Frank Zawada, Page 5

Zawada Family History

Frank Zawada's Accident in the Copper Mine

Based on the information from Frank's employment records, Frank began life as a copper miner in Calumet in 1896, at the age of 24.
No previous records have yet been found to document Frank's migration from his immigrant arrival in New York to his settling in Calumet, Michigan. However, we know that Frank was living in Calumet by at least 1894, if not earlier, because his first child was born in July of 1895.
It appears that 12 years later, Frank lost his leg in a mining accident.

Calumet & Hecla employment records show Frank as a Timberman on January 11, 1896, and an Oil Hose man on October 5, 1896. Then, the "Occupation" field is left blank from August 1, 1901 to Dec 1, 1909 when Frank is listed as a Dryman.
Record-keeping may not have been very accurate at the mines, or perhaps we are led to believe this based on the few surviving documents we are left with today.
It is likely that Frank worked in other mines between 1901 and 1909, and it is also possible that Frank either had different job titles at Calumet & Hecla, or that he held the status as Oil Hose man until 1909.

Frank's employment records state, "Had worked 14 1/2 days when leg was broken necessitating amputation", but no month or year is listed for these 14 days of work.

To discover approximately when Frank lost his leg, I turned to the mine applications of his sons Frank Jr and Joseph.
Frank Jr's employment records show that he worked in a lab above-ground for Calumet & Hecla for 6 months when he was 13 years old, beginning on June 3, 1909. However, Frank lied on the mine application and said he was 14 years old.
Joseph also lied on his mine application when he applied to work at the age of 12 - he said he was really 13 - but someone double-checked with the county clerk and corrected the birthdate on the application. Joe was apparently allowed to work, anyway, and he too worked in a lab above-ground for Calumet & Hecla for 6 months.

If a man could not handle even "a cripple's job," the company put one of his sons to work as soon as possible; the boy served as a surrogate for his father. After Michigan passed legislation against child labor [setting the minimum working age at 14], James MacNaughton [president of Calumet & Hecla after 1910] proved generally strict about not hiring underage boys. Still he made exceptions, particularly when a boy had to replace a breadwinner. Victor Meunier, while working for C&H railroad, lost a leg and had to undergo surgery several times. He asked the railroad's superintendent, T.H. Soddy, to hire his boy, even though he was under 16. Soddy allowed the boy to be a locomotive wiper, as long as MacNaughton approved the hire. MacNaughton acquiesced: "If the son of Victor Meunier can fill the bill it would be a good thing to give him the job, notwithstanding the fact that he is not of age, and you have my approval for doing so." - Cradle To Grave: Life, Work And Death At The Lake Superior Copper Mines, by Larry Lankton, p. 191.

In 1909 when Frank Jr was sent to work, he had five siblings; aged 12, 10, 8, 5 and 3. When his brother Joe was sent to work in May of 1910, they had another sibling, born just two months earlier in March. That's a total of seven children, all under the age of 15, and all, except for Frank and Joe, were female.

After losing his leg, Frank may have been unable to work for at least 8 months to a year before any sort of meager financial disability relief was exhausted. During his medical leave, Frank would only see monies that came in from his fellow mine workers (assuming Frank belonged to a "Miner's Club", in which each participating miner put monthly dues in to help cover medical bills if any of their club was injured on the job), and whatever Calumet & Hecla saw fit to give him in terms of medical pay. Workmen's Compensation did not exist in Michigan until 1912.

Lauck and Sydenstricker found that "health has been a luxury to the wage earner because it has been a purchasable thing." The cost of sickness to the worker was extremely heavy since "when a man is injured [on the job], in eighty percent of the cases, his pay is discontinued."- A Short History of American Capitalism - by Meyer Weinberg

"Calumet & Hecla...operated a benefit society and matched the contributions paid in by the men. Started in 1877, the C&H aid fund paid $25 per month (for up to eight months) to men incapacitated by illness or accident; $300 for a disabling injury, such as the loss of a limb or of eyesight; and $500 upon accidental death while at work." - Cradle To Grave: Life, Work And Death At The Lake Superior Copper Mines, by Larry Lankton, p. 188.

"Between the mid-1890's and 1912, mine safety became a contentious issue at the mines. The death toll reached more than one man per week. Even though most underground workers still died only one or two at a time, these small scale fatalities had a cumulative human cost simply too big to be ignored. And for every man who died underground, another 75 suffered injuries that cost them time and wages, or left them incapacitated for life." - Cradle To Grave: Life, Work And Death At The Lake Superior Copper Mines, by Larry Lankton, p. 140.

Despite losing a leg in a mining accident, Frank was a pretty robust man, I'm told.
Frank opted to go back to work down in the mines on December 1, 1909, rather than take a job above-ground, because work down in the mines paid more than surface work. This was likely out of financial necessity, because by December, his wife was about six months pregnant with their seventh child. Once Frank was back to work again, his new title was that of Dryman. His job was to keep the mine clean. This was an entry-level sort of job - quite a departure from his skilled worker status as Timberman.

It is interesting to note that in the 1910 census, Frank's wife Victoria is listed as having the occupation of 'dressmaker'. This further supports the theory that Frank lost his leg in 1909, which would have had severe financial implications on the rest of the family, as, up until that point, Frank had been the lone breadwinner.

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