Hi, All! I thought since so many of you had miners in your families you might like to read the article I just transcribed for my family file. Jake was my great grandfather! Enjoy, Cyndi Jan. 11, 1953—Maybe Joplin Globe? Or Miami Daily News? With pictures This Crew Moves In When The Big Zinc Firms Quit By John Feen Miami, Okla., Jan. 10—Street corner prognosticators around here are saying that the once-fabulous Tri-State district lead and zinc mines, north of this Ottawa county city, are petering out. But as long as there’s a sizeable ore pocket left in the field, there will be daring and hard-working men ready to dig it out. The decision by a major mining company to cease operations on any particular lease doesn’t necessarily mean that the property is valueless. It merely means that it would be cheaper to clean up the mine by sub-leasing it to an independent operator who can chisel the last ton of ore without spending huge sums of money on modern machinery. That’s where the mine “gouger” comes in. Such a man is Jake Dryer, 72-year-old ore hustler who threw his shoeshine box away to work the mines near Joplin, Mo., when he was 11 years old. Jake, a resident of Commerce, has been working for himself as a lead and zinc mine gouger since soon after the 1929 Wall street market crash. The elderly hard-rock miner has seen good days and bad while trying to wrest a living for his family hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface. Jake is now prospecting at the old Southside property, one-half mile northwest of the Eagle-Picher company’s Central Mill, six miles north of Miami. Jake shares the cleanup profits with his son Ted Dryer, and son-in-law, Raymond Sikes, both of Commerce, and Bob Mitchell of Lowell, Kan. Until the little company started to lose money about four months ago, Jake and his partners made a “fair profit” for about five years. Hiring from six to a dozen men, Jake now is probing the earth for undiscovered ore deposis, 322 feet underground at the Southside diggings. Jake supervises all drilling, blasting, and loading operations. Cans are loaded from two dark underground recesses and pulled about 330 feet to the shaft by “Red” an 11-year-old mule with one good eye. A docile animal. Red is a diligent worker and pet of the working crew. He spends most of his off-work hours munching on oats, corn chops and hay in his warm underground stable. He is taken to the surface about once every six months. During the lean 1930’s the elder Dryer worked as a gouger from dawn until dusk in mines abandoned by major companies. Depending mostly on brawn and mining know-how, Jake succeeded in uncovering enough zinc ore to support his wife and six children. He managed to save enough money to purchase a modest home in which he lives today. Jake has seen men killed and others badly maimed during his 61 years of mining. Lady Luck frowned on him only once. That was about 17 years ago. “I was lucky,” the oldtimer declared. “A big bolder rolled down a slope and over me. When I looked myself over I found that I only had a broken ankle.” Jake had several other close calls from falling rock and earth but was not seriously hurt in any of the incidents. The gouger’s jovial manner disappeared when he told of seeing three miners lose their lives back in the early days. A fellow worker, he said, was fatally burned when a drum of gasoline ignited after it fell down a shaft and trapped the luckless victim in a mass of flames. “It was terrible,” Jake said, “I’ll never forget hearing the poor guy screaming as he burned to death. We finally put the fire out but it was to late. He was gone.” A few years later Jake helped recover the body of a miner who stepped off into a shaft and dropped 312 feet to his death. “And I’ll always remember how another man was killed near me,” Jake said. “He was squatted down while doing some high-grading for me. A big boulder fell 40 feet from the roof and split in two as it hit him on the head. Of course my friend was killed outright.” Jake, who has been accused of cutting his eye-teeth on a chunk of lead, started working in the mines during his lollipop days. He hadn’t reached his 12th birthday when he first carried his dinner pail into the earth. The ensuing years of toil and disheartening setbacks may have sapped some of the old miner’s strength, but Jake Dryer has retained his amiable disposition through the hard years. His friends will tell you “that’s the kind of a gouger he is.”