Reflection: Making steel
I’ve been blessed in so many ways, it would be impossible to list them.
But one of the primary blessings would be living years past retirement and having the time to remember the good times and the not so good ones, throughout what my buddy Nick labels as “a life well lived.”
My dad gave all but 14 years of his life to the railroad; he passed away barely two years into retirement.
Right out of the chute after high school, I landed in a career (I thought) job with built in machinist training in Pittsburgh. After two years, the company moved operations out of the area, and three friends and I were headed to Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore.
At the gigantic Sparrows Point complex, the largest single steel-making facility in the world, we were fast-tracked into the frantic activity of producing steel products to (unknowingly) stockpile materials for an upcoming United Steelworkers of America strike.
Having accumulated some credits toward machinist papers, I was hired into the maintenance and repair crew in the pipe mill. My official title was millwright trainee.
Being young and ambitious, I was fully engaged in learning everything I could about the steel making operations, impervious to the reality that Bethlehem’s mismanagement, greed and personnel policy had the company on a fast track to failure.
In his book, “Making Steel, Sparrows Point, The Rise and Failure of American Industrial Might,” journalist Mark Reuter documents how the industry behemoth categorically treated workers as machinery, refused to upgrade and diversify, and lost major contracts to foreign factories and domestic specialty companies.
Since I was a maintenance employee, when the mill was running well, I could utilize my time in the millwright’s shanty to learn the skill of electric and gas welding from some of the best.
I worked in the pipe mill, a continuous process in which the steel was fed through a long furnace as it was being heated and formed.
When the pipe reached the end of the furnace, it was white hot and oxygen would weld the seam together. Then, the red hot moving pipe was cut into 50-foot lengths by a 12-foot diameter chop saw. At times the saw would dull and crimp the flaming pipe, sending it in all directions. Then it was the millwright crew’s job to change the saw while burning off sections of the pipe as the mill was slowed. The work was difficult and dangerous, though I still planned to have a career, making steel in Baltimore.
…….Until the strike
In July 1959, USWA went on strike at Sparrows Point. I returned to Pennsylvania to wait it out. It became painfully evident why the pipe mill had been so busy for the preceding years. Bethlehem Steel pipe products were stockpiled at shipyards and storage facilities all over the East Coast.
When President Eisenhower invoked the Taft Hartley Act in November, ordering workers back to the mills, the need for speed was over. The mill was put on a two-week run/two-week shutdown schedule. As a millwright crew member, my work was a little more regular, but I had lost my faith in the mill as a career. During the shutdown weeks I believe I signed for one unemployment check in the amount of $35.
In the two years I spent at Sparrows Point Plant, the workforce exceeded 26,000. I believe Bethlehem Steel’s decline had already started when just five years out of high school, married, with my career plans and my right knee shattered, we loaded up a U-Haul and aimed our faith and dreams back toward Western Pennsylvania.
Roy Hess Sr. is a retired teacher and businessman from Dawson.