"I was nineteen years old in 1922. I worked in the machine shop. I had good luck. I had luck from when I first started to have the chance to be boilermaker helper. At that time there were not any apprenticeships. In that era, it was on the person if they were interested to learn and if they were not interested, they did not learn. They were not but helpers of boilermakers. That is what happened to many of my friends that were of my same age and began to work there in the machine shop. And then there was a quadrilla [a group of men] that worked for the machine shop moving fierros [tools], moving this and that, outside of the machine shop. Then they would put some from the quadrilla to work as boilermaker helpers but many of they weren't interested and they didn't like it. They asked to be changed back to outside because out there they said they had a better time. Bueno. They did not learn. Not me! Since the first day I started working, that same day a new boilermaker started working that came from California. He had gotten out of the army. He was a good worker. He helped me a lot to learn what I did. We got along very well. The little English I had learned in school, I had already forgotten.

At the end of three years, I got a job with the company and that is when I began to work as a boilermaker helper. I had an interest in learning because boilermaker is a profession. There are boilermakers in the machine shop. There are machinists in the machine shop. The machinists handle machines that are turning tools and things like that. The boilermaker worked from the beginning. At that time they were expanding the concentrator there in Morenci. The concentrator reduced. It was new. Two thousand tons of metal passed every 24 hours through the concentrator. It so happened that at the time that I got the job there, a little after I got the job as boilermaker helper, they started to expand the concentrator and make it produce four thousand tons to pass through the concentrator. It turned out that everyone in that time period received very low pay but we in the machine shop got more than those in the mine.

I started as boilermaker helper at $2.90. That is what I earned as a helper. Then in a while, they raised me to $3.15 a day. I was more advanced in my work. I was interested in the work. I learned how to read plans. I did not know how before, but I learned with them, with the man I helped. From there, they raised me $3.45 per day. I was first class helper because at that time they had three kinds of classifications of helper: third, second, and first class. The first class earned $3.45. That is what a miner in the mine earned, $3.45. That is then what I earned, $3.45. As the years passed, they raised it to $3.70. It was third class. Then I got married and they raised it to $4.10. From there, later, they raised me to $4.40 per day. Believe it or not, $4.40 was a lot of money in those days. The miner got $3.45. I earned one dollar more than they did in the shop. I was well off. I bought a car. I was one of the first ones to buy an automobile in 1925. Before that, there were not any automobiles. Everybody used to go by horse or burro.

There were two companies [in Morenci]. One of them was AC Company, Arizona Copper Company. The other was PD. It was not Phelps Dodge [Detroit Copper Company]. That is the one I worked for, the other company. There was a store of the Longfellow Company. The Longfellow Company belonged to Arizona Copper Company. It was an English company. The general offices of that company were in London. They had another office in New York.

There was not a union. Later as the years passed there was a union. Because of the union, there was a strike in 1915, in the winter. There were some men, I do not remember their names. With so many years, everything goes. We made a strike and in that strike, that is when the wages went up to $4.00. They only earned $1.50. I am going to tell you something; the union is good in all organizations. The union is very beautiful, but for everything there is a limit. In this of work, the union got powerful, and as it got stronger, I did not like many of the things the union did. I was a member like everybody else but one cannot say anything. I did not like it because when it gets powerful, they want to obligate the company to do what the union wants. It is not that way. My point of view is that when a person has a business and hires five or six or seven. You run your business but the day arrives that the children, the six or seven, want to run the business and tell you how to run your business. No, it should not be like that because the business is not theirs. They work for you. You can run your business the way you want to. That is what happened with the union. They wanted the company to do what they [union] wanted to do, what they demanded. In the end, the union fell apart. At the end, it was dissolved because not many people wanted a union. [This happened in] 1918 or1920. After 1921 there was no union.

The war was in 1917 in Europe and they took many people as soldiers to Europe. In Morenci it was the same as in all of the United States. They had a million soldiers in France. I was young. I was fourteen years old. When the war was over, copper went down so much and that is when they started working three days, four days. That is when they got me out of school to help my father support the family. In 1921, the copper went down so much, it did not sell. They closed Morenci for a year in 1921. They closed it in May when school was out. Then they closed Morenci for a whole year, until '22. In August of 1922, they started to hire again a little bit, then a bit more. That is when I began to work for the company in 1922, in September. So I had good luck. I did not go to the mine. I had good luck to go to the machine shop. There I learned a trade.

My father died from working in the [underground] mine. You know that the work in the mine, even the foremen died from it. It was a large mine. I got to go in the mine. We had to go do some work inside of the mine for a week. It seemed like the days were shorter inside the mine. It was all tunnels [inside the mine]. All tunnels connected to one another and there were tracks that they ran electric motors with wires above. They took the metal to the concentrator. At the concentrator there was a slide that went down and below in the mine there were deposits. They put that metal in the deposits and the concentrator had two skippers as they called them. They were two boxes. Each box held 100 tons. When one box was on top, the other was below. When it was below, it filled automatically. The doors would open where the metal was already ground up that the machines left. The skipper would fill up then it would go up and then the other one would go up and dump in the ponds. The one at the bottom while the other one dumped; would fill and come up. It worked automatically. It worked the whole shift and got lots of metal. All the metal from the mine came out that way through the concentrator. In the deposits where it fell, there were belts and the belts would take the metal to the crushers where the metal was ground. From there it moved to other crushers that ground the metal smaller. In that way, it passed to another compartment of the concentrator where the copper was concentrated and separated. That is to say, they took out the dirt and the concentrated copper remained. The concentrate was then taken to the mill and there it was separated and came out glasa.

The work was very beautiful. I worked in the machine shop. I learned all that because sometimes I had to do work in the mill where they lifted the copper and we worked on the concentrator sometimes. I learned it all, the process. The process of the metal from when comes out of the earth. El Numero Seis was the concentrator. It was new. There was another one of the Morenci Company. It is Phelps Dodge today. There were two concentrators. The other one was on the other side of the hill going to Metcalf.

Many people would go up the incline [in Metcalf] to work. They went up in the little cars of the incline. In the afternoon, there were many that got on the little car and went down. There were others [that went down in a different way]. I learned how to do this, to make caballitos (little horses) of 4 by 4 wood and two rollers. One would put them on the tracks. Many would take their caballito. They would put a foot out on one side, and they would put a hose from a train car, thick. They would get a hose like that and cut it lengthwise and nail it to the back. Then they would get the hose like this on the track (demonstrates) and that is what they used for a brake. They went down the incline in a short time. I made one when I first started working in the company. We worked for a little over a month and a half there in Coronado making tracks. I made one [caballito], the ones from Metcalf showed me how. I made one to go down the incline. Very comfortable that was.

At work, I spoke English but not very correct. That is what kept me back from rising in the company to a good position, the education. That is what kept me back. I could not read and write much in English because I did not have the education. That is what kept me from getting a high position in the company. They told me this twice, different people. They told me, "What holds you back, is not having an education. If you did, now you would be in a higher level job." If only I had finished high school. I used to tell them, "It is okay. I will not debate it." Even so, I worked the last twenty years, before retiring, as a foreman. I was in charge of all the work of the shovels there in the mine, the repair of them. Everybody worked under me. I had a good salary. Not like the ones who have college or who finished high school, no. But I was better off than many who had finished high school. When I retired, thirty years ago, the salaries were still very low. I earned $33 per day and that was one of the highest salaries there were. About two years later, they were earning $90 per day. They said, "You should have stayed." I wish I had earned two or three years of $100 per day, but no, that is not how it was. (laughs)

When I retired, they did not want me to retire, the superintendent of the mine nor the master mechanic. I worked for the department of mechanics. But I got to my time of retirement. I retired at sixty-eight years of age and I was in good physical shape. I was not sick or anything. That is why I retired because the company insurance did not cover anyone over sixty-eight years of age. That is why I had to retire. Then later, two years after, they raised it to seventy years. Now there is no limit. One can stay working in the company, if one wants to work as long as one is healthy. If one starts to get sick, then they retire because of the illness. But if one can last to 75 or 78 years of age in good health, there is nothing like someone with experience. Everything is changing."