PETE OF THE STEEL-MILLS

BY HERSCHEL S. HALL

It was a very black and a very dirty street down which I made my way that November morning at half-past five. There was no paving, there was no sidewalk, there were no lights. Rain had been falling for several days, and I waded through seas of 5 mud and sloshed through lakes of water. There were men in front of me and men behind me, all plodding along through the muck and mire, just as I was plodding along, their tin lunchpails rattling as mine was rattling. Some of us were going to work, some of us were going to look for work-the steel-mills 10 lay somewhere in the darkness ahead of us.

We who were not so fortunate as to possess a magical piece of brass, the showing of which to a uniformed guard at the steelmills' gate would cause the door to swing open, waited outside in the street, where we milled about in the mud, not unlike a 15 herd of uneasy cattle. It was cold out there. A north wind, blowing straight in from the lake, whipped our faces and hands and penetrated our none-too-heavy clothing.

"I wisht I had a job in there!" said a shivering man at my side, who had been doing some inspecting through a knothole in 20 the high fence. "You got a job there?" he asked, glancing at my pail.

I told him I had been promised work and had been ordered to report.

"You're lucky to get a job, and you want to freeze on to it. 25 Jobs ain't to be any too plentiful this winter, and if this war stops -good night! I've been comin' here every mornin' for two weeks, but I can't get took. I reckon I'm kind o' small for most of the work in there." He began to kick his muddy shoes against the fence and to blow upon his hands. "Winter's comin'," he 30 sighed.

A whistle blew, a gate swung open, and a mob of men poured out into the street-the night shift going off duty. Their faces

5

looked haggard and deathly pale in the sickly glare of the pale blue arcs above us.

"Night-work's no good," said the small man at my side. "But you got to do it if you're goin' to work in the mills."

A man with a Turkish towel thrown loosely about his neck came out of the gate and looked critically at the job hunters. He came up to me. "What's yer name?" he demanded. I told him. "Come on!" he grunted.

We stopped before the uniformed guard, who wrote my name 10 on a card, punched the card, and gave it to me. "Come on!" again grunted the man with the towel. I followed my guide into the yard, over railroad tracks, past great piles of scrap-iron and pig metal, through clouds of steam and smoke, and into a long, black building where engines whistled, bells clanged, and electric 15 cranes rumbled and rattled overhead. We skirted a mighty pit filled with molten slag, and the hot air and stifling fumes blowing from it struck me in the face and staggered me. We crept between giant ladles in whose depths I could hear the banging of hammers and the shouting of men. We passed beneath a 20 huge trough through which a white, seething river of steel was rushing. I shrank back in terror as the sound of the roaring flood fell upon my ears, but the man with the towel, who was walking briskly in front of me, looked over his shoulder and grunted, "Come on!"

25 Through a long, hot tunnel and past black, curving flues, down which I saw red arms of flame reaching, we made our way. We came to an iron stairway, climbed it, and stepped out upon a steel floor into the open hearth. "Come on!" growled my guide, and we walked down the steel floor, scattered over which I saw 30 groups of men at work in front of big, house-like furnaces out of whose cavernous mouths white tongues of flame were leaping. The men worked naked to the waist, or stripped to overalls and undershirt, and, watching them, I began to wonder if I had chosen wisely in seeking and accepting employment in this inferno.

"Put yer pail there. Hang yer coat there. Set down there. I'll tell the boss ye're here." And the man with the towel went

away.

I was sitting opposite one of the furnaces, a square, squat structure of yellow brick built to hold seventy-five tons of steel. There were three doors on the front wall, each door having a round opening in the center, the "peep-hole." Out through these peep-holes poured shafts of light so white and dazzling they pained the eye they struck. They were as the glaring orbs of some gigantic uncouth monster, and as I looked down the long line of furnaces and saw the three fiery eyes burning in each, the effect through the dark, smoke-laden atmosphere was 10 grotesquely weird.

I watched a man who worked at one of the doors of the furnace nearest me. He had thrust a bar of iron through the peep-hole and was jabbing and prying at some object inside. Every ounce of his strength he was putting into his efforts. I 15 could hear him grunt as he pulled and pushed, and I saw the perspiration dripping from his face and naked arms. He withdrew the bar-the end that had been inside the door came out as white and as pliable as a hank of taffy-and dropped it to the floor. He shouted some command to an invisible person, and 20 the door rose slowly and quietly, disclosing to me a great, snowwhite cavern in whose depths bubbled and boiled a seething lake of steel.

With a quick movement of his hand the workman dropped a pair of dark-colored spectacles before his eyes, and his arms 25 went up before his face to shield it from the withering blast that poured out through the open door. There he stood, silhouetted against that piercing light, stooping and peering, tiptoeing and bending, cringing and twisting, as he tried to examine something back in the furnace. Then with another shout he caused the 30 door to slip down into its place.

He came walking across the floor to where I sat and stopped in front of me. The sweat in great drops fell from his blistered face, ran in tiny rivulets from his arms and hands, and splashed on the iron floor. He trembled, he gasped for breath, and I 35 thought he was going to sink down from pure exhaustion, when, to my surprise, he deliberately winked at me.

"Ought never to have left the farm, ought we? Eh, buddy?"

he said with a sweaty chuckle. And that was my introduction to Pete, the best open-hearth man I ever knew, a good fellow, clean and honest.

"Mike, put this guy to wheeling in manganese," said a voice behind me, and I turned and saw the boss. "Eighteen hundred at Number Four and twenty-two hundred at Number Six."

"Get that wheelbarrer over yender and foller me," instructed Mike, a little, old, white-haired Irishman who was, as I learned afterward, called "maid of all work" about the plant. I picked 10 up the heavy iron wheelbarrow and trundled it after him, out through a runway to a detached building where the various alloys and refractories used in steel-making were kept.

"Now, then, you load your wheelbarrer up wth this here ma'ganese and weigh it over on them scales yender, and then 15 wheel it in and put it behind Number Four," Mike told me.

"Why is manganese put into steel?" I asked Pete on one of my trips past his furnace.

"It settles it, toughens it up, and makes it so it'll roll," he answered.

A few days later I asked one of the chemists about the plant the same question. "It absorbs the occluded gases in the molten steel, hardens it, and imparts the properties of ductility and malleability," was his reply. I preferred Pete's elucidation.

All day I trundled the iron wheelbarrow back and forth along 25 the iron floor, wheeling in manganese. I watched the powerful electric cranes at work picking up the heavy boxes of material and dumping their contents into the furnaces. I watched the tapping of the "heats," when the dams holding in the boiling lakes would be broken down and the fiery floods would go 20 rushing and roaring into the ladles, these to be whisked away to

the ingot molds. And I watched the men at work, saw the strain they were under, saw the risks they took, and wondered if, after a few days, I could be doing what they were doing.

"It is all very interesting," I said to Pete, as I stood near 35 him, waiting for a crane to pass by.

He grinned. "Uh-huh! But you'll get over it. 'Bout tomorrow mornin', when your clock goes rattlety-bang and you look

to see what's up and find it's five o'clock, you'll not be thinkin' it so interestin', oh, no! Let's see your hands." He laughed when he saw the blisters the handles of the wheelbarrow had developed.

Pete was right. When my alarm clock awakened me next 5 morning and I started to get out of bed I groaned in agony. Every muscle of my body ached. I fancied my joints creaked as I sat on the edge of the couch vainly endeavoring to get them to working freely and easily. The breakfast bell rang twice, but hurry I could not.

10

"You'll be late to work! The others have gone!" called the landlady. I managed to creak downstairs. My pail was packed and she had tied up an extra lunch in a newspaper. "You can't stop to eat, if you want to get to work on time," she said. "Your breakfast is in this paper-eat it when you get to the mills." 15 I stumbled away in the darkness, groaning and gasping, and found my way to the black and dirty street. The mud was frozen hard now, and the pools of water were ice-covered, and my heavy working shoes thumped and bumped along the dismal road in a remarkably noisy manner.

20

The number of job hunters was larger this morning. Among them I saw the small man who could not "get took," and again he was peeking wishfully through the knothole in the fence.

"You're on, eh?" he said when he spied me. "I wisht I was. Say, you haven't got a dime you could spare a feller, have you?" 25 I discovered a dime.

30

I showed my brass check-a timekeeper had given me one the day before, Number 1266-to the uniformed watchman. He waved me on, and I entered the gate just as the whistle blew. A minute later and I would have been docked a half-hour.

Mike, "maid of all work," took me in hand as soon as I came on the floor and proceeded to give me a few pointers. "I kept me eye on ye all day yestiddy, and ye fair disgoosted me with the way ye cavorted round with the Irish buggy. As though ye wanted to do it all the first day! Now, ye're on a twelve-hour 35 turn here, and ye ain't expected to work like a fool. Ye want to learn to spell. (Mike wasn't referring to my orthographic shortcomings). Ye'll get in bad with the boss if he sees ye