Customer Reviews

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

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I've known Julie pretty much forever. She's an excellent lawyer, or was (maybe retired now) but her writing really sets her apart. For a Wallace guy to say that about a Kellogg person is pretty unusual. Had to take a lot of courage for her to write the book. Her history is correct, of course. Except that Wallace usually beat Kellogg in football.

This is one of those books which will always stay with me. Ms. Weston offers up a sort of archeological and sociological excavation of her hometown, and I found it fascinating. In driving around this country, I've passed through many small towns where I've wondered about the people who live there, wondered why they stayed. This story evoked memories and images of my own barely surviving hometown, also once a booming company town (but not mining), where I also grew up in the '40s and '50s. This book gently peels away the present facade and explores and explains the components beneath that created Kellogg, Idaho--not quite as wholesome as the name "Kellogg" would imply. It's a history of the intertwined good and bad, blessings and curses, that co-exist with everything, everyone and everywhere, but most blatantly, perhaps, in a mining town. Ms. Weston writes in such a way that attaches the readers to her side and takes us along on her journey as witnesses. I appreciated sharing parts of her childhood, exploring the town through her eyes, learning of another life in another prosperous small town in the that era, and then coming back with her and watching it all fall down. Some parts of it I'd rather have avoided, such as the trip into the mine, deep inside the mountain. I am also claustrophobic and cannot imagine the courage it took for her to do this. I loved this book and highly recommend it to anyone who has ever lived in a small town, driven through and wondered about one, or never lived in a small town or a company town, and to whoever appreciates the cost some extraordinary men paid to give us all a better life. The writing is clear and concise, with vivid descriptions of the town, its people, and, of course, the mine operations and its ramifications. An outstanding book, Ms. Weston!

The author writes about her childhood in a mining town in northern Idaho where she never really noticed the brown haze that hung over the town, the product of the smelters sending out steam, sulfuric acid, and lead particles into the air, or the barren hillsides and piles of slag. Nor did she really give much thought to the row of brothels she passed on her way to and from school or the ladies who worked there, although she knew they visited her doctor dad periodically for a clean bill of health so they could continue working. Typically of kids in those days, she played outdoors most of the time and in all kinds of weather. She and her friends playing "Indian tribe" found in the garbage cans of the hospital, where her dad worked, interesting things for barter or trade: bottles, gauze, rubber tubes, and even syringes (with out needles), but they didn't touch the jars of what appeared to hold human organs and fetus looking things. Maple trees grew in the town, turned colors and shed their leaves, normal sounding, but, she says, only robins sang in Kellogg, the only type bird that could survive regular doses of lead poisoning.
In her research for the book, Julie Whitesel Weston interviewed many who have lived there for years and who remembered how it was back then. She explores her family dynamics, especially her relationship with her Jekyll and Hyde father who was loved by his patients, but whose family bore the brunt of his drunken rages. She also tells the story of mining and even went down into a mine to understand a little more of the kind of life the miners led. It was for her a frightening experience and she does not envy those men and the few women who went to work everyday into the bowels of the earth, knowing it could be their last, and especially so in the early days of mining.
In later years Kellogg tried to become the model of a Bavarian village, but wasn't very successful. They now cater to skiing and are casting about for other ideas, determined to have their town thrive as it did in the days of mining, but as a clean and healthy community.
Eunice Boeve, author of Ride a Shadowed Trail

"I bought a lottery ticket," writes Julie Weston at the opening of this illuminating memoir of the mining town where she grew up. "The prize? Pushing the plunger to dynamite the smokestacks rising above Kellogg, Idaho, on Memorial Day weekend in 1996."

After beginning with what seems like the end--the destruction of the smelter chimneys that towered over the town, representing the flourishing mining industry that brought Kellogg into being in the 1880s and sustained it until the 1980s--Weston describes what travelers see today when they whizz through the narrow valley hemmed in by steep mountainsides on Interstate 90: slag heaps, tailings ponds, bare mountainsides, once-flourishing neighborhoods abandoned, a downtown with vacant buildings, billboards urging tourists to stop and ride the longest gondola in the western hemisphere.

"Only a few ghostly remnants remained," Weston writes, of the industry that produced fortunes in silver, lead, and zinc from underground mines. "Who now remembered the hustle and bustle except those of us who grew up there?"

Hence this unflinching and beautifully written memoir of place, in which Weston recreates that hustle and bustle, drawing a compelling portrait of the town she knew and the people who animated it, from miners and labor agitators to lawyers, women's clubs to whorehouses. Included are her own memories and the stories of her family, including her father, a hard-drinking doctor as revered for his skilled and compassionate care at the town's only hospital as he was feared at home for his temper, along with the recollections of dozens of people she interviewed in researching the book, the complex geology of the mountains, the history of the mines and strikes, and the fortunes made and lives lost. The book brings Kellogg alive, a town that flourished for decades on the prosperity brought by humming underground mines and the smelters that processed their ores, before the market for the silver, lead, and zinc crashed and the toxic deposits from mining and smelting turned the area into the nation's second-largest Superfund site.

At the end, Weston (who left Kellogg after high school and never moved back) sorts through her ties to the town and her complex feelings of loss, even as she searches for signs of rebirth. Whether a happy ending is in store for Kellogg is not clear, but its role in the lives of those who grew up with the round-the-clock rumble of the smelter, the whistle signaling the changing of shifts, and the perpetual haze of toxic smoke is very clear. "If I don't always know who or where I am," Weston writes, "I do know where I come from: Kellogg, a small town in northern Idaho." That solid belonging allows Weston to write this poignant and affectionate memoir of place, showing clearly the gifts and perils at the heart of real people, real communities, real life.

by Susan J. Tweit
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

An excellent, well written book about a very interesting area and period of our history.

In baseball parlance a home run is a hit that covers all three bases of the diamond. In "The Good Times Are All Gone Now" this author covers in precious detail what life was like in Kellog Utah, her home town in its great years. For second base she details all the factors that led to the death of her town and finally she complets the hit with the rebirth and hope for the future of her town. Among the high lights are her description of the terrible decline and death of many of the town's prostitutes. Their tragedy mirrors the tragedy of the town brought down by the unbridled lust for the riches that mining could produce. What it produced was death of her town. It's rebirth is full of hope. Julie Weston loves her town. This is a great read.

Claude M. Pearson

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. The author "drills down" deeply. 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.(less)

The Good Times are All Gone Now: Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town, by Julie Whitesel Weston takes a refreshingly frank look at the author's hometown, Kellogg, Idaho.

Weston delves realistically into the gritty world of a town's quest for lead, silver and zinc by Bunker Hill Mining Company, the community's largest employer. Although the book begins with the author's return to Kellogg to witness the1996 demolition of the mining company's smokestack, much of the book takes place in the fifties and sixties, during Weston's years as a school girl. But she also reaches back to the nineteenth century of Kellogg's founding and the townpeople's involvement in this stark mining environment, as well as five generations of her family in Idaho.

Weston takes an honest look at her family's dynamics-a supportive mother, an older brother and younger sister, and a well-respected father, much admired as a skilled physician, but who at home is feared for his drunken rages. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Weston thrives among the hard-working townspeople, is at the top of her class at school, and makes life-long friends.

Kellogg, known for its rich mines and notorious for its tough way of life, its brothels and gambling, is nevertheless Julie Whitesel Weston's hometown and she mourns the demise of a way of life. Although the mines brought wealth to the community, they also brought sludge piles of contaminated waste, causing devastation to forests and rivers.

Toward the end of the book, the author recognizes a new Kellogg emerging, a town with a different focus, turning years of decay into new life, opportunity and jobs. The realization that her hometown has changed forever is mixed with the bitter-sweet memories of the past, but hope for the future.

The Good Times are All Gone Now: Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town is a funny, sad, touching and skillfully-told story of a town and its people, of a young girl influenced by all she saw and experienced. Weston does a remarkable job of putting the reader inside the heart of a town, giving a fresh viewpoint to otherwise casual observers of that unique way of life.

I've waited too long to write this review. I read The Good Times Are All Gone Now when it first came out, bought multiple copies to give to friends and family, and vowed to write a review that captured all the grace, wisdom, nuance, and insight that Julie Weston packs into the book.

Rather than wait any longer for a review crafted as well as the book itself, I'll just say it's a wise and beautiful book, and it's bound to resonate with many readers on many levels. Weston weaves together the story of her hometown and the story of her home life with consummate skill. The public/private contrasts for both are what drives the narrative: the author understands how things appear and how they really are behind the appearances, she understands the emotional, social, and political tensions that result, and she shares those understandings in a way that anyone who ever struggled to reconcile the complexities of life in small town America can appreciate.

The Good Times Are All Gone Now is a memoir, an homage, a social history, and so much more.