Daughter Pays Homage to Father’s Work at Rushmore

Jack (Palooka) Payne--prizefighter, merchant seaman, gambler, stonecutter and father--always wanted to be here the day his daughter climbed the mountain.

But the mountain that Payne loved would frustrate his dream. Years of breathing the fine rock dust he hammered from it ignited chronic diseases, silicosis and emphysema, that would choke his lungs.

As the 74-year-old Payne lay dying in a Modesto hospital in 1984, Jackie Maggio told her father she would follow the path he had walked hundreds of times a half-century before when he helped carve the giant stone faces of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

Payne took credit for carving out Washington’s nostrils and Lincoln’s left eye.

Knew He Wouldn’t Make It

“I told him, ‘Daddy, if you don’t get to go, I’ll go.’ And he squeezed my hand real tight. He knew he wasn’t going to make it, but he knew I was,” she said.

On Wednesday, Maggio, 41, of Reseda clambered up Mt. Rushmore to make good on her promise. As she leaned on a rock midway, winded from the rugged climb through a rock-laden pine forest, her gaze fixed on the very top of Washington’s head hundreds of feet above.

She was going to make it up there, “one way or another.”

She carried a dozen pink roses in memory of her father and two white roses in honor of her uncle, Jimmy (Call Boy) Payne, who also worked on Mt. Rushmore. Climbing the steep path with her were Mt. Rushmore’s chief ranger, Leo Zwetzig, and a close friend, Steve Hill.

Ascent on Steep Ladder

“My legs don’t want to climb any more,” she said as Hill pulled her over a small crevice about halfway up the mountain.

But the ascent continued on a steep metal ladder, past rusting equipment of the crews that, from 1927 to 1941, chiseled out a mountain destined to awe millions as a shrine of democracy.

Maggio scrambled up the final ledge just as the wind blustered dangerously. Zwetzig, his hat grabbed by the wind and deposited on the rocks 400 feet below, yelled at Maggio to keep low.

But the stonecutter’s daughter was looking elsewhere, her eyes moving over the rolling Black Hills of western South Dakota.

“I remember him talking about standing on top of the mountain and feeling like he could see the rest of his life before him, like it was all there for the taking,” she said of her father.

She placed the roses on the summit and laid a rock over the stems to prevent them from blowing away.

First Memorial on Summit

“It’s everything my dad said it would be,” the grinning Maggio said, clutching a single pink rose she would keep for herself. “It feels like I’ve done what I was supposed to do.” She sighed. “I was saying things to myself like, ‘We made it Dad.’ ”

Maggio’s memorial was the first time Mt. Rushmore National Memorial officials have allowed any ceremony on the summit to honor a former worker. The taxing route to the top is closed to the public.

Although officials at Mt. Rushmore are concerned that the ceremony may prompt others to use the mountain for personal memorials, Maggio was given special permission because of the length of time her father worked on the project, from 1929 to 1938.

During the 14 years of work after President Calvin Coolidge dedicated the project, about 360 people worked on Mt. Rushmore, but few worked longer than Payne.

Mt. Rushmore was conceived by sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who, until his death in 1941, directed the crews as they blasted away rock with dynamite and cut the stone to precise dimensions transferred from a scale model at the base of the mountain.

“He was a wonderful, eccentric guy--all full of ideas,” Payne said of Borglum in a 1982 newspaper interview. “He’d fire you in a minute if you talked back to him, but he’d always take you back. He took me back many times.”

Money Kept Running Out

When private donations dwindled, federal funds financed more than 80% of the $1-million cost for Mt. Rushmore. But money kept running out, and work proceeded less than half of the time.

A typical crew consisted of 30 men--skilled drillers, powder men, hoist operators and blacksmiths. Most, like Payne, were hard-drinking, poker-playing miners who, before Rushmore, had scoured tunnels under the Black Hills for gold.

The quick-tempered Payne, known as the “Keystone Cutter,” was a celebrity among them for losing only three of 120 prizefights against the likes of “Hammering Huntley” and “Pinkie Lewis.” The money the young Payne won from the fights helped his mother and sister during the Depression.

He started on the mountain as a laborer, making 55 cents an hour, then worked as a winch man and a driller and, finally, a carver making $1.25 an hour before he quit over a wage dispute.

Suspended over the sheer face of the mountain, he and other drillers gave general shape to the faces with their jackhammers. A small air hammer was used for “bumping,” smoothing out the four 60-foot-high faces to their finished appearance.

Doses of Rock Dust

In the 1982 interview, Payne asserted that the time he spent flat on his back drilling straight up into Washington’s nostrils produced the dose of rock dust that ultimately killed him.

At the time, silicosis from breathing the minute, glassy dust was common among hard-rock miners. No records were kept on workers who suffered from the disease, but several died from it because precautions to contain the dust were insufficient, according to Mt. Rushmore’s chief historian, James Popovich.

Payne’s mask was uncomfortable to wear, Maggio said, and her father spent one winter inhaling the deadly dust under a canvas tarpaulin slung across the stone faces to protect carvers from the subzero temperatures, which were cold enough to freeze tools to a cutter’s hands.

But Payne, who later traveled the world as a merchant marine, never considered the mountain to be his undoing, his daughter said.

On the contrary, scratching out a monument intended to last tens of thousands of years, carousing with friends who were drilling history out of a rock face--those were the best days of his life, she said.

Even as the silicosis defeated him, there there was no bitterness or anger, Maggio said.

“It would never occur to him to blame the mountain. Silicosis and all, I don’t think he would have taken back a minute of it.”