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that kind of thing. There were no protections whatever against the ordinary hazards of the mines.

This was before we had adopted that mining code. We had almost no mines in the State of New York. There are these old run-out mines up there north of Massena. There is an old mine which was once owned by Oswald Garrison Villard's family. Oswald got rid of it. It's really in the Ramapos as you go in from the Hudson. That was hardly working at all. Then we had some salt mines in the State of New York and talcum mines, which people forget are mining operations.

This was before we had gotten on to the mining problem, because it was not a basic problem in the State of New York. There wasn't enough of it and there weren't enough people employed in mining. So we didn't have any specific code that could be applied to these mines, except the general statement of the law that everything must be done in a safe and sanitary fashion.

At any rate, I used Lillian Sire to uncover that. That was near scandal. The New York City newspapers scarcely touched it because it wasn't local news, but the papers of the northern tier talked about it.

This may have been before, or perhaps at this time, but there was an explosion in the Oswego Starch Factory some time around here. We were just beginning to know