And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 22:54:20 -0800
To: sovernet-l <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: Jamie Kneen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Fwd: Life of a uranium miner
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 22:44:17 -0500
X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Canadian Uranium Alliance)
Subject: Re: CNPCORE-L Life of a uranium miner
Globe and Mail - 'Lives Lived'
AMBROSE DORÉ
Thursday, March 18, 1999
by Paul Webster
Uranium miner. Born on Jan. 1, 1946, in Ile ŕ la Crosse, Sask.; died of a
heart attack on Sept. 21, 1998, in Ile ŕ la Crosse, aged 52.
During his last year, Ambrose Doré was a shadow of his former self,
although he should have been in his physical prime. After decades mining
for uranium deep under the Canadian North, he had come to realize that
there should have been a safer way to do the work. Last summer, he visited
younger friends and relatives in the Cree, Chipewyan and Dene villages
north of Prince Albert, Sask., that send their men north to the mines that
produce much of the world's uranium. He warned them to pay more attention
to mine safety.
The son of a trapper and forester named Leon Ambrose and his wife Celina,
Ambrose spent his first years in an almost completely isolated Ile ŕ la
Crosse, before the old mission town was accessible by road. Married just
two years, he got his first uranium job at the Cluff Lake mine south of
Lake Athabasca in 1971. He was gone from home most of the rest of his life,
working long shifts in the radioactive underground, living in company
barracks and hotels where miners congregate to blow money not sent home. It
was a hard-drinking and occasionally lawless life in which time off could
take as hard a physical toll as any day's work underground.
Back in Ile ŕ la Crosse his wife Victoria brought up their children,
Darlene, Tina and Gerald, amidst the changes that had come after the road
reached town in the fifties. In the seventies, Ambrose pulled down the old
log home and replaced it with a new structure. He was enormously proud of
the modern things he could afford with the uranium money.
The early eighties were his best mining years. Mr. Doré was a powerful man
and fiercely hard worker. In those days, "highballing" miners competed for
bonuses from long shifts underground in radioactive conditions that would
be illegal today. Ambrose often boasted that in his best years he earned
more than $100,000 scraping radioactive ore from "the face." Not bad, he
said, for a guy who quit school at 12. He was as skillful with pneumatic
mining tools as his ancestors were with hunting bows and fishing spears.
But it was as a highballer that he became plagued with "mine rash," an
psoriasis-like affliction common among men who spend long hours underground
without adequate protection from the intense dust and damp. He told the men
he met last summer not to resent their protective gear. The rash covering
his body was a striking warning.
In 1995 he hit the jackpot with a contract to dig an electrical tunnel
under San Diego. Like the Canadian natives who bolted together the girders
of the Manhattan skyline in the 1920s, Mr. Doré got a taste of big-city
life -- a world unlike anything he'd ever imagined. He'd slyly allude to
the pleasures he found there. "Why take a sandwich to the banquet?" he
joked when asked why he never invited Victoria to meet him in San Diego.
Forced into retirement at 52 by the mine rash and a stroke, Mr. Doré went
back to the settled life he'd never really known since the uranium road
took him out of Ile ŕ la Crosse in the early seventies. He marvelled at the
size of his monthly disability cheques, but they didn't compensate for the
exuberance of a solid shift at the mine face. And his restlessness never
calmed, even after the 60-kilometre trip to the liquor store in Buffalo
Narrows and a spree. He and Victoria gave their house to their eldest
daughter Darlene and moved into a home for disabled people. Ambrose ordered
extravagant gifts from the Hudson's Bay catalogue for their two grandsons.
He had immense pride in their promise. Spending time with the kids, the
itching pain of the mine rash receded.
Last summer, the days seemed especially long when forest fires swept near
Ile ŕ la Crosse and able-bodied villagers were conscripted for duty,
leaving him one of the only men in town. Only two months later his heart
gave out. He returned underground far too soon.
Paul Webster met Ambrose Doré last summer while researching a television
program on uranium mining in northern Saskatchewan.
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