact of life. Both of you are young enough that - in the late sixties and early seventies, you looked at what was happening in Los Angeles and stuff, and even to some extent in Butte when there weren't any pollution controls going on, or before the catalytic converter was invented and the pollution was just horrible. I mean, the air we have today is hundreds of times better than it was back then. But I think you kind of grow with your environment. Clark and I were talking earlier about when you first come to Butte, it's a shock because you look around and - well, I can remember when there weren't even trees really on the East Ridge over here. It was just kind of bare and there weren't a lot of trees around town either. But then eventually it changed. But that's what people saw when they came in.

[01:10:29]

I guess if you're entirely a visual person, that would probably affect you. But it's way better now than it was then. It's a lot prettier. You still have the mine sitting there, which isn't very pretty, but people realize that's their bread and butter. It may not be your bread and butter, you think, if you're working in the hospital, but who are you treating in the hospital? They're treating miners. And you look at the way money flows in a community and you need those base industries.

Grant: The sense I'm getting from what you're saying [is that] any economy, it seems, is based on those industrial consumers of energy and producers of wealth, whether it's mining or agriculture. But I just don’t - in Butte, it seems almost double edged. Like in order to have the mine, we have to have a place where people don't wanna live. It kinda reminds me of the transmission lines - that if they were out of sight, out of mind, it was a much better thing. People don't hesitate to consume electricity, but they don't wanna see the big lines on the ridge, you know? And I think in a way, if this mine wasn't so close to town, if it wasn't visible, then Butte would be way better off. Because people don't want to see the results of their consumption.

Murphy: But you've got a mine where the minerals are! [laughs]

Grant: Right, you know, and these people inconveniently built the town right next to the mineral deposit, on top of it.

Murphy: It's always amazed me how in various places, not Butte per se, but you look at some of these urban areas and they locate the airport 17 miles out of town where it won't bother anybody. And 30 years later, the town is built around the airport and everybody's complaining about the noise. You know, it's a chicken and egg type of thing - which came first, and who has the right to be there? You do the best you can at the time. It's like trying to locate a mine in Montana now. It's practically impossible to open a new operation. So I guess the alternative is you buy the copper from Chile where there's no regulation down there and destroy somebody else's environment, but still keep giving me the copper for my cell phone.

Grant: Right.

Murphy: As a consumer, we demand the metals and stuff. I think one of the most poignant bumper stickers that I ever saw was ‘if it can't be grown, it's gotta be mined.’ And you try to think of exceptions to that and you - there are just so many factors, population. I have a brother-in-law who’s a farmer/rancher down by Missoula, and they used to live way outta town by Frenchtown. But now Missoula is growing out there.

Jaap: That’s not out of town anymore.

Murphy: And so what used to be farmland and stuff out there - he'd raise alfalfa and he did cows and they did sheep and stuff, but he's my age and he's retiring and put the ranch up for sale and now it's called open space. And so you have a whole bunch of competing interests there for this land that was just once farmland. People wanna preserve it as open space or conservation easement or that type of thing. Again, it's just change. You've got all these competing interests for this land, and what they're willing to pay for it. So I don't know, there's just - I guess it's one thing as you age, you see so many of these iterations and changes going through. There's just no black and white solution to any of it. You can't have your cell phone without somebody -

Jaap:I just had this conversation the other day. It was someone a little younger than me who just moved here, and [they said], ‘I don't get why they're still mining here. I mean, did you not learn your lesson?’

And I got a little argumentative. I said, ‘Well, you know, if it is our tax base, if that mine wasn’t out there, you don't have parks. You don't have people taking care of your roads.’

Grant: You think the roads are bad now?

Jaap: Yeah. I mean, it's a huge - and they just said, ‘Well, I just don't get it.’ I said, ‘Well then put away your cell phone and turn off that computer.’ And I said that ‘if you can't grow it, you mine it.’ I mean, there's only one situation. So that's, it's really interesting because people do think, well, why? And it is that, ‘Well, if it could just be elsewhere.’ Right. But then you put it in someone else's backyard.

Grant: One of my favorite bumper stickers is, ‘Earth first, we'll mine the other planets later.’ [laughter]

Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. You're turning into a Butte native, I can tell.

Grant: Okay. Alright. Right. Hopefully one of these days I'll fit in.

Murphy: No, but I mean - I don't think miners are insensitive to all of that. I mean, this is your home. I mean, I saw the things that my dad went through when the pit was ordered to expand into Meaderville. My dad had all kinds of Italian friends. In fact, Tino Grosso, who ran the Aro, was a good friend of his.

[01:17:30]

We went fishing one day with Tino and he brought along a cook named Armando Palagi with us. And he wasn't gonna fish. He was just gonna be the cook. Joe Peglaro was there and my dad and me, and we went down by Dillon and we got out and we're getting set up. Armando broke out all his cooking stuff and he had tables and stoves and everything, and he put this all together. I think it was about 10 o'clock, and he said, ‘Okay, go fishing and be back here exactly at noon.’

So we did. We went fishing on this stream and then we came back and Armando had this spread. I mean, it was a typical Meaderville spread - all the anti pasta and everything, all this fabulous food. But that's what he -he liked to cook. I don't know whether he cooked in Meaderville or whether he was just friends of these guys. But nonetheless, then the lawyers moved in, started buying up the houses, and the mine started moving that way. These were people's homes. And there were homes in history and ethnicity there that was, you know, priceless. I remember my dad always talking about when they were tearing down the homes - the wine cellars they'd find and all of these wine barrels and stuff.

I remember - [laughs] - my dad came home one day and it was kinda late at night. And where we lived, there was this couple living next door to us. I think their name was Lempke, Nina and Rupert Lempke. Rupert was an IRS agent. He worked for the revenue department, he was a revenuer. And so Dad waited until the lights went out and they went to bed. He went out to the car and he brought in, [he was] carrying this big, huge thing covered in a blanket. It turned out to be a slot machine. One of his buddies in Meaderville had given him a slot machine, which of course was like, totally illegal. You weren't allowed to have slot machines in Montana, and it was regulated by the revenue department. So dad brought it in. We played with the slot machine for a while with all the curtains closed and lights out.

So then dad - he got so nervous about having it in the house that he put it out in the garage, and two days later it disappeared. I don't know where it went, but he was sweating bullets. And this Rupert was - he was probably in his sixties and a real nice guy. I don't think he'd have cared, but it was something that one of dad's friends in Meaderville - apparently there was probably a place where they had a lot of these going on down there, but when they were moving things around, he just gave dad this slot machine.

But, you know, all those places - and the Meaderville Fire Department and the Christmas card they had every year and um [pause]...you know, all of that is just gone.

[01:21:31]

I think the people of Butte, just like with the Columbia Gardens - it's just a gut wrenching thing when that goes away. But the alternative is your job goes away if it can't expand and go that way. But it still hurts. I mean, whether you work downtown or whether you work in the pit, you're all dependent on that. [pause] And I don't know. It's all place related.

Grant: Hmm. What do you mean by that?

Murphy: Oh, I mean you live here because of the minerals. I live here because of the minerals. My family came from Ireland because of the minerals. They ran out in Ireland and so they moved to eventually wound up in Butte. People from all over the world. I mean the ethnicity - what would Butte have been without it being the richest hill on Earth? And if they hadn't found that copper deposit, what would it have been? I mean, you can sit around and talk philosophy about that for hours and hours.

Grant: Sure, sure.

Murphy: And we have, I mean. But the place makes the people and then people make the place. Butte was a very ethnic community and I can remember that growing up too. You might have noticed Butte isn't always politically correct. [laughs] We used to call each other, you know, a Cousin Jack or a Mick or a Bohunk or whatever. Nobody thought anything about it. That was just a means of identification. Everybody got along pretty well because your life may depend on your partner and your partner might not be from where you're from. So everybody kind of just adapted to it. I shouldn't say everybody because there's always people who don't get along.

I remember [laughs] when we lived in Anaconda, my daughter was - she was in about first grade and she was talking to her little friend in the other room. I was in the kitchen with my wife where she was making dinner. We heard the girls talking in there and my little daughter said, ‘Well,’ she said, ‘We're Catholic. What are you?’ The other little girl thought for a minute. And she said, ‘Well, my mom said we're Bohunk.’ [laughter] And then they just went on playing, and we were out in the kitchen just dying laughing. It was so funny.

But we had a lot of good friends of every nationality - or like when the Cubans were here. I think they were really widely accepted in the community. The women loved them because they were unique and colorful and Hispanic, good looking guys. So everybody got along. They were very accepting. I didn't really understand racism till my wife and I moved to Virginia in the sixties. And there were a couple things that happened back there which were real eye openers because we're so isolated out here. You read about those things and you just don't understand them. But when you're living them, it's a whole different ball game. But conditions now are so much better than they were back then. So, anyway, I'm rambling again.

Grant: No, that's quite alright. One thing that strikes me is - there's all kinds of ways in which you can't go home. You know, even if your home is still standing, maybe you've changed, the home has changed. In the case of Meaderville, not only are the buildings not there, but the very earth they stood upon is not there, which you blasted some of that apart, right? I mean, that to me has always been kind of profound - that the very ground that these towns stood on itself too is gone. And that I always ask, when we have folks and we start talking about the expansion of the pit, sacrificing the ethnic neighborhoods. Was it really worth it now that you're able to look back after all these years? And was it worth it?

Murphy: Yeah. That's like an onion. That's a multilayered question too. It might be worth it to a Meaderville citizen whose life depended on mining - might not be worth it to the miner’s widow who - that was her home. But in a way, it kinda wound up with some of these communities reforming and resettling up in the…

Grant: McGloan Heights.

Murphy: McGloan Heights. That's where all the wine barrels went. [laughter]

[01:28:24]

But I mean, it's never the same. It's not just Butte, it's everywhere. I mean, you look at - how did all these Irishmen get here? It's because what they had in Ireland changed and they couldn't live there anymore. I mean, true - the land is still there, but what they had is gone. [pause] Anyway.

Grant: Blasting kind of sounds like fun.

Murphy: Yeah, I kinda liked that! [laughter]

Jaap: I heard about that last week. Was it Hawaii? That was that example you used?

Murphy: Yeah. Right, right.

Grant: The whole Earth.

Jaap: Hawaii floating up.

Murphy: Well, it's impressive and it's powerful, and in a way there's an art to it now. I mean, how they do it and how their blast was set up and the timing and everything. It wasn't just people putting powder in the ground and touching it off, most of the time. [laughter] But just being able to see that and feel the power and when you see what explosives can do. And I noticed that too in the military. It's pretty powerful when you're pretty close to a six inch gun and it goes off. I wear hearing aids because I did that. But there's just something about that power that - you almost have to experience it.

I enjoyed working down the pit and I enjoyed working - I was thinking about that the other day, kind of the camaraderie of all the guys that worked down there. You'd meet up at the Berkeley office down there and change into your work clothes and then go out and get on the bus, and then the bus would go around to the individual shovel locations. And there were three-man crews. There was the shovel operator, the oiler, and the cat skinner. On our particular shovel, Bob Henderson was the operator. He later worked at the Montana Standard as the maintenance guy for a while. And then Don Edelman was the cat skinner, and there used to be a - he quit that and set up a restaurant out on Harrison Avenue called Don's. It was kind of a Western style restaurant.

Fran Johnson - he worked down there with us. But they’d get on this bus and there would be more goofing off - it was like being with a bunch of high school kids. There was Bad Rabbit and Fat Jack and all of these names. They called this guy Fat Jack because he was huge and he was a payloader operator. People would get really mad at him because he was so heavy that he'd break down the seats in the payloader. And if you were around where he was working, he'd bring out his lunch bucket and he had this big, huge lunch bucket and he'd have four or five sandwiches, just this tremendous amount of food. And then he'd finally cap it off by drinking a can of MetriCal. Do you remember MetriCal? It was a weight loss supplement. [laughter] And that was his weight loss program, was to eat all this food and then drink a MetriCal. He thought that -

Jaap: I think it's supposed to be a meal replacement. [laughter]

Murphy: This was his version of it. But I mean, it was things like that that I was thinking as you were talking too, about change. When we were digging down there, sometimes we'd dig into these perfectly circular tunnels that were maybe three feet in diameter, and those were the tunnels that were left by the Chinese miners. And they'd dig a perfectly circular tunnel, which was - it was very strong and it wouldn't cave in and they didn't have to use timbers. And so they could just follow along the veins and just get the ore and stuff without having to use timbers and a whole bunch of things like that. But when you looked at the size of the tunnel and how small it was. And then of course they were smaller too, but still, they were literally like three feet. I can't imagine doing that, I mean, without being like totally claustrophobic. But how they did it - or you’d dig into the old workings where they had mined before and there were timbers and everything. Sometimes it'd be on fire because it'd been sealed up for 70 or 80 years and the heat builds up in there, and then when you open it up to the oxygen, it'd catch fire.

Grant: Really?

Murphy: Yeah. I was operating one night and it was kind of dusty and I turned to the operator and I said - I was running the shovel, and I said, ‘What's that taste?’ I said, ‘I keep tasting something that's sweet.’ He says, ‘Oh, that's just the arsenic from the old works.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ But I mean, it was considered uncool at the time to wear a mask or anything.

Grant: Uncool.

[01:35:49]

Murphy: Yeah, I mean that was for sissies. There's a whole philosophy and mindset, or there was. They didn't really realize the danger or something like that, but [we] dug into…[laughs] I'm going all over the place here.

Grant: That's good. These are fascinating anecdotes. I just had a couple more topics I wanted to touch on. I appreciate you being so generous with your time, meeting us twice and everything.

Murphy: Oh, that's alright. Like my wife said, ‘Oh, somebody new to listen to your stories.’ [laughter]

Grant: Sure.

Murphy: And I said, ‘Gee, I went in and I talked for three hours straight last time. I can't believe it.; I said, ‘I don't, didn't think I could talk that long.’ And my, uh, my whole family just cracked up. [laughter]

Grant: Well, so one topic I wanted to bring up - and again, I kind of do this with everybody, especially if they bring it up. In talking about buildings uptown burning down - or you used the word arson last week - I'm always curious to hear more about people's observations of the fires and any insights you have into who did it, why they did it, just the phenomenon of the Uptown burning.

Murphy: I was probably a teenager when, I think, most of that stuff was going. And I remember going to the fires and stuff and I remember 'em talking about them being arson caused. That was a pretty popular topic of discussion. I remember that the police were very active trying to catch this arsonist. I don't remember whether they actually ever did catch somebody, but there was kind of a standing joke that this was an urban renewal project that was going on at the time. But I just remember going to these things and seeing these big huge buildings on fire and the firemen fighting like mad and the people just flocked around these fires. I'd go with my dad, but we'd always stay a long ways away because he said, ‘You don't know if there's dynamite in that building or not,’ or what was going on in there.

But I was probably too young to have real opinions about it. It was just something that was interesting to look at. I don't know any kids alive that aren't interested in firemen and fire trucks and that kind of stuff. But at the same time, I remember feeling sad, like when the library burned down, because it was a place that you'd been before.

[01:39:07]

I know our dentist's office burned down up here - or no, our optometrist's office, one day. It was sad to see these big chunks going out of Butte too that were turning into parking lots, and nothing else was coming in. And you could just kind of feel this slow, downhill slide. At the same time, you know, it was being built up elsewhere. You had the mall coming in - and that's another whole cycle that's gone through now. I mean, you see that all over the country. In Helena, where the mall used to be, there's a big empty lot up there. But it's just part of the changing landscape. I think the police and stuff were very active in trying to find out who was doing that. But I didn't really - I had more feelings and opinions at that time. Does that answer your question?

Grant: Yeah. I mean, would you care to describe a little bit further your feelings? Was it purely fascination?

Murphy: Well, it was interesting to see something that huge going on, but at the same time it was destroying something that you liked, like the library or when the winter garden bowling alley burned down. We used to go and bowl there all the time, and now it was gone. I mean, it just left you with kind of a hollow feeling. Maybe you hoped that it'd be rebuilt there or someplace else, but it was a piece of you that just went away. I guess that'd be about my only feelings about it.

Grant: Yeah. Well, thanks for that. Last time we talked a lot about your father's side of the family, and so I wanted to be sure that this time we covered your mother's side and I saw you - did you make notes as well? Yeah, ok.

Murphy: Oh, these were just some of the side stories - I guess the side salads that I was - [laughter]. I was thinking about - I remember - this has been a good exercise because it's brought up a lot of memories and it's helped my memory too, coming back.

[01:42:24]
Anyway, my mother's family - her grandfather, my mother's grandfather, was Tom Kelly. He was originally from Canada, or from Ireland, by way of Canada. And he wound up in Virginia City, Nevada. He was a miner and he also rose to be chief of police and head of the miners union there. He eventually wound up being US Marshall down there. I think when he was in his late thirties, his wife dropped dead. And two months later, he dropped dead. So they left these like five orphaned kids there. So, the exact path of how they came to Butte isn't totally clear, but I think the two older boys went to live in California with some relatives, and I think my grandfather went with them at the time. He was just five or six years old. And then one of his sisters came to Butte - she was a kid too.

Tom Kelly's wife, Winifred, had a sister. Elizabeth lived in Butte and she was married to a guy named John Flood who was a mining engineer. And this is all 1880s, 1890s. So, one girl came up, and then Aunt Lizzie didn't like the way that my grandfather was being treated in California, so she went and got him and brought him to Butte. And then the second daughter was old enough that she went to the University of Nevada and became a teacher, and then she came to Butte. And so all three of 'em were now living in Butte with the Floods, who were raising them like their own kids.

They all went on to have real interesting lives too. My one great aunt that became the teacher - she went on to become the principal of the Grant School, Ms. Kelly. She was really highly thought of and all her students loved her. She lived to be in her late eighties. And she had a - there was a picture in the Standard about her, surrounded by some of her old students who are probably in their sixties. She looked up and said, ‘My, how you've all grown!’ [laughter]

Jaap: Oh, I think I've seen that picture before.

Murphy: Yeah, you may have. She's a little old lady sitting in a chair. So that was my great aunt, and she was single her whole life. And then my Aunt Laura, she went to Dillon, I believe. She became a teacher and she taught in all the schools here. And eventually, she and her sister got together and they put on a Halloween parade every year.

Grant: In Butte?

Murphy: In Butte. But the kids could only participate in the Halloween parade if they promised that they hadn't sinned the previous year. [laughs] So anyway, she was a great lady too. And she married an Irish guy, Charlie Gallagher. He was originally - he came from County Mayo when he was a kid. There were still the troubles going on over there, and he remembered that there was a lot of trouble with the British. And there was a family down the road that - their name was Boycott, and they were supporting the British, and they were not well thought of in the community. So everybody decided to shun ‘em and not have anything to do with him. And according to him, that was the origination of the term boycott, whether it's true or not, but it was to Charlie.

[01:48:10]

But he went on - Uncle Charlie was - he went to Butte High and the Butte Business College, and then he started working in the grocery business around town. Then he opened his own grocery store and he had - eventually, he wound up owning four different grocery stores in Butte. And he developed this concept of - kind of the open grocery store. Prior to that time, the grocers would send what they called a solicitor out to your home and you'd tell 'em what you needed, and then they'd go back to the store and load it up and then bring it to you. Well, Charlie came up with the idea of opening up the store and having you come in and you could walk through and get it for yourself. And eventually he sold out to this outfit that became Safeway.

Then after he retired, they came and they wanted him to be on the school board. And so he was on the school board, and he was on the school board when they built the new Butte High School down here. But he was also, I think, really involved with the AOH and the Robert Emmett Literary Association, because he was kind of an Irish patriot. He never talked really too much about what they did, but I suspect he was involved in moving money and guns back to the homeland, as a lot of them were back at that time.

He was friends with Jeanette Rankin and Burton K. Wheeler, which are two pretty notable Montana folks. But I mean, he was kind of on that level.

Grant: Can you remind me his name?

Murphy: Charlie Gallagher. Charles. Charles Henry Gallagher. And then he and Laura, they had two sons, Charles Junior and Kevin Gallagher. And Charles went on to law school, got a law degree, but then he went to work in Yellowstone Park for Hamilton Stores. Eventually he wound up managing all the gas stations in the park. And he did that till he retired. He just liked being down there. He'd always tell stories about how he'd have to do things like submit claims to his insurance company because the trailer he was living in - a buffalo came by and was scratching against the side of it, rubbed all the siding off it.

But he had all kinds of national park stories. And later when I was working in my capacity at Montana Power, Yellowstone Park was one of my contracts that I worked on. That was a real special contract. That was during the fires of ‘88 down there too. So I'd go down to the concessionaire's meeting - Montana Power and the park service stations were both concessionaires - so I'd sit in meetings with him. That was kinda interesting.

But then his brother, Kevin - I think he went to MSU and got a degree, but then he went into the Air Force and he worked his way up to being a Lieutenant Colonel. And he was a genuine spy, I mean, James Bond type of a person. Well, not quite that dramatic, but he'd never talk about it or anything, until much, much later when he was probably in his eighties. My wife and I went back to Washington, DC and he started telling us stories, and that was a real eye-opener.

[01:52:55]

But he was signed as a diplomatic attache to Moscow for a couple years. And they had two little kids. When they were living in Washington, DC, he was at a level where the kids went and played with Carolyn and John Kennedy, when they went to their birthday parties and stuff.

When he started telling stories to us, it was kinda like Forrest Gump, you know? All of these decisions were made and stuff, and here's Charles standing in the background, telling what really happened. When I was on the ship, we visited them in - they were stationed in Okinawa. This was still during Vietnam. Kevin had been away on some mission, so I was visiting with his wife and kids there. I think she was from Red Lodge. But anyway, Kevin got back and we were standing in the backyard having a beer - and they lived right next to Kadena Air Force base there on Okinawa. All of a sudden this plane went ripping overhead, and it was like something I'd never seen before. And I said, ‘What was that?’ And he says, ‘What was what?’ I said, ‘That plane,’ I said, ‘I've never seen anything like it.’ He said, ‘All I can tell you about that is it's called a habu. And a habu was an Okinawan snake. And he said, ‘You'll never see it, and it'll bite you and you'll be dead before you hit the ground and you still never saw the snake.’ But it turned out it was a SR 71 Blackbird before the public knew there was an SR 71 Blackbird, and that they were using that as a spy plane over Vietnam to determine what was going on. Kevin was in charge of the whole program.

Jaap: Oh, wow.

Murphy: So anyway, he had stories like that. Anyway, they had a very interesting family there. Once they had - the senior Charlie Gallagher was about 50 when they got married and had kids. Laura retired [from] her teaching job and she started raising kids. And according to an article in the newspaper, my mother said that she became Charlie's chief thinker and they'd figure all this stuff out together. So then there was my grandfather, and he was quite an interesting character. He grew up in Butte and he started in the hardware business. I think he was working for Montana Hardware and then for HR Holter Hardware in Helena. But he was a traveling salesman - they called ‘em a drummer back then. So he was a drummer and he'd travel around from town to town selling hardware and stoves and roofing metal and all that kind of stuff.

[01:56:47]

And while he was working in the hardware store, he met Mary Kelly or Mary Munloch, who was my grandmother. And so they fell in love and got engaged. One of my treasured possessions is - I've got a walnut box that has the letters that they wrote back and forth to each other in about 1912. My grandfather was writing these really romantic things. This was right before they got married, and mainly he spends a whole letter telling her about all the stuff that he sold during the day and the people that he met and how he'd meet these different people. And as he said, he'd ‘jolly 'em along.’ He traveled a lot on the railroad, but then when the railroad ended, he'd get a horse and wagon and go up on like the reservation, up by Polson, selling hardware. All these letters are on fancy stationary from different hotels in these towns. And he was in - he wrote to her when he was in Missoula one night and they were having a big celebration because they had just installed street lights and they were gonna turn 'em on and this was a big deal down there. And he said, ‘I don't know what they're so excited about. Buttes had street lights for a long time.’ [laughter]

So anyway, they got married and - I think it was about then that he went into partnership with a shiner and opened a combined furniture/hardware store. I think it was down on Park Street. Those were all down, kind of in that block where the Exerdance building used to be, down in there. In fact, one time there used to be a little restaurant in the Exerdance building on the mezzanine. And I went up there and there was an old safe with his name on it. But anyway, he was in partnership with Shiner for a long time. He dropped that partnership in about 1916, I think, and he went into - I saw an article in the paper that he went into partnership with a guy named Vincent Alton with furniture and hardware. I think that store - I've gotta go out and look at the directories some more. I think that was down in that same area.

And then later in his life, he had his own hardware store. I think he renamed that Montana Hardware. And that was located right across from where Sparky's Garage is now. Tony Canonica used to have his old store there. I've got a picture of my grandfather standing out in front holding me when I was a baby. That's when he retired back in - I think it was about 1946-1947. But anyway, he was - in the article, it said he was one of Butte’s most aggressive furniture and hardware salesmen. What that exactly means, I don't know. That could be good or bad! [laughs]

Grant: Yeah. Really.

Murphy: He wasn't aggressive in a mean sort of way. He was a pretty neat guy and he had a lot of good stories because - where they were located right there on East Park like that was right above the red light district and right above the Chinese district. One of my grandmother's things she always talked about when she was alive was - she was wondering - because the Chinese would come around selling vegetables on carts. Even in the middle of winter, they'd have fresh vegetables. And she always wondered how they managed to produce the vegetables. That might be something the Archives could look up. But whether they did it in tunnels - my grandfather used to talk about [how] the eastern part of Butte here was underlined with a lot of these tunnels that they used to have, that Chinese people would have Tong wars and stuff and fight with each other and stuff. So there was a lot going on in that community, and he'd always talk about that.

[02:01:57]

But his wife, my grandmother, Mary - she came from - well, she was born in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin. Her family before that was from Germany, and the other part was from Luxembourg. And the German part was a family named Koch, K-O-C-H. They used to call her Katie Cook. But she was supposed to be related in some way to Robert Koch, who was a Nobel Prize winner, and the father of modern bacteriology, but I think he was a brother-in-law or something. It wasn't really a direct descendant. But then the Munloch part - they were the ones from Luxembourg and there were several big German Catholic communities over in Wisconsin and in Michigan, in that area. I think that's where they were kind of centered over there. But after she was born, her dad moved back to - he and Katie Cook were married in Hancock.  Hancock, Michigan is just 80 miles away from where my great-grandfather, the AOH guy, was raised. So they were both raised there.

And so anyway, her dad, JP, John Peter Munloch, was a carpenter and a very skilled guy, evidently, very high end. He had his own company back in Hancock. Then they decided to move to Butte, and they moved to Butte in November of 1889, which was the month that Montana became a state. So he set up working here as a carpenter and became very well known. If you look out in the Sanders History of Montana, there's an article about him describing all of this and what he did. His first shop was about two blocks on this street, that way. There's a replica of his shop in Hell Roaring Gulch up at the Mining Museum, and it supposedly has some of his original tools and stuff up there. I guess he was pretty notable around here. They had like five different kids, five kids. One of 'em was a doctor and he was the one that delivered me.

[02:05:22]

So anyway, that was my grandmother's parents. And then my grandmother and grandfather met each other in the hardware business. Then they set up housekeeping and they wound up having seven kids, six girls and one boy.

Grant: Wow.

Murphy: My poor uncle - he was really mothered a lot. [laughter] But he was quite a character. He grew up and he wound up in the Navy - that was at the end of World War II and he wound up - my mother wound up in Washington, DC too. Walt was in Washington, DC, but the other kids, all the other girls - well, not all of them - they got married fairly young. Some of 'em got married and their husbands went away to war. And one of 'em, my aunt Winnie - they wound up living in Anaconda. Her husband Bob was in the Battle of the Bulge. Bob was - he was an artist. He did a lot of the artwork for the Anaconda Company. He was the voice of - when you went to the viewing stand down there, you had this deep baritone voice. He was the one describing all the stuff. And when you go through Anaconda, there's a big mural on the wall. And he did that. And so he was a pretty notable guy.

Grant: What was his last name?

Murphy: Vine. V-I-N-E, Bob Vine. They had five kids. Isabelle was the oldest and she got married and had seven kids, I think. Her oldest was the bureau chief for AP in Montana for a while. The second oldest was an Ursuline nun. Was - she still is an Ursuline nun. Her whole convent and everything got wiped out in the fires in California - was it last year or the year before?

Grant: Oh, wow.

Murphy: And then she has - several of them are dead now. And then the next oldest was Katie, or Kathleen. They had five kids and three of 'em still live here in Butte. They're all retired now. One I'm losing, in Bozeman - I'm missing somebody. Can't remember. [laughs] And then my mother was the next one. Those three were born in a house over here on West Woolman Street. My dad was born on West Woolman. My mom was born on West Woolman. And then eventually, they wound up moving down on Steel Street when they had the other kids. There was, let’s see - Frannie. She married a guy named Jim Shafer who was from Butte. They moved to California. He worked in the aerospace industry. He was an engineer. We went down there one time and he took us out - I think it was TRW at the time. We got to see a model of the space shuttle, a full size replica model of the space shuttle. They were doing tests on it.

Jaap: You must have loved that.

Murphy: Oh man, I was in heaven! [laughs] Life didn't get any better than that. To be able to touch it, you know, and that kind of thing. Then eventually, he retired and moved back to Montana, to Polson. Well he ran a small foundry and then he started out from scratch and built a tour boat up there called the Redda Mary. And it was a big boat, and they'd have parties on it and meals and stuff. And then Frannie had a massive stroke one day and died. They had five kids.

Then let's see - Lenore was next. She married a guy named Phil Carstead, which - you may have had some inquiries on a Carstead because my cousin's into genealogy and he’s doing some research on it. Anyway, he was a civil engineer and they traveled around a lot. He helped build Canyon Ferry. He helped build the Fort Peck Dam. My aunt would go with him to these construction camps. Ivan Doig wrote a book about it called Bucking the Sun, which was about building the Fort Peck Dam. And she said it was exactly like the way it was. Then he worked on the California aqueduct and he worked on the Glen Canyon Dam. Those were the big ones that he worked on.

But when they’d go to these remote camps, till they got settled in, the kids would come and live with relatives. They had three children, one a little older than I am, and two that are a little younger than I am. The kids would come and live with relatives and so we'd have cousins living with us part of the year until their parents called for 'em. I remember Cousin Mike was living with us in ‘59 when the big earthquake down in Yellowstone hit. He and I both slept through it. [laughs]

[02:12:32]

But anyway, the three kids were both just honored at a baseball game back in Hartford, Connecticut because all three of 'em were in the military, two sons and a daughter. The daughter, I think, was in Desert Storm and the other two boys were in different Reserve operations. But anyway, they had an interesting family.

And then there was Uncle Wald. He went on - he wound up being the Chief Operating Officer for Montana Power. He was an electrical engineer. He was doing that in the Paul Schmeckle days. He and his wife, who was from Red Lodge - they had two daughters and one of the daughters still lives in town. Walt's wife Barb is my only surviving aunt. She was a very musical person. She directed the choir at St. Ann's for years and years. Then she ran a singing group in town called The Notabelles. She did that for years and years, But now she's moved out with her daughter in Olympia. But like I said, she's the only one surviving in that generation now.

And then Winifred was the one that was married to Bob Vine, and they lived in Anaconda. They had five children.

Grant: Wow. Everybody.

Murphy: Everybody. So I think we had like 35-36 cousins on that side. We had some big family reunions, but I always remembered that - the Kelly Bunch getting together. They had a house on West Steel, and essentially it was a living room and two bedrooms and a single bath. Seven kids, seven girls, one bath. What's wrong with that picture?

Jaap: Everything. Yeah, everything. [laughter]

Murphy: My grandfather's two sisters lived right next to 'em. My grandfather lived on Steel Street - right across from the alley was the Gallaghers. They had a big house, and their two sons. Then across the street was Aunt Vel, the one that was the principal of the Grant. So I get the idea that the kids kind of roamed back and forth and whenever they got tired, they slept wherever they were at the time. They were all kind of like one big happy family. And then there's the family that they grew up with - some of them were still around. One of my grandfather's adopted brothers was killed on a bombing mission over Nagoya in Japan in World War II.

But there were a lot of relatives over there. We’d get together in these big reunions and I knew all these people by name, but I didn't have any clue really as to how they were related. They were just an aunt or an uncle or a cousin. I always remember going to the Kelly's. When they'd get together, all the brothers and sisters, when they were adults, they'd all have a big dinner or something. Then they'd all go out in the kitchen and they'd start singing. And that's what they did during the dishes - well, and drinking beer. [laughs] They’d sing all these Irish songs. And my Uncle Wald - he was quite a singer, and so was Barb, the gal that was the choir director and in the Notabelles. And they'd harmonize and everybody would be harmonizing and singing all these Irish songs and stuff. It was very cool. One of my fondest memories.
And then eventually my grandmother and grandfather moved out next to us on North Drive. There was a gal that was living next to us. Chelsea Bailey. The Chelsea Bailey Animal Shelter. She was living over there, and then when she left, my grandparents moved into that house. So we had ‘em right close. But up on - when they were up on Steel Street, I used to go up there when I was in grade school and I'd mow all three lawns. It took me all day and I mowed and trimmed and did the hedge and everything. I got $2.50 a day for it. It was pretty cool. But then when I went from there to working at the Gardens, I got $2 50 cents an hour up there. That was in high cotto, man? It was really neat.

[pause] I don't know. That's kind of what I remember about them. But they were really, really big in the community. And there was a - my grandmother and grandfather were on the front page of the Standard. They were having a golden age thing at the Columbia Gardens and it was kind of the year before they closed the gardens. This was the last hurrah for the kids who had grown up up there to come up and see it. And they had a picture of them on the front of the paper. Somehow they had a picture of them with their little kids going through the - they had kind of a zoo up there early on. And there's a picture of them doing that.

But, oh. The one sister I didn't mention was my mom.

Grant: Right.

Murphy: Oh man! Sorry, mom. [laughter] But she was kinda - she didn't get married real young, but she went to the Butte Business College and then she went to Seattle and worked as a secretary. Then when World War II got going, the government created the WAVES, W-A-V-E-S, which was the women - kinda like the women's auxiliary of the Navy. They were considered actual Navy, but not. It was kinda like, ‘okay, we really need some help, so we're letting women in.’ She joined that and wound up going to Washington, DC. She worked in the Pentagon and she worked for the signal core. In the office that she worked for, the signal core, they made kind of the propaganda movies that you'd see at a movie theater when you went in: ‘Today and Europe,’ you know, ‘this was going on.’ And they also had the people in there, the photographers and reporters and stuff that reported - they were actually the war recorders. They'd go out and record all that action. And she met some pretty famous people there. I think she told me that she met Ronald Reagan once back there when he was an actor and doing that kind of stuff. She had a lot of interaction with Darrell F Zanuck, who was a big time Hollywood movie producer. I think his son or grandson still produces movies in Hollywood.

[02:21:47]
But anyway, she was working back there. She was a yeoman first class. She was back there at the same time her brother Walt was. Her brother started out as an enlisted man and then he was in officer school. So they had a lot of pictures of them in uniform. Walt was in high heaven there because of all my mom's association with all these WAVES. Walt was really popular. [laughs]

But then - my dad was back in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, going to officer school in the Engineer Corps. And there was a woman from Butte. Her name was Helen Lalley. And she called up my dad and she said - she knew both families - and she said, ‘Did you know that Rita Kelly is in Washington?’ And dad said, ‘No.’ And so she called up Rita and she said, ‘Did you know Emmet Murphy's is in DC? And dad [read: mom] said, ‘No.’ And she said, ‘Well, come on over.’ And she invited 'em both over for dinner. And so they got together for dinner. Mom and dad had gone together at St. Patrick's, like in grade school, I think like starting in the third grade. So they knew each other, but they had kind of gone their separate ways.

Well, anyway, they got together and sometime later they got married at Fort Belvoir. And then mom quit the Navy and dad got his First Lieutenant bar, or Second Lieutenant bars, the day before they were married. Then he got assigned to go to - well, they worked in DC for a little while - and then dad got assigned to go to Germany with the army of occupation. So he left for Germany and then my mother left the Navy and she came back and she was living with her folks here in town. Mom was pregnant with me at the time. Dad was in Germany from, I think, March through September of that year. He was in charge of an all African American company. It was a transportation company. I guess they kind of segregated the troops back then and transportation was one of the things that they had the African Americans doing. And my dad always - did I tell you this story last week? It sounds familiar.

Grant: You did mention that. The African American unit.

Murphy: Yeah. And McKinley Murphy. But anyway, dad came back and he took the ship across the Atlantic and then hopped on a train and came all the way to Butte and he got back to Butte the night that I was born. I think I told you about that, because of Aunt Eda, or uncle Jerry, holding mom's hand while dad was asleep in the bed. But anyway, mom was - she went on, had me, and then there were five kids in our family.

Jaap: Five's the magic number, it seems like. [laughs]

Murphy: Well, we were going to St. Ann's at the time and we were considered like a medium sized family. I mean, there were big families, like the Bartolettis. You've probably run into some of them in your travels. And the Orizottis. I don't know, you had all these big name families that - going to church, it was just massive. 

So anyway, mom was kind of an organizer. She was always super organized, with her business skills. We found out after the fact, after mom died, that her brother and her sisters called her Sarge, not to her face, but. [laughs] She kinda organized things and one of her sisters said, ‘Now that Rita's gone, who's gonna tell us what to do?’ [laughs] But evidently they relied on her quite a bit, and she's the one that kept the whole family organized. She took care of the elderly relatives. We called them the oldsters. So all the people I described - the Gallaghers and Aunt Bell - they all were failing and winding up in rest homes.

Aunt Laura Gallagher lived until she was 96. I've got an interview that the Standard did with her when she was in the Crest nursing home. She told the reporter, she said, ‘Do you realize that in four more years I'm gonna be a Centipede?’ [laughter] But I mean, she was just like that. She just had a tremendous mind. She was reading until the day she died and [she] liked spy novels. Because she knew that her son was involved in that, but she never knew what he did and. So she liked that. She had a theory that you either use it or lose it when it came to your brain. She said, ‘My body is just quitting me, but my head is still sharp.’ So she started memorizing the names of all her caretakers and then that wasn't enough, so she memorized all the names of their kids and their husbands and she knew all the relationships there and that still wasn't enough. So she memorized all their birthdays. She could tell you the birthday of any of the caretakers and their kids and their husbands in all of the Crest nursing home. She just kept adding layers like that. She was still just a brilliant woman till the end.

But anyway, mom took care of all those people. Mom died when she was like 68. She had emphysema really bad from having smoked since she was 16. You've never experienced that, but everybody smoked back in those days. I mean, I found an ashtray the other day. I go, ‘Whoa, this is a relic.’ I mean, you don't see 'em anymore. You'd be in business meetings and everybody would be smoking. Teenagers smoked. You'd look in nightclubs. When they were in the military and out smoking, everybody's got a cigarette in their hand. That was just kind of a way of life. My dad smoked too. He was a three pack a day smoker. And I remember vividly, he quit the day I graduated from eighth grade at St. Ann's. I remember because he was a bear cat to get along with. He was really grouchy.

[02:30:31]

And then he started on sunflower seeds, and he always had a mouthful of sunflower seeds. We thought for sure one day we were gonna wake up and the whole pit would be covered with sunflowers, [laughter] you know, from traveling around.

But I don't know. It's just, I mean, it probably isn't as interesting to you guys and to other people because they're my family. You start talking about family and everybody kind of glazes over, but you know, these were some of the people that made Butte. I mean, they were just an integral part of it. That's what we were talking about before - Butte made the people, and people made Butte. You know, it was kind of a symbiotic relationship. Who was it - O’Henry, that wrote the story about the - what would the world be like if you weren't in it? You think of that often. These were all really interesting people and they had interesting lives.

My grandfather and the Kellys - they built a summer cabin out at Buxton, out here on the flanks of the mountain, Mount Fleecer out there. They'd pile all the kids into the truck, in the back, in the bed, no seat belts, you know, like seven kids, and head down the highway and go to Buxton. Then they’d spend the summer out there just roaming around and doing stuff. No electricity, wood stove, water out of a spring. And then later on that became kind of a social center for - we'd go out there on weekends and all the aunts and uncles and two dozen cousins would be out there roaming around - it's all gone now.

After my grandparents died, the Forest Service - the cabin was on leased land and they had a lifelong lease on it. Then a family member had to take it over if the lease was to continue and none of the family wanted to step forward and take it over. So the Forest Service came and knocked it down. But one of my oldest aunts, Isabelle Van Swearingen, had her ashes spread up there. It meant so much to her, in the summer. They had all kinds of stories of - there were even spies up there in World War II that they came across. I don't know. There's a lot of their stories I still remember too, that they used to tell.

Grant: People spying on the mine or?

Murphy: No, German spies. They heard somebody trying to break into the cabin one night and they got out the gun and - but they gave up and they left. And my grandfather was really sad that, ‘Why didn't you shoot through the door?’ ‘We didn't wanna wreck the door.’ [laughter] But anyway, they went and told - I think it was the FBI at the time and then the FBI came out and apparently there were. I think they just told him that that was a good tip, that they had caught somebody out there because copper was a strategic metal and it was really important to the war effort. So it wouldn't be surprising that they'd have people looking around trying to figure out what's going on. [pause] But I’m really rambling now.

Grant: No, that's, that's quite alright. [laughter] I guess I just have one more question, you know.

Murphy: Sure.

Grant: If you like - we try to ask a lot of folks this, you know. What do you hope for, for Butte, in the coming years, after having seen so much of it play out?

Murphy: I don't know. I kind of feel like Butte's going through a transition right now. It's like it's struggling to find out where it really wants to be in the world, and its identity. You know, I'm hopeful that - you look at places like Philipsburg and they've managed to transform a failing mining, old mining agriculture town, into something that's really coming along. Maybe along those lines, but I don't think I'd like to see happen to Butte what's happened to Missoula or Bozeman. I mean, those were both beautiful places that I think are slowly being destroyed by - well, not slowly. They're quickly being destroyed. [laughs]

As I remember, when my wife and I were going to school in Bozeman, that was just a little cowtown. And now it's a booming metropolis and there's a lot of wealth and people there. The average people can't live there anymore. And it's the same in Missoula. You know, my wife grew up there and we kinda have to struggle with the idea of going up and visiting those places because of the traffic. None of those places are really like they were before. I mean, Missoula still has Rockin’ Rudy’s and that's a good place. [laughs]

But I mean, it's things like that. And I think Butte’s got a definite heart when you look at the people who are here, even yourselves. You look at the opportunities and everything that exists elsewhere, but this has kind of become home to you. And this is now where part of your heart is. I think my concerns and dreams are probably the same as yours, as the things you'd like to see happen in Butte. You'd like to see that part of history maintained. And all the things that we've talked about. That's how it grew up and all these things developed. And all the changes. But where the future lies, you can't really tell. I think it'll pull through. People are looking for good places. You just put your back to the pit and look at the beautiful scenery and you're [laughs].

[02:38:57]

It's a nice place…and the demand for copper and molybdenum is going through the roof - well, sometimes it fluctuates with the market. But you know, there's going to be that demand for minerals for a long time. And some smart Montana Tech student is gonna figure out what to do with the water in the pit. I'm hopeful that a lot of those problems will be changed around. So I think - I have a lot of hope that there'll be a future for Butte and that your great, great grandkids will be able to sit around and yammer about the great things that you did here back in the day. And that they'll still be able to have a place here in Butte and Montana, and be able to appreciate what we do have here. I think that's important.

Grant: Thank you.

Murphy: You're welcome.

Jaap: Thank you.

Murphy: Well, you're welcome.

Jaap: We did another three hours!

Murphy: Really? Holy cow.

Jaap: Yeah.

Murphy: Boy, I ate at Perkins this morning, so I was ready.

Grant: I waited to eat until right before we started, pretty much so.

Murphy: Oh, I -

[END OF RECORDING]