Ines Anderson Gino Busato Dick and Dalia Guzzi Pasquale and Maria Perri

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Q: Your father’s work, you said he was working the ovens?

A: He was a coke loader. He was a coke loader working in those days they loaded coke they didn’t have machinery like now. They had to do everything by hand and there was just the two, two would be loading the coke and he worked with his brother Frank and uh.....

Q: How much did they get paid?

A: What I remember it was 26 cents a ton. So his pay was - I was just figuring out before you come what was the pay like. They must have split the money. Cause 26 times 40 what would it give you.

Q: Twenty times 40 is 800, that’s $8 a day.

A: Oh no they didn’t get $8. I remember on a day it was $4.60, $4.50.

Q: Then they split it in half that’s what happened. Your right $4 a day.

A: Yeah and well they worked everyday, five days a week and maybe there was a special car that they had to load while they were called out I guess on Saturdays. And I don’t think they were paid extra but the coke was picked by hand so the nicest pieces would be loaded and well they wanted them for sample and you know they picked on my father and uncle all the time they must have of uh specially my uncle he was the fussy one. He you know he it had to be just so the way he done things.

Q: Can you tell us about the coke ovens, the neighborhood of the coke ovens. The people you know.

A: Well where we lived behind the coke ovens there was, there was mostly shacks built up you should have seen there was a fellow there that lived down below us. It was just a long shack, one room, he had just the bunks he didn’t have a bed he had a bunk I don’t know if he had a mattress on it. And just a pot belly stove to cook on it. I couldn’t get over it. I don’t think he even had a chair - maybe a chair to sit on he must of and a little table that was handmade. I couldn’t get over it. When he moved you know we were curious to see what he left behind and you could see the cracks and he was a tall fellow we wondered how he was how he fit in.

Q: Fits in the shack. He was a bachelor?

A: Yeah he was a bachelor in those days they couldn’t send for their family overseas aye.

Q: It was during the war or before?

A: Yeah it must have been after too. After the war because a lot of - and they used to take all them Russians that they couldn’t even write to their folks they were. They were forgotten it seemed if ever they sent money there you know money was confiscated and that so they lost their families a lot of them.

Q: So there were many different nationalities aye?

A: Oh yeah, oh yeah there was the Russians, the Italians, what you say different nationalities, Ukrainian and Slavs. There was no Englishmen there.

Q: Not behind the Coke Ovens?

A: No.

Q: Where were the Englishmen, where were they?

A: The Englishmen were across the creek in the first row of homes where they called it a Fire Boss homes. Well they were bosses or something. You know they knew they had to be in right they were bound to get the best jobs. Yeah it was funny, my uncle was he used to get the Italian paper, um American Italian paper but he used to read English too, He used to read, but he couldn’t write English because he wrote in the Italian way aye and a lot of times we’d have to - he’d write down what he needed in the store and it was hard for us to understand but then I thought gee it must be he’s writing in Italian way but English so you had to figure that out.

This oral history transcript is extracted from the Elk Valley Italian Oral History Project undertaken for the Fernie and District Historical Society in 1998-99. The Heritage Community Foundation and the Year of the Coal Miner Consortium would like to thank Leslie Robertson and the interview team and the Fernie and District Historical Society, which is a member of the consortium, for permission to reprint this material.