The seven children in the Kitchen family grew up tough, in a two-bedroom house in the hardscrabble mining town of Kellogg, Idaho.
There were four girls and three boys. Just 17 months before the worst disaster in Idaho history snuffed out the lives of two Kitchen men, one brother had been shot to death outside a bar.
“The Kitchen name – people almost shook in their boots when they heard it,” said Delta Kirpes, 60, of Lake Stevens.
“They had a reputation,” she said. “They did drink. They did carouse. They earned good money and spent good money. My brothers were lucky if they finished seventh grade. All they knew was mining.”
Delta Kitchen Kirpes is one of the seven, born to a mother who married at age 13.
Thirty-three years ago this month, Kirpes was in Idaho for a heartbreaking vigil and then burial of her father and one brother, Elmer and Dewellyn Kitchen. They were two of 91 men killed in the 1972 fire at the Sunshine Mine in Kellogg.
A new book by best-selling author Gregg Olsen, “The Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption in America’s Richest Silver Mine” (Crown Publishers), brings back a dark time that forever changed the Idaho panhandle town.
“There’s not one person in that town who wasn’t touched by it. It’s nice someone finally wrote a book,” Kirpes said last week when she visited The Herald. “Gregg Olsen is a compassionate man. He answered a lot of questions for me. He feels the people’s sorrow.”
Opening a Life magazine dated May 19, 1972, Kirpes found a picture of townspeople awaiting word, or loved ones’ bodies, outside the mine. “There I am. I’m the blond,” said Kirpes, pointing to a young woman. She was 27.
She and her husband, Jim Kirpes, were living in Seattle. By May 3, the day after the fire, they’d made their way to her hometown an hour’s drive from Spokane. The agony of waiting for news and bodies would last 10 days.
Her family was struck by both disaster and luck. Elmer, 54, and Dewellyn, 31, were dead. “Dad was 5,600 feet down, the lowest level,” Kirpes said. But one of the Kitchens survived.
Delmar Kitchen, 30 at the time, was among 108 miners who escaped to safety the day of the fire. It was Delmar’s twin, Dwight Kitchen, who’d been killed in the bar fight.
“The smoke was so bad, gas masks didn’t work. My brother, Delmar, tells of walking with several men behind him. He was sharing a gas mask and setting the pace. He told them not to run, not to panic. But he could hear guys falling behind him,” Kirpes said.
“For 10 years afterward, he was so depressed. He could hardly take a breath,” she said. “He wondered why he had made it, and why Dad and our brother did not make it.”
Delmar Kitchen returned to the mines. He and his wife, Donna, still live in Pinehurst, west of Kellogg. He suffers from cancer, which Kirpes suspects is related to his years of mining.
The Sunshine Mine is closed now. The cause of the fire has never been discovered. Olsen’s book recounts that Sunshine Mining Co. management was having a stockholders’ meeting in Coeur d’Alene when the fire occurred.
Aware of some smoke underground, they didn’t evacuate the mine because the possibility of a devastating fire in a hard-rock silver mine was dismissed, Olsen said.
Widows received $5,000 in life insurance, and after a lawsuit, families received about $10,000 more, Kirpes said. Unaccustomed to saving, many bought new cars with the money.
Kirpes bears little malice toward the company, and said miners’ tough-as-nails approach to work may have added to their peril.
“My brother would say, ‘A lot of it was our fault.’ He talked about a safety inspector, a nice guy who used to try to have meetings. My dad and brothers just humbugged him. They’d say, ‘We’ve been doing this for years. No one’s going to tell us how to do our jobs.’ “
I was honored to shake Kirpes’ hand and hear her story, having for years thought of the disaster in the abstract. The Sunshine fire happened the spring of my high school graduation.
My memory is clear as a sunny day. We sat on my parents’ patio in the affluence of suburban Spokane and listened to radio reports of miners’ bodies being brought up. Life for us went on as usual, parties and graduation plans, as the media glare shone upon Kellogg’s death watch.
A Northwest tragedy for the ages, the fire killed more people than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.
I have driven through Kellogg many times. I have stopped at the Sunshine Mine Memorial at Big Creek and have been haunted by 91 names at the statue of a proud miner.
Those names have come alive now, through Olsen’s book and Kirpes’ memories.
“Even today, I don’t think the Silver Valley has totally recovered,” said Kirpes, a widow, mother of two and grandmother. “I would never move back there. I never wanted my son to go down in the mines.”
She’ll return to Kellogg next week for a Memorial Day visit, as she has many times.
“I visit the monument, but I have never been back up to the mine,” Kirpes said. “I won’t go up that road. Too many awful memories.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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