TRANSCRIPT

So what was it like when you started work at the salt mine, any idea how many they employed then, how busy it was?

Oh yes, there was about 120 people working there then, roughly.

So what were some of the other jobs they would have been doing then?

Oh there were quite a few jobs. At 1951 they changed to paper bags instead of jute bags. They still had to fill some jute bags but they went to paper, 100 lbs, and that was a picnic compared to the other ones. And Jimmy Waugh? you want to hear that story about Jimmy Waugh?

Oh sure.

Jimmy Waugh, the maintenance superintendent he went to New Brunswick up to a sugar plant for a company visit or something; and he saw a small machine up there that filled 2lb bags with sugar. He got thinking about it and he came back to Malagash and the maintenance department and him built a rotary bagging machine, and it had three heads on it, that meant it would fill three bags at a time. It rotated around in a circle and it automatically filled, and two men one fella putting the empty paper bags on and one taking the full ones off. They put it on like a little table up quite high, and you had a feed trolley, and you'd take your feed trolley and pull it up to the front of that and load the bags on the feed trolley very carefully. And sometimes I had to trolley, I became a trolley-man, and sometimes I had to trolley ten bags, which was half a ton, on two wheels; but it wasn't the strength because I didn't have that much, it was the skill of doing it, and you would trolley it out into the box car.

So that was quite innovative then for him to go and see that and make one for Malagash?

Oh yes. In Malagash if something broke, we usually had to make the part. You couldn't phone up and say send me one; and a lot of things that were at the salt mine Jimmy Waugh, Theodore McKenzie, Baxter Mattertol, Alec Smith, those four fellas invented a lot of things for the first time.