American RadioWorks: 'No Place for a Woman' Explaining the Iron Range character Not all the mines were bad It's all about respect Working in the mines today Photos Inside the mine Wendy Beaulieu Marlynn Klinzing View full slideshow (5 images) Tools E-mail this page Print this page Sponsor

A pebble mill inside the NorthShore mine, the former Reserve Mining Co. in Babbitt, Minnesota. (Photo courtesy of Cleveland-Cliffs)

Although some women who worked in the iron mines of northern Minnesota in the 1970s suffered harassment at the hands of their male coworkers, most of the mines weren't that bad. Three women who worked at Reserve Mining Co. in Babbitt remember it as a good place to work.

Babbitt, Minn. — Wendy Beaulieu was hired in May, 1975. She was the fourth woman to start working at Reserve.

"The happiest day ever when I got to work at the mine. Because I thought, 'Oh, the world's open to me, I'm going to have a paycheck,'" Beaulieu recalls. "Because living on welfare is not a good place to be. So having this job brought security to us. I bought a trailer house. It was excellent!"

Wendy Beaulieu's friend, Marlynn Klinzing, started at Reserve in 1977.

"I took my job serious. In fact, when I first got hired up there on the midnight shift, you kind of get lost for the night, you know. Well I was sweeping all night. And the foreman was watching me, and all he did was shake his head," says Klinzing. "After you wised up a little bit, why, I never did just go sleep somewhere, but I wasn't quite that active all the time. But it was a very good mine to work for."

"I hated it," says Margaret Sweet. She worked at Reserve to earn money for her kids' college education.

"Unlike Wendy and unlike Marlynn, I absolutely hated it for every day I worked there," says Sweet. "The noise, the dirt, the shift work. I was very happy selling Avon."

Margaret Sweet worked some of the time in the drive house, where enormous motors propel conveyor belts loaded with crushed rock.

"When I was in the drive house, I think of the one young guy who would urinate on the big drive motors so the place would smell. And he did this on purpose, knowing I would be the next one," Sweet recalls. "And yet his father was a foreman and he was just a pussycat, he was one that would baby us. He would never let me run the crane himself, he would always come up with me, for fear that I might get hurt. He'd let me do the job but he would walk me through it all the time."

"Fritz, on the other hand, would say, 'Why don't you go down to the loading bins and spend the night, on midnight shift. Just get out of the crusher, get out of the way. Go down to the loading bins and spend the night,'" says Sweet. "Because it would be a nice quiet place for me to spend the night. And these were the kind of men that would give any woman special treatment just because they were women."

"Every once in awhile you'd run into some guy who didn't like women there, but the majority of the people that I was in contact with liked women," adds Wendy Beaulieu. "But then, if you are outgoing and sunny and laughing, you couldn't help but win them over."

"Most of the men were fine. You know, most people are fine. There were that handful, of course, there's always a handful," says Margaret Sweet. "The maintenance men at the start were the ones that would tell off-color stories and carry on in the lunchroom. I would sit and read my book and ignore them. After awhile it wasn't fun anymore. So they'd say, 'Why don't you keep score while we play cards?' So I'd keep score. So that was acceptance."

"Later on there were times when they would come to my assistance. There was a young guy that was sent over to work and he thought, 'Oh, a woman, let's just be as gross as we can be.' And he was soon put in his place. He was told that there's a lady in the room and we don't treat our ladies that way."

Marlynn Klinzing remembers an occasion when she was working the pan feeder, which catches the crushed rock and feeds it to the conveyor belt. Klinzing's job was to keep an eye on the falling rock to be sure nothing damaged the belt.

"There was a pipe leaking down there. And I says, 'There's a pipe down there with metal fatigue.' I was trying to sound real fancy here. And he says, 'You mean the damn thing's wore out, don't you?'" recalls Klinzing. "I mean, we did have funny things that happened, but it was quite an experience."

"I got out of the pit," says Margaret Sweet. "I was on the jet drills and I just couldn't handle that job, I was 5 feet tall and 105 pounds, and I couldn't do it."

Sweet was assigned to help the drill operator, who drilled holes for explosives. Her job included changing the reamer -- or bit -- when it got dull.

"I was standing on the edge of the pit, holding the reamer up above my head and about to pitch it down into the pit, when the foreman drove up. And I looked at him and said, 'Tom, get me out of here.' And he said, 'I wouldn't throw that if I were you, Margaret.' And I said, 'Well then, get me out of here.' And he did."

"But when Reserve shut down, that was hard times, very hard times," says Wendy Beaulieu.

In the mid-1980s, the price of steel dropped, and the Reserve mine shut down in 1986. Like all the laid-off miners, Beaulieu and her family struggled to make ends meet.

"We had a Duluth News-Tribune paper route. And then through all this time, we learned we can live without working in the mine, there are other ways to make a living. It's not the end of the world," Beaulieu says. "But our spending is down. We just don't spend like we used to. We just don't spend."

The Reserve mine reopened and is now NorthShore Mining Co. But none of these women went back to work there.

Wendy Beaulieu now assembles cell phones for a company in Eveleth. Margaret Sweet is manager of the Ely-Winton Historical Society. Marlynn Klinzing is retired.