Bill Roberts stands beside his basement desk, surrounded by photographs and artifacts of the Sullivan mine. He opens his best-selling book, The Best Miners in the World: Stories from Canada’s Sullivan Mine, and points to a typewritten chart of 1920 mine employees’ nationalities:  Polish. Irish. Norwegian. Galician. Russian. Swedish. Italian. ”That’s why we live in the best country in the world,” Roberts says. “Look where we all came from.”

He reminisces about the best times and a few of the worst. His speech slows when describing the day his partner, Mike Lysohirka, died from a cave-in. Roberts stares off into the past and explains how he uncovered Lysohirka from fallen rock, hoisted him onto his shoulders, and carried him through the dark. He smiles and shakes his head. “It was tough work,” Roberts says. “But, I’d do it all over again. In a heartbeat. We were miners. It was the best career in the world.”

Roberts is referring to his thirty-six years of employment at Kimberley’s Sullivan Mine--originally owned by The Consolidated Mining and Smelting Co., or Cominco, until it became Teck Resources in 2009--one of the world’s largest underground lead, zinc, and silver mines, that operated for ninety-two  years before it ceased production in 2001. The mine, the result of geological stirrings 1470 million years ago,  stretched underground with forty miles of tracks. The mine's economic success resulted largely from Cominco’s development of the differential flotation process that allowed separate recovery of lead and zinc concentrates in the milling process. The Sullivan produced over 160 million tons of ore that yielded more than twenty-billion dollars in metals. Kimberley was a company town, with 1,000 average annual employees and a lifetime total of 60,000 employees. “We were neighbours, relatives, friends,” Roberts says of his fellow employees. “We had a good rapport with the company. They paid us fairly and were always looking at ways to make living and working here more enjoyable.”

He describes his first few years at work, during the early 60’s, laying track and ties under four inches of ice-cold water. The ex-Notre Dame College Hound, who tried out with the Saskatchewan Roughriders as a running back, wasn’t afraid of hard work. “My college’s motto was fitting: Luctor et Emergo,” he says. “Struggle and Emerge." In 1969, Roberts transitioned into hard rock mining, and was responsible for drilling and blasting the ore body. “We’d load the drilled holes with nitrate fertilizer, get out of the way, then let ‘er rip,” he says chuckling.

Roberts, 79, works for the Kimberley Underground Railway Museum’s Sullivan Mine Interpretive Centre. He dons his diggers and demonstrates how the equipment works, how ore is blasted, and how important mine rescue and refuge stations are. He informs people that the company was one of the safest to work for: Since the mine’s opening in 1909, only seventy-three people died, a remarkably number given the history and immense amount of ore extracted. When there’s a mining disaster throughout the world, Roberts is frequently contacted by news bureaus to solicit his expertise. “When the Chilean miners were trapped,” he says, “CBC reporters asked me what they’d be experiencing. When they emerged, they relayed the identical tales I’d described.”

In his book, Roberts describes the miners as battle-weary, battered, and bruised from a hard life working underground. “But there was never any whining or complaining. Their filter of memory had them recalling the best times, not the worst.” Harry ‘Red’ Foster, who’d endured a long mining career before he was hired to work the Sullivan in 1943, described what it was like in the old days: “While one guy was drilling, his partner would be scraping the blasted round. You couldn’t see a goddamn thing with all the fog and dust. Crazy bastards we were.” Roberts interviewed miners who’d worked both the early and late years of the Sullivan.

In the early days, it was the wild west, with rudimentary safety codes. Miners climbed forty foot ladders to scrape loose rock from walls. They kept warm by working hard. They played practical jokes on each other, and basketball with a tied up rag ball. Miners and their families lived well. The company built swimming pools, skating rinks, dance halls, and ball diamonds. They turned a blind eye when miners built houses and left work with a lunch buckets full of nails. When they worked overtime, they got restaurant vouchers for their family. Roberts writes: “They were good days. A lot of miners stayed, and over the years their sons followed in their footsteps. A new miner evolved: the ‘homestead miner’. Eventually, the Sullivan had third and fourth-generation miners.” For the most part, they loved their work. They loved Kimberley. They referred to the mine as if it was part-human: it was the lungs of Kimberley, the heart, the belly. It was the soul of the town. Miner Bud Hart told Roberts he’d like to see a commemorative plaque above the 3900 Portal, where the miners entered by train beginning in 1915: “Through this portal have passed the best miners in the world.”

Before the afternoon’s over, Roberts stands outside the old powerhouse, the building that provided energy and air during the early years of the mine. He talks about how lucky he was to spend thirty-six years doing what he loved. He smiles. “It was beautiful,” he says. “Really beautiful.” He locks the side door, rattles it to make sure it’s secure and drives to the front gate. “Now, at least I get to tell people about the history here,” he says. “You should see the look on their faces.”