The Good Times Are All Gone Now
Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town
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3 Months Free
The Good Times Are All Gone Now
Buy Now for £12.29
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Narrated by:
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Cindy Piller
Julie Whitesel Weston left her hometown of Kellogg, Idaho, but eventually it pulled her back.
Kellogg in the late 1940s and 50s was a typical American small town complete with high school football and basketball teams, marching band, and anti-Communist clubs; yet its bars, gambling dens, and brothels were entrenched holdovers from a rowdier frontier past. The Bunker Hill Mining Company, the largest employer, paid miners good wages for difficult, dangerous work, while the quest for lead, silver, and zinc denuded the mountainsides and laced the soil and water with contaminants.
Much of this memoir of place set during the Cold War and post-McCarthyism is told through their voices. But Weston also considers how certain people made a difference in her life, especially her band director, her ski coach, and an attorney she worked for during a major strike. She also explores her charged relationship with her father, a hardworking doctor revered in the community for his dedication but feared at home for his drinking and rages.
The Good Times Are All Gone Now begins the day the smokestacks came down, and it reaches far back into collective and personal memory to understand a way of life now gone.
©2009 Julie M. Weston (P)2015 Redwood Audiobooks