Word: mine
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...vine-covered hills around their village. The black-streaked yellow ore has brought them steady jobs, tidy red brick houses and a measure of happiness, but in recent years it has brought a creeping fear: What if the supply of sulphur should run out? As the mine shaft plunged deeper and deeper into the earth, even Cabernardi's Communists went regularly to the little parish church to pray to St. Barbara that the seam might last forever...
Invalids Assay High. The word spread through the mining country, and so many visitors arrived at the Free Enterprise that they got in the way of the miners who were trying to find out whether its uranium veins were worth working. Wade V. Lewis, an experienced hard-rock miner and president of the company that owns the Free Enterprise, soon discovered that the visiting invalids assayed higher than anything in the mine: every carload was a pay-lode...
Lewis asked medical authorities to check whether there was anything in the mine that could do anybody any harm-or any good. Assured that a trip down the mine should not actually hurt anybody, but without waiting for a verdict on the reported cures-no serious investigation has begun yet-the owners of the Free Enterprise floated $100,000 worth of stock and closed the mine for improvements...
...shaft was sunk, and into it was built an Otis elevator big enough to hold stretcher and wheelchair cases. This cost $50,000. Airlocks were installed in the mine to seal in "curative" gases. To keep the procession of health-seekers in order, there is a flossy reception room where each visitor gets a number assigning him to a seat in the 85-ft. lateral. Downtown, a cashier handles the payoff: $100 for each visitor, which entitles him to four one-hour sessions underground...
...Merry Widow. Proprietor Lewis, flanked by a lawyer, is careful never to use such words as "treatment" or "patients." "Hell," says Lewis, "we're mining men, developing a uranium-bearing deposit. We're not doctors and don't pretend to be." But even with a daily limit of 30 new visitors, the mine takes in as much as $3,000 a day, and nobody has seen any trucks of uranium ore coming...