Steel: The Diary of a Furnace Worker. Charles R. Walker
I look at the job?" I asked.
"Sure," he said, "you can look at the job."
I walked out of the square, brick office of the open-hearth foreman, and lost my way in a maze of railroad tracks, trestles, and small brick shanties, at last pushing inside a blackened sheet-iron shell, the mill. I entered by the side, following fierce white lights shining from the half-twilight interior. They seemed immensely brighter than the warm sun in the heavens.
I was first conscious of the blaring mouths of furnaces. There were five of them, and men with shovels in line, marching within a yard, hurling a white gravel down red throats. Two of the men were stripped, and their backs were shiny in the red flare. I tried to feel perfectly at home, but discovered a deep consciousness of being overdressed. My straw hat I could have hurled into a ladle of steel.
Some one yelled, "Watch yourself!" and I looked up, with some horror, to note half the mill moving slowly but resolutely onward, bent on my annihilation. I was mistaken. It was the charging-machine, rattling and grinding past furnace No. 7.
The machine is a monster, some forty feet from head to rear, stretching nearly the width of the central open space in the mill. The tracks on which it proceeds go the whole length, in front of all the furnaces. I dodged it, or rather ran from it, toward what appeared open water, but found there more tracks for stumbling. An annoyed whistle lifted itself against the general background of noise. I looked over my shoulder. It relieved me to find a mere locomotive. I knew how to cope with locomotives. It was coming at me leisurely, so I gave it an interested inspection before leaving the track. It dragged a cauldron of exaggerated proportions on a car fitted to hold it easily. A dull glow showed from inside, and a swirl of sparks and smoke shot up and lost themselves among girders.
The annoyed whistle recurred. By now the charging affair had lumbered past, was still threatening noisily, but was two furnaces below. I stepped back into the central spaces of the mill.
The foreman had told me to see the melter, Peter Grayson. I asked a short Italian, with a blazing face and weeping eyes, where the melter was.
He stared hostilely at me.
"Pete Grayson," I said.
"Oh, Pete," he returned; "there!"
I followed his eyes past a pile of coal, along a pipe, up to Pete. He was a Russian, of Atlas build, bent, vast-shouldered, a square head like a box. He was lounging slowly toward me with short steps. Coming into the furnace light, I could see he was an old man with white hair under his cap, and a wooden face which, I was certain, kept a uniform expression in all weathers.
"What does a third-helper do?" I asked when he came alongside.
Pete spat and turned away, as if the question disgusted him profoundly. But I noticed in a moment that he was giving the matter thought.
We waited two minutes. Finally he said, looking at me, "Why a third-helper has got a hell of a lot to do."
He seemed to regard this quantitative answer as entirely satisfying.
"I know," I said, "but what in hell does he do?"
He again looked at the floor, considered, and spat. "He works around the furnace," he said.
I saw that I should have to accept this as a prospectus. So I began negotiations. "I want a job," I said. "I come from Mr. Towers. Have you got anything now?"
He looked away again and said, "They want a man on the night-shift. Can you come at five?"
My heart leaped a bit at "the night-shift." I thought over the hours-schedule the employment manager had rehearsed: "Five to seven, fourteen hours, on the night-week."
"Yes," I said.
We had just about concluded this verbal contract, when a chorus of "Heows" hit our eardrums. Men make such a sound in a queer, startling, warning way, difficult to describe. I looked around for the charging machine, or locomotive, but neither was in range.
"What are they 'Heowing' about?" I thought violently to myself.
But Pete had already grabbed my arm with a hand like a crane-hook. "Want to watch y'self," he said; "get hurt."
I saw what it was, now: the overhead crane, about to carry over our heads a couple of tons of coal in a huge swaying box.
I looked around a little more before I left, trying to organize some meaning into the operations I observed; trying to wonder how it would be to take a shovel and hurl that white gravel into those red throats. I said to myself: "Hell! I guess I can handle it," and thought strongly on the worst things I had known in the army.
As I stood, a locomotive entered the mill from the other end, and went down the track before the furnaces. It was dragging flat-cars, with iron boxes laid crosswise on them, as big as coffins. I went over and looked carefully at the train load, and at one or two of the boxes. They were filled with irregular shapes of iron, wire coils, bars, weights, sheets, fragments of machines, in short—scrap.
"This is what they eat," I thought, glancing at the glowing doors; "I wonder how many tons a day." I waited till the locomotive came to a shaken stop in front of the middle furnace, then left the mill by the tracks along which it had entered.
I followed them out and along a short bridge. A little way to my right was solid ground—the yards, where I had been. Back of Mr. Towers's little office were more mills. I picked out the power house—half a city block. Behind them all were five cone-shaped towers, against the sky, and a little smoke curling over the top—the blast-furnaces. Behind me the Bessemer furnace threw off a cloud of fire that had changed while I was in the mill from brown to brownish gold. In front, and to my left, the tracks ran on the edge of a sloping embankment that fell away quickly to a lower level. Fifty yards from the base was the blooming-mill, where the metal was being rolled into great oblong shapes called "blooms." A vague red glow came out of its interior twilights.
Down through the railroad ties on which I walked was open space, twenty feet below. Two workmen were coming out with dinner-buckets. It must be nearly twelve. I had a curiosity to know the arrangement and workings of the dark mill-cellar from which they came.
Turning back on the open-hearth mill, when I had crossed the bridge, I could see that it extended itself, in a sort of gigantic lean-to shelter, over what the melter had called the "pit." There was a crane moving about there, and more centres of light, which I took to be molten steel. I wondered about that area, too, and what sort of work the men did.
When I reached the end of the track, I thought to myself: "I go to work at five o'clock. How about clothes?"
No one in the mill wore overalls, except carpenters and millwrights, and so on. The helpers on the furnaces were clad in shapeless, baggy, gray affairs for trousers, and shirts were blue or gray, with a rare khaki. Hats were either degraded felts, or those black-visor effects—like locomotive engineers.
The twelve-o'clock whistle blew. A few men had been moving toward the gate slowly for minutes. The whistle sent them at top walking-speed. I stared at them to assure myself as to the correct dress for steel makers.
Main Street began at the tracks, and ran straight through the town, mounting the hills as it went. At the railroad end was the Hotel Bouton, where I had breakfasted. Beside it was an Italian fruit store sprawling leisurely over the sidewalk, and a Greek restaurant, one of four. The Greeks monopolized the feeding of Bouton. A block farther, on the right, I ran into a clothing-store, a barber-shop, and two rudimentary department stores. Then, on the same side, a finished city block, looking queer and haughty amid its village companions.
"What's that?" I asked a strolling, raw-boned Slav.
"Comp'ny store," he said.
I passed a one-story movie "palace," almost concealed behind chromatic advertising, and then the street twisted and I entered the "American quarter." Half a mile of neat, slightly varying brick houses, with lawns fifteen by twenty, and children in such quantity as seriously to menace automobiles.