Q: So you’re at 499 feet, six inches.

A: Yeah

Q: Of a 500 foot drilling rig

A: Yeah

Q: The last six inches?

A: Yeah. Well, we were actually 498 because the last two foot of the pipe never did go all the way through the ground. So you still had been set up in the air a little bit. And so in that last core that we took out, he had turned the scintillator on, it went wild.

Q: So you’re onto something.

A: We knew we had something then. Didn’t know what, but we knew we had it. And everybody rejoiced over that. And [in a ] few days, we got the car and come back to Pawhuska, time to go to school again, because we didn’t have a home out there. Now, my parents did go back and they built a couple of little tar paper shacks out there to stay in. And my brothers and his wife and children moved out from Oklahoma out there to work. We bought, they bought a new rig, one that would really drill some holes. And then, my brother —

Q: You got a couple of Mayhew drilling rigs. Which at the time were, how much were they?

A: Yeah Mayhew drilling rigs. I think they were $25,000 a piece, the price of a cheap Ford nowadays.

Q: And we were talking, we met with Mark Steen earlier. He knew all about that, and he said, you know, that’s roughly $250,000 each in today’s money.

A: Yeah.

Q: So you guys went from having not much–. So that this big find enabled you to start purchasing bigger equipment, better equipment.

A: Well, we’d raised — We could get some money now. People would… And my parents were very generous in their givings. They could have ended up with half of it all by themselves, but when they started making stock within the company, making, you know, shares of stock, they gave each one of their children the same amount of stock, which is a sizable amount. So I think one time we had one of our family members kind of look up what the strike was, what the find was. And he said he thought [it was] in the neighborhood of 28 to 30 million in today’s money. So guys were literally the Beverly Hillbillies. I mean, went from having nothing to millions. Well, we could act a little dice, or we might have come up to their level, we don’t know, yeah. So having this money brought kind of some credibility to the whole, you know, Lisbon Valley area, the whole uranium boom. So it was, you know, Charlie Steen, you know, he had found his but this also just bolstered what he was doing, gave it credibility.

Q: Which just in turn, brought more and more people there.

A: Yeah, we were probably the second or third uranium mine going there, and we had a couple of more mines branch off of that, or we formed companies off of this. And one was called the Alice Mine, which was named after Frank Richardson’s wife, Alice, the Alice Mine. And it worked for a while, but it finally just run out of ore. And then there was another one that we had back over in that [area], I can’t think of the name of that, but anyway, the La Sal mine which was basically 100 yards from where we drilled the first hole to find that uranium. And they drilled, I mean, they sunk the shaft down. That was probably 100 yards from where we found the ore.

Q: Wow. So they went back out, and you moved back out in 1954 and went to your junior year of high school in Moab?

A: Yeah.

Q: So you moved back. They were out working in La Sal. You lived in Moab. So what was that like?

A: Well, I would go out and work some, but mostly didn’t do a whole lot, because the big work was already done when we left, like the summer before, we found the ore. So this was like four or five months later, and things really went into high gear as far as arranging things to be done, housing, all this kind of stuff was in play.

Q: You said, all of a sudden, you had a lot of relatives you never knew existed.

A: Oh yeah! Isn’t that strange? We’re probably the first ones that ever did that. We did have a lot of relatives show up.

Q: Some you’d never heard of.

A: Some I’ve never even, didn’t even know that they ever existed.

Q: So but, but you moved into a boarding house and went to school?

A: Yeah

Q: So what was that like?

A: I don’t really remember much about that. It was a boarding house. It’s just a mile — just a block off of Main Street. I can’t recall the name of the boarding house now, but I lived there and went to school, took care of myself, went to the restaurant to eat, because there wasn’t — a boarding house was not, they didn’t serve meals. It was just a place to stay. And so they arranged, my parents arranged for a restaurant there to charge my meals. So I got the three good meals a day.

Q: But you got to know kids there?

A: I got to know kids there. Some really nice kids too. One of the boys was, was well, the White. His last name was White, and his parents had the White Ranch, which is up, up the river, up where the old movie fort used to be. And they were just as friendly as could be. And the people were just as friendly as they could be. The kids were friendly. Had a good time with them, but didn’t have my parents there to tell me what to do, but I knew what to do, and I knew if I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, I was going to have a meeting with them.