The Good Times are all Gone Now: Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town (review)

In this loving account of her hometown of Kellogg, Idaho, Julie Whitesel Weston traces both the promise and perils of life in a Rocky Mountain mining town. Industrial mining offered jobs and a close community, but it took the lives of many workers and inflicted their family members with high rates of cancer and lead poisoning. At the end of a century that produced riches for owners, investors, and the nation, the mines and smelter shut down in the 1980s, devastating the local economy and families and leaving behind a legacy of pollution—treeless mountains, leaded soils, toxic streams, and one of the largest Superfund sites in the nation.

Weston wrestles with the contradictions inherent in celebrating and mourning the industry and her youth in the community. It is her reflections and observations, rather than her oral history narrators, that enrich our understanding of this place during the Cold War and its fate in the late twentieth century. The author interviewed a few dozen residents to reconstruct life in the town and work in the mines, but as presented, these accounts do little to illuminate the complexities of life in a company town. Like many local historical accounts, the reminiscences focus on the fantastic, the expected, and the stories often told for effect: wine making during Prohibition, the company's largesse, and the local madam who bought uniforms for the high school band.

Buried in these familiar stories are strong ties to place—the hovering mountains that shade the sun from the narrow valley for most hours of the day, the persistent haze of smelter smoke, the work in the mines and outside that catered to miners, and living with occupational death or injury. These stories are what distinguish Kellogg from other small towns in the U.S., which like it shared a passion for high school sports teams and anti-communism. The author does not situate these upbeat oral narratives by generation or by the declining economic conditions that made earlier decades appear more attractive: Everyone "looked after one another" (35) and "Everybody mixed and had a pretty good time without any class consciousness" (36). The author embraces the idea of "everyone in the same boat," but as the town doctor's daughter, she does not fully acknowledge her position of privilege that separated her from the lives of most of the town's working-class residents.

Although the author's initial intention was to write about a labor strike in 1960, her brief description of the strike and struggle over representation are weakened by her youthful vantage in 1960. She interprets miners trying to end the strike as "courageous" (11), based on her employer's perspective, with little understanding of the strike's objectives, the consequences of divided workers, and company obstinacy in light of low metals prices. She did not make use of the extensive literature about the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, and for someone growing up in a union town, she is surprisingly unsympathetic toward union struggles and achievements. Yet the author admits her bias stems from her own upper middle-class parents and their circle of friends, the town newspaper, and her schoolteachers.

The author's honest personal reflections, in particular, make this book worth reading. Weston returns to her hometown with different eyes, confronting the demons of her father's alcoholism and verbally abusive rages, the stubborn pride of Kellogg's residents, and the environmental legacy of mining. This personal account does not contextualize Kellogg's demise in relation to other American deindustrialized cities during the 1980s, only hinting at the causes of the shutdown—Gulf Resources' hostile takeover of Bunker Hill and union resistance to the company's cutting wages more than 25 percent. Yet its portrayal of the contradictions unearthed in this life—how mining families refused to believe Environmental Protection Agency reports...