Joseph H. Duffy: From miner and laundry man to man of letters
By Mike Duffy
Some of the libretto for "No Greater Love" draws upon the poetry of Joseph "Joe" H. Duffy, my grandfather. Joe was born in 1878 in Virginia City, Nevada, to Henry and Jennie Duffy. Henry had come West to work in the gold mines, but changed professions and worked as a printer for the "Territorial Enterprise," the same newspaper that Mark Twain wrote for.
Joe came to Butte in 1898, and after spending a decade as a miner and coal hauler in the Mountain Con and Neversweat mines, he co-founded the Independent Laundry, which served the hotels and boarding houses, and later merged it into the C.O.D. laundry on East Galena Street.
From his beginning days in Butte, Joe was also known for producing musical reviews and theatrical productions. He also wrote poetry about Butte, miners, and mining, that was published in several local newspapers, particularly, The Anaconda Standard. In 1941, Joe published a novel entitled "Butte Was Like That," which served more as a loose framework on which to muse about and comment on the personality and politics of early Butte.
Besides his business and artistic endeavors, Joe had a taste for politics: He served as a Butte alderman from the late 1920's to the early 1940's, and also served as a Silver Bow County representative to the Montana Legislature in 1916-1917.
A forty-year member of the Teamsters Union, Joe passed away in September 1955, at age 77.
In his novel, "Butte Was Like That," Joe sets out an epigraph from his own collection of poems:
Those old days are forgotten,
They'll never come again,
But memory has a habit
To revive them now and then.
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