The Good Times Are All Gone Now: Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town

by Julie Whitesel Weston

Julie Whitesel Weston left her hometown of Kellogg, Idaho, but eventually it pulled her back. Only when she returned to this mining community in the Idaho Panhandle did she begin to see the paradoxes of the place where she grew up. Her book combines oral history, journalistic investigation, and personal reminiscence to take a fond but hard look at life in Kellogg during “the good times.”

Kellogg in the late 1940s and fifties was a typical American small town complete with high school football and basketball teams, marching band, and anti-Communist clubs; yet its bars, gambling dens, and brothels were entrenched holdovers from a rowdier frontier past. The Bunker Hill Mining Company, the largest employer, paid miners good wages for difficult, dangerous work, while the quest for lead, silver, and zinc denuded the mountainsides and laced the soil and water with contaminants.

Weston researched the late-nineteenth-century founding of Kellogg and her family’s five generations in Idaho. She interviewed friends she grew up with, their parents, and her own parents’ friends—miners mostly, but also businesspeople, housewives, and professionals. Much of this memoir of place set during the Cold War and post-McCarthyism is told through their voices. But Weston also considers how certain people made a difference in her life, especially her band director, her ski coach, and an attorney she worked for during a major strike. She also explores her charged relationship with her father, a hardworking doctor revered in the community for his dedication but feared at home for his drinking and rages.

The Good Times Are All Gone Now begins the day the smokestacks came down, and it reaches far back into collective and personal memory to understand a way of life now gone. The company town Weston knew is a different place, where “Uncle Bunker” is a Superfund site, and where the townspeople, as in previous hard times, have endured to reinvent Kellogg—not once, but twice.

 

Genres: Nonfiction, History

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Julie Weston grew up in Idaho and practiced law for many years in Seattle. Her debut fiction, MOONSHADOWS, a Nellie Burns and Moonshine Mystery, was published in 2015 (Five Star Publishing) and was a Finalist in the May Sarton Literary Award. Her next mystery, BASQUE MOON won the 2017 WILLA Literary Award for Historical Fiction. Her memoir of place, The Good Times Are All Gone Now: Life, Death and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), received an honorable mention in the 2009 Idaho Book of the Year Awards. Her short stories and essays have been published in IDAHO Magazine, The Threepenny Review, River Styx, Clackamas Review and other journals. She and her husband, Gerry Morrison, now live in central Idaho where they ski, write, photograph, and enjoy the outdoors.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought this for a friend who grew up in the Silver Valley. S0 much history, life is very different there now

[Evan Filby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Catalogs and reviews bill this book as a "memoir of place," which is certainly accurate. Still, in the end, it's the people in a place that really make it memorable. I received my copy directly from the publisher, the University of Oklahoma Press, after agreeing to post a review of it on my blog. I'll summarize my reactions to the book here, but the complete review is at http://sfcompanion.blogspot.com/2010/...

Although I (mistakenly) expected a more traditional history-book approach, Weston's stories drew me in. Stories about people, sometimes told in their own interviewed words. They resonated with me for two special reasons. First, the author and I graduated from high school the same year. Perhaps more importantly, we both grew up in small towns. However, you don't need to be older or a small-towner or a country boy/girl to get something from these narratives. For, in the final analysis, these are tales of human courage and endurance. But the funny thing is: they, by and large, did not view themselves as courageous or enduring. No, this was simply life – some good mixed with some bad – and they were just living it. I myself knew many individuals like them.

We also learn a good deal about how growing up in Kellogg shaped the author's character and expectations. We can all relate to her high school years: a town mad about the local sports teams, seeking peer group approval, boys, trying to build a unique "personhood," and all that. Weston's narrative opens, and then ends, with scenes from after the mines have closed. Toppling the giant smelter stacks becomes a symbol of the final end of Kellogg's old-style "good times."

By then, the area was busy re-making itself as a tourist and recreational "destination resort" town. New hotels and condos dwarfed most vestiges of its mining history. She ended on a hopeful note, but also admitted, "Kellogg was no longer my town."

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I borrowed this book from my son, who read it for one of his history classes at Idaho State University. It is the story of a western Idaho mining town, Kellogg, and a memoir of the author's coming of age in it between the 1940s and 1960s. The town of Kellogg is unique in that the Bunker Hill Mine that supported the town's economy was one of the riches and most productive in the world (lead and silver among other minerals. It provided the townspeople with a good living--most people living there were content with their lives, appreciating the mine's benefits it gave to them and the community. However, when the price for silver plummeted and the EPA recognized the dire effects of years of pollution, the mine closed down. In the the 80s it became an Environmental Super Fund--the second most costly in U.S. history. It almost became a ghost town, but as the book ends, the towns people had reinvented themselves as a tourist/skiing town and seemed to be revitalizing. Sometimes the book dragged, but the history of mining kept my interest and Weston's stories about growing up in a small town brought back memories of my own small-town upbringing in a small Iowa town.

[Arletta Dawdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Good Times Are All Gone Now is a carefully researched memoir of a life, a town and a way of life by a skilled and talented writer. Julie Weston has a mastery of language that evokes compassion and empathy for the characters, their gains and losses. She shares a painful family history, her emancipation from that scene and her return. Ms. Weston's story shows the damage done to a community by powers intent on financial gain at any cost and the blind lack of knowledge of the people most cruelly affected. Kellog, Idaho was the home of the Bunker Hill Mine and was identified by 1996 as a Superfund Site by the EPA. The cover, painted by the author's mother Marie Whitesel more than thirty years earlier, shows the spewing of toxins into the air and soil. Seeing does not make believers for the community remained largely unaware of the mine's destructive power. The book is a strong reminder to us to be informed of our surroundings, human destructive forces and the ever optimistic desire to believe things can't be as bad as they seem.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, a part of the charm of this book comes from having driven through beautiful Kellogg, Idaho many times, and from having friends from the area. If I was unfamiliar with the area, I don't know that I would have enjoyed it due to the inconsistent style of the book. The time line was all over the place, and it was part personal history, part regional history and part ecological report. It gives me pause to ask: was the voracious mining of lead, silver, and zinc in the Kellogg area a necessary activity to provide minerals and jobs, or was it to be avoided because of the long term damage to the land, water and health of generations of people. Overall, I enjoyed the book, but it won't be the same for me the next time I drive through Kellogg.

[X · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was part memoir, part history lesson. I was hoping it would be more memoir than history when I got it. As it was it wasn't really my thing and took a long time to get interesting (the whole first chapter was just the author being like "I went back to my hometown, I saw my old high school where stuff used to happen, I saw this other place where stuff used to happen, I have so many memories here" - like, so? Everyone has high school memories...) but it was kind of interesting when the author actually started writing about her experiences.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was loaned to me by my mother. It tells the story of the mining town I was born in...Kellogg, Idaho. I was quite young when we moved, so I wasn't really aware of all the history behind this town...wow. There is quite a story to tell and I think the author did a fairly good job of keeping the readers interest while telling the story of a small town. I would actually give it 3.5 stars.

[Winnie Thornton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decently written, somewhat scattered memoirs that will interest those who 1) knew the author, 2) grew up in Kellogg, or 3) are writing a book about small mining towns in the Idaho panhandle and need to steep in as many details as they can find.

[Danni · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was ok. It is not one that I would have chosen for myself but it is interesting. It moved kind of slow.

[Linda Gaines · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to read about Kellogg Idaho where my relatives lived and I visited.

[Lynda Haghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty interesting especially since I lived in several mining towns and went through this area regularly.