james parlin

When I graduated from high school, I went right off to college, but after spending two years drifting about in the academy, devoid of all direction, I thought it best to take time away, and I moved back to my parent’s house in Bethlehem, PA.  After a pleasant summer hiatus (pleasant for me, that is, and not for my fretful parents) I began a desultory search for a job.  This proved to be harder than I had anticipated, as I had absolutely no employable skills, but then I saw a notice that the Bethlehem Steel Corporation was hiring for a variety of positions, including unskilled labor.  As this last exactly matched my abilities, I went down to the mill’s HR office, filled in the paperwork, and got in a long line to be interviewed.  When I reached the front of the line, the hiring clerk scanned my application form and said he had an opening in the ingot mold workshop.  I was being offered a job!  I opened my mouth to accept when he added that the job required wearing a respirator and that I would have to shave my beard.  It wasn’t much of a beard, but it did an admirable job of disguising my lack of a chin, and I was loth to lose it.  As I hesitated, the guy behind me leaned forward and said they couldn’t make me shave as a condition of employment.  The clerk glared at him, consulted his list again, and said he had an opening on the labor crew in the soaking pits.  I looked back at my new friend, who gave me a quick nod.  I signed up.

              The next day, I reported to a meeting hall with all the new hires.  We were given a safety lecture that covered hazards from extremely hot materials, dangerous machinery, open pits, cranes passing overhead, and individual and group stupidity.  We were given scratch-and-sniff cards that smelled like coke gas with particular instructions that, should we smell coke gas, we were to immediately evacuate the premises.  (Two workers had died of coke gas inhalation a few months earlier.)  We then purchased yellow hard hats, safety glasses, sturdy leather gloves, and work boots with steel plates covering the instep from the company store.  Two pieces of bright red tape were applied in a cross on our helmets to identify us as newbies, and I was taken to the soaking pits with a few other guys.

              I entered a minor circle of hell.  The shop was enormous, the size of several football fields.  It was dimly lit and everything was blackened by a thick layer of soot.  All the equipment was massive in scale.  Huge glowing orange steel ingots were being moved in every direction.  The noise was cacophonous, with the roar of the furnace pits, the earth-shaking trundle of the giant equipment, and the constant undercurrent of men shouting at men.  The air was permeated with the unmistakable smell of coke gas.

              The soaking pits were the midpoint between the basic oxygen furnace, where the steel was smelted and poured into ingot molds, and the rolling mill, where the ingots were transformed into I-beams.  In the BOF, molten steel was poured from a giant crucible into ingot molds arrayed on flatbed cars on a narrow-gauge railway.  When the ingots cooled sufficiently, the molds were slid up and off and the train rolled slowly down the hill and into the soaking pits shop.  The ingots varied in size, but were frequently four feet square and eight-to-ten feet high.  They glowed orange and were too hot to approach.  Hot as they were, they were too cool to roll into I-beams, so they had to be reheated, and this was done in the soaking pits.  The pits were large furnaces, lined with refractory cement and with a layer of coke covering the floor.  They were loaded from the top, so each pit had a cover that could slide off to the back, allowing a crane operator to put the cooler ingots in and take the hotter ones out for delivery to the rolling mill next door.  The men who worked directly on the pits strapped thick wooden soles onto their shoes so they could walk out on the pit covers without their shoes melting.  The crane itself was two stories high and had a giant pincher that grabbed onto the ingots and swung them back and forth through the shop, the crane man looking down at them through a small glass window a foot thick set between his feet.

              The labor crew numbered about eight young men and our job was simple and straightforward.  We cleaned up the messes, and the messes were a constant.  The ingots all had a scaly outer layer of flakey steel, called slag, that they shed all over the mill.  We mostly gathered up the slag, shoveled it into big steel boxes, hooked the boxes to smaller utility cranes, dumped them and returned them and started all over again.  We also filled in the craters that resulted when a massive ingot slipped free of the crane and tumbled to earth, a not infrequent occurrence and the main reason why you never walked underneath a crane.

              After a week or two, I learned my way around the shop and, more importantly, learned what to watch out for.  It was a truly dangerous place, but you could minimize the risk by staying constantly alert.  I also learned that the red tape crossed on my helmet, while ostensibly there so the older men would watch out for you, simply made you a target for constant hazing, sometimes harsh, but mostly good-natured.  Several of my more gullible compatriots were sent all over the mill by seemingly sincere and helpful older men in the quest for a left-handed socket wrench.  At the end of my second week, I removed the tape from my helmet.

              The work varied in intensity from day to day, sometimes constant and physically draining and other days so light that boredom was the principal concern.  Nearly every day’s work, however, made you filthy dirty.  The room where we changed into our work clothes was probably built at the beginning of the twentieth century.  It was designed to accommodate three shifts of workers a day and was crude but a little ingenious.  It was a huge room with rows of columns and benches.  Each of us had a metal basket suspended high up on the ceiling by a chain.  The end of each chain was anchored to a numbered hasp on a column, secured by a combination lock.  The basket held your work clothes and safety equipment.  You came in at the beginning of your shift, unlocked your basket and lowered it down towards the floor.  You took off your street clothes, donned your work clothes, raised your basket of street clothes back to the ceiling, and resecured your lock.  At the end of the week, you took your work clothes home and laundered them.  You could never get yourself entirely clean, though.  No matter how much you scrubbed your face, there was always a black smudge on your pillow when you woke up in the morning.

              One day, as we were raking up slag and filling craters at one end of the shop, the foreman came up and yelled, “Don’t you morons smell that gas?  Get out of there!”  Of course we smelled gas – we smelled it everywhere we worked.  We backed away and the foreman called the gas checkers, three portly older men with green helmets.  They looked about and then held a meter up to a crack in the side of the nearest soaking pit.  The needle pegged against the stop.  The shop foreman was instructed to turn off the gas to the pit.  The gas checkers grabbed a twenty-foot-long piece of rebar with a loop at one end, wrapped a rag around the loop, doused it with kerosene and set it on fire.  A considerable crowd had gathered at this point and we were all instructed to stand back.  We each took a half-step to the rear.  Holding their giant match from the very end, the gas checkers carefully advanced towards the crack in the pit.  Nothing, nothing, nothing and then, a giant fump!  An enormous fire ball filled the space, and the three ended up knocked back on their substantial butts, to a volley of sarcastic cheers and applause from the assembled multitude.  We laborers were sent to the dispensary to have our blood taken and checked for gas poisoning, but evidently didn’t show more than the acceptable minimum.  We returned and finished the clean-up, regularly asking each other if anyone smelled gas, banter which inevitably devolved into a series of fart jokes.

              At Christmas, I was assigned to the rolling mill for two weeks to cover for a worker on vacation.  The rolling mill shop was narrow and three-hundred yards long.  It was here that the reheated ingots were rolled into I-beams.  There was a single track down the middle of the shop, punctuated by a gradated series of giant adjustable rollers.  An ingot was laid down on the track at one end and then accelerated towards the first roller, which was adjusted to be slightly smaller in dimension than the girth of the ingot.  The ingot crashed into the roller with a mighty boom, spraying red-hot slag high in the air, which then rained down all over the shop.  The ingot came out the other side smaller, but longer.  The roller was adjusted and the ingot was run through a few more times, each time becoming smaller and longer.  Then it was on to the next station, where it continued to become smaller and longer and started to take the shape of an I-beam.  It continued down the line until it was an astoundingly long, perfectly shaped I-beam, which was then cut into useable lengths by a giant shear.  The sound was deafening.  We wore earplugs and communicated by shouting at each other face-to-face.  We all got small burns from the flying slag.  It was mesmerizing to walk down the line, watching a huge ingot get hammered into long slender I-beams.  My job was to help chain up the finished beams and hold the chains in place while a crane man swung them off the line and onto racks where they finished cooling.  The only trick was to be sure your fingers weren’t between the chain and the beam when the crane took up the tension.  At the end of the first day, I went out for a few beers with the older men.  I quickly realized I was the only guy at the table who still had all ten fingers.  I was very careful chaining up the I-beams.

              The work was hard, dirty and boring, but I was enthralled by the mill.  I was in awe of the scale of everything and wondered at the people who had the wherewithal to conceive of and build such a place.  The men I worked with, and it was all men in the mill at the time, were a mix of characters, some hard and unsparing, and some friendly and good-hearted.  The culture was generally one of rough machismo, broken by occasional episodes of generous community.  The older pit workers would regularly go fishing at the Jersey shore, clean and filet their catch, wrap the fish in aluminum foil with a bit of lemon, and place the packets on the pit covers, arranging and turning them according to a time-honored formula.  At the noon break, we were all treated to a delicious fish luncheon.  For all their posturing, however, I found most of these men to be a little helpless when it came to navigating in the bigger world.  I believe they would have been chewed up and spit out if it weren’t for the union to which we all belonged.

              I would like to say that my time in the mill straightened me out and set me on a better path, but all it did was teach me what I didn’t want to be doing.  I returned to school the next fall, to generally better effect, but it would still be a number of years before I stumbled upon what would become my true calling in life.

 

              James Steward Parlin

              January 1, 2024