43.

DONALD Poynter revived the Hay Pook mine in 1960. He also had plans to reopen the Hare’s Ears mine. He was confident that the high-quality ore from Hare’s Ears would win new customers in the American steel industry. The government of Newfoundland had offered a $200,000 loan guarantee, but it had tight strings attached—evidence that senior government officials finally had serious doubts about the competence, and perhaps even the integrity, of Walter Seibert.

Walter turned the offer down.

There’s a telling document among the Smallwood papers in an archive at Memorial University of Newfoundland. It’s undated and unsigned. It’s stamped “Confidential,” and it presents an unflattering portrait of the St. Lawrence Corporation and its owner. “Almost any handyman can build a lean-to,” it begins, “add more lean-tos to it, put a couple of more lean-tos on top of it and call it a house. But it is not a house for all it may be called one. At best, it is a crude shelter. In the same way, a bunch of holes dug into the ground all over the place does not constitute a mine, even though it may be called a mine at St. Lawrence. It is at best extensive diggings.”²⁰

The anonymous author continues: “From observation and from report, I have come to the conclusion that the construction of the fluorspar ‘mines’ of the St. Lawrence Corporation initially involved only the application of the ingenuity of handymen and the financial outlay of a lean-to . . . Moreover, during the twenty-odd years that these diggings have been expanding there is no visible evidence that anything was done to them by way of engineering design.” The policy was “to improvise until there was nothing left to improvise with, and then purchase the cheapest possible make-do to keep things going a little longer.”

The document then sets out twelve steps that should have been followed, including the preparation of a master plan and the employment of “a qualified accountant . . . from the start.” This observation would have stung Walter Seibert, who was an accountant by profession.

It must be admitted that mines are constructed to make a profit for the owner more than for any other reason. In view of the fact that the St. Lawrence Corporation’s operations at St. Lawrence undoubtedly returned a profit for their owner for many years, then the question may well be asked what does it matter whether these diggings were ingenious improvisations or engineered excavations?

The answer is that as soon as an abnormal combination of circumstances, particularly favourable to the owner, disappeared, the operations collapsed flat, the deposits only partly exhausted, and the normal demand for fluorspar greater than ever.

The author noted approvingly “the availability of several superbly ingenious men who were prepared to devote their all to an adventure, and who did just that by going to St. Lawrence in the 1930s.” However, “the owner of the deposits was a man with a reputed fanatical devotion to profit,” which resulted in many of the problems that were then threatening the existence of the venture.

There is, in the five-page document, no reference to mine ventilation or to health, to silicosis or to cancer. It is, all in all, a lament for lost political and economic opportunities.

The writing has the flair and the journalistic tone, not to mention the wit, to suggest it could have been written by Smallwood himself. The reference to “superbly ingenious men” could reflect the fact that Dr. Warren Smith, the first manager of Black Duck and later boss at Newfluor, and Donald Poynter, who had a warm relationship with the premier, were both well respected among government officials in St. John’s and Ottawa.

Whether Joey Smallwood actually penned this vivid document is beside the point—he obviously agreed with it and valued it enough to preserve it among his private papers for posterity.

ON Friday, June 9, 1961, Donald Poynter took another phone call from the United States. On the line this time was Johanna Seibert, Walter’s wife. The message was brief: her husband had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage the day before and had died shortly afterwards in St. Mary’s Hospital, in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Poynter put the phone down, shaken. He was in his office. He had known Walter Seibert for more than thirty years. Their mothers had introduced them, encouraged them to work together. He and Seibert had become business partners on the strength of promises and a handshake, an arrangement that had never been formalized. He took a deep breath, then walked home to break the news to his wife, Florence Etchegary Poynter.

His son Thomas Poynter recalls that his father “was visibly upset. The wind was clearly taken out of his sails for the moment. I don’t think there was any indication that Seibert was ill.”

Walter Seibert was, legally, the sole owner of the St. Lawrence Corporation and several other related enterprises in Canada and the United States. The future of the corporation—and now that of its senior employee, Donald Poynter—was suddenly, unexpectedly under a darker cloud than just a day earlier, when the challenge had been simple by comparison: reopen mines, find buyers for fluorspar. Donald Poynter had been confident that both objectives, while difficult, were doable. But what now?

The Seibert family, Johanna and her three sons, visited St. Lawrence to evaluate their mining operations. It quickly became obvious to Poynter that they had no interest in hanging on to them—they would soon be up for sale.

It also became clear that the family had no intention of honouring Walter’s informal promises that Donald would one day be a full partner and would own a substantial block of shares in the corporation. Poynter’s plans to reopen one of the idle mines were abruptly shelved.

Two of Seibert’s sons had actually lived and worked in St. Lawrence in the early fifties. They would undoubtedly have been aware of the looming tragedy of miners who had worked in corporation mines. To that point, because the corporation had been relatively inactive since 1957, Seibert had avoided the growing controversy about dust and radiation in his mines. He’d been unwavering in his focus on the business of selling fluorspar and making money from it. He had cleared a reported $10 million on his contract with the US government in the early fifties.

Newfluor, so far, had been taking all the heat in the emerging controversy over miners’ health. And as of 1961, there would be new regulations that required rigorous radiation monitoring underground and even in surface facilities. There would be intense public scrutiny. Newfluor would be on the firing line for years to come. There was no way around that reality.

There were many reasons, on the other hand, why the Seibert family would want to cut and run, and effectively avoid accountability for the industrial carnage that was directly attributable to Walter’s early scheme to make his fortune. The financial compensation owed to the dead and dying miners and their families would inevitably become a liability. The Seibert family had been handed, in Walter’s sudden death, a golden opportunity to avoid it.

St. Lawrence Corporation assets were soon up for sale, but the same factors that had made the Seibert family reluctant to continue running the mines were also daunting for prospective buyers. Alcan was already in the middle of the mess. There was little downside to picking up the pieces of what was left of their old competitor. They had their eye, especially, on the Blue Beach property. The Smallwood government, reluctant to allow one company to have total control of the resource, discouraged the deal at first.²¹

The search went on for more than three years, until finally the Seibert family asked Alcan to revive its original offer to buy the corporation assets. And this time, they did. Now they had the town of St. Lawrence, afraid that it could soon become a ghost town, onside, and the political objections quickly slipped away.

Poynter, by now aware that he had been betrayed by the man he had long considered his partner, had to endure the additional indignity of working out the details of the sale to Alcan’s subsidiary, Newfluor. And on June 9, 1965, four years to the day from the fateful phone call from Mrs. Seibert, he watched the properties he had helped turn into mines pass over to the competition.

Poynter by then had deep roots in St. Lawrence. His wife was born and raised there, part of the prominent Etchegary clan. His five children, with the exception of his eldest daughter, had all been born in Newfoundland, and all had become ardent Newfoundlanders. He might have returned to New Jersey, but instead he took a job in St. John’s as an adviser to the provincial government, which was where he ended his career.

He would live out much of his remaining life in Newfoundland, in failing health, until July 26, 1976, when he suffered a heart attack during a holiday at a family retreat in Long Island, New York. He died four days later, surrounded by his wife and adult children.

His final years were bitter. As his son Thomas, a Boston-based entrepreneur, remembers: “It was a difficult time in our house. My family’s notion, on the Poynter and the Etchegary sides, of keeping promises was strong. And the Seiberts broke it, again.”²²

The Seibert family, Thomas Poynter still believes, were “uncaring for the miners or the town. From the father to the wife to the sons, just nasty people who give capitalism a bad name.”

IN 1965, the year the corporation died, lung cancer claimed the lives of eight more former miners in St. Lawrence, most of whom had started their careers in corporation mines.

One of them was forty-five-year-old Arcule Slaney Jr., whose father, Rennie Slaney’s brother, also named Arcule, had died from “miners’ disease” eight years earlier.