HOT AIR

by
Thomas F. Pado
Delivered to The Chicago Literary Club
April 13, 1998
Copyright 1998 by Thomas F. Pado

It was almost midnight. A light snow was falling and it was cold. I was walking among strange shadows and lights and large looming shapes. An orange glow was flickering off the bottom of the clouds - a deep-throated roar was in the air. The glow in the sky came from two giant cannons shooting blazing fire and sparks 50 feet into the sky. The Bessemer Process was converting iron into steel. My destination was the Power and Fuel Plant. It was 1951 and I was heading for my 12 AM to 8 AM shift. My walk started by crossing a bridge over the Grand Calumet River, where I entered the largest steel mill in the world: US Steel Corporation, Gary Works. The river, like a moat, separated the huge mill from the rest of civilization. The mill was truly another world.

My route took me near glowing 25 ton ingots of steel, fresh out of their molds, lined up like dominos on flat bed railroad cars. They provided temporary comfort from the cold - you could feel their radiant warmth from a hundred feet away. I was dressed in the usual mill attire of the time. Your very own steel- toed shoes and long underwear. Almost all the male employees wore "Long John's" against the cold and damp of the winters and if you worked near the ovens, to insulate you from the heat and possibly as a last defense against an errant spark. I eventually reached The Power and Fuel Plant. The building was almost a thousand feet long. The space was filled with an eerie bluish oil haze and there was a persistent rumbling sound. This massive building was moving, strangely rocking back and forth, almost like a ship at sea. It was a typical turn- of-the-century industrial building with the proportions of a gothic cathedral framed by exposed steel trusses high overhead forming the ubiquitous clear story. The buildings were enclosed with dusty red brick walls, and illuminated with dots of sparse incandescent lighting, each fixture suspended from their own thin wire. The building housed the most amazing machines. These were horizontal in-line engines about 80 feet long, where the pistons were pumping back and forth similar to a railroad steam locomotive. There was engine next to engine, dozens of them that disappeared into the oily haze. The pumping of these pistons, although not in unison, was the cause of the building movement. The engines were built in the late 19th Century by Allis Chalmers and could have been right out of the Industrial Revolution had these been run by steam. The fuel that powered them was a by-product of the blast furnaces nearby called coke gas or blast furnace gas. The use of these gases was an early example of large scale re-cycling of energy. There was a 30-foot flywheel at one end, which the pumping piston shaft drove in a surprisingly slow motion. These engines generated electricity for the mill, but most were used for generating huge volumes of compressed air. The pistons were 55 inches in diameter, 4 in a line. There was not a ball bearing in sight. The bearings used here were a solid soft metal called "Babbit" which were internally grooved to distribute the lubricants. These engines demanded great quantities of grease and oil; my job, as an Oiler, was to make sure they were satisfied. I was responsible for two of these monsters for eight hours, seeing that all was running well. Thirty minutes were spent going from stem to stern with an oilcan looking for unusual smoke or heat from the bearings. You also had to give the many grease cups a turn to inject more lubricant into the bearings - a constant struggle over friction. The route took you on top of the machine, and into the dark pits below each piston housing. The top of the engines had a complicated series of rods clicking constantly back and forth, which you also had to be aware of in order to avoid being entangled in them. The only way you could assess the condition of the flywheel bearing, where the pumping shaft meets the wheel, is to very carefully follow the movement and at the right moment put your bare hand on the elusive bearing. My God, there you were, your arms swinging in an arc for two or three strokes. This was a dangerous maneuver and an error can cost you your hand. If there was a problem with bearings, the engine had to be shut down and later re-started with a hiss of compressed air. The Oilers rested between rounds in small cider block sheds, which were almost as cold as the main machine room. In those days, where warmth was absolutely necessary, "Salamanders" were used throughout the mill-indoors as well as outdoors. I don't know where the name came from - they in no way resembled a lizard. They were "mill produced", heavy steel cylinders on legs with holes drilled in them and burned anything that was available. There appeared to be enough air circulating in the buildings to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning. The sheds in the Power and Fuel did give you a little shelter from the noise and the haze and a place to rest, but soon enough, it was time to repeat your rounds. It was always a shock to open the door and re-enter that strange swaying nether- world.

The compressed air that these engines generated was primarily used for the blast furnaces. This air, when heated, is used to melt materials to make iron. To make iron you needed iron ore and coke (which is baked coal) and limestone (which acts as a flux to separate the slag from the iron). The term "blast furnace" refers to the blast of air that is injected into the bottom of the giant furnaces. To make one ton of iron takes two tons of iron ore, one ton of coke, one-half ton of limestone and three and one-half tons of hot air. It takes a greater weight of air pressure than of solid material to produce a ton of iron. The blast furnace is a steel vessel, over 140 feet high, lined with refractory brick. The materials are charged at the top and eventually percolated down toward the air blast where the temperatures get high enough (about 3000 Fahrenheit) to make iron. The air is distributed around the bottom of the blast furnace by large steel pipes, called the "girdle". The air is heated to 2000 at 50 pounds per square inch. In those days, you evaluated the melt by looking through silica "windows" (located where the "girdle" injects air into the mix). Through these, a "Melter" could actually look directly into this fiery hell and observe the process. The melt is tapped out about every 4 to 5 hours, producing about 6,000 tons of iron a day continuously for about 10 years before the furnace requires masonry restoration. There is a blast furnace still in use in the Gary Works after 90 years of making iron.

The taps were spectacular. Like the eruption of a volcano, dazzling bright orange iron is poured into an immense ladle for the iron, and into a smaller ladle for the slag that is skimmed off the on top of the iron.

Alongside the blast furnaces are a number of "stoves ", steel cylinders almost as tall as the furnaces. This is where the air is heated inside intricate brick chambers. When the stoves are shut down for re-building, highly skilled masons are employed to rebuild these chambers. Complicated brick shapes are used to create "checkered" masonry forms, which allow an efficient flow of air while providing thousands of square feet of hot masonry surfaces that were necessary to heat the huge volumes of air. Each ton of iron requires 50,000 cubic foot of hot air.

The blast furnace, in use today, is not that far removed from furnaces constructed in medieval times after the onset of the Iron Age 3,500 years ago. The making of iron still remains an unsophisticated process. For hundreds of years men built vertical stone furnaces and poured materials at the top and used bellows to induce air to make the coal, coke or charcoal burn fierce enough to remove oxygen from the iron ore to create iron. Iron was an important world commodity over the centuries, making possible hinges for doors and cannon balls for wars. You then take the iron and remove more carbon and you have a wondrous material called steel. When you think about it, there is very little in our lives that does not depend on steel, the most important commodity in the industrialized world. Steel vitally affects the social, economic and political activities of all mankind. If a product is not made of steel, it was something made by steel machines or transported in carriers of steel. Ninety percent of all metals produced in the world is steel and it costs less than any other metal. The "Steel Age" expanded man's horizons and made possible the spinning of bridges across great bays. It also changed the architecture of the world, giving Architects an opportunity to construct buildings of soaring heights. Steel also made possible the killing machines of modern warfare. Steel was a material known since the legendary Arabian Damascus swords. The Swedes were making small amounts of it in the 13th Century. The batches were always very small, it took nearly a week to make a few pounds of steel. It was, at that time, a precious metal and was used for watch making and fine instruments. But it was not until 1854, when the English inventor Henry Bessemer set out to build a better cannon for French emperor Napoleon III, that anyone figured out how to produce large quantities of steel strong enough to withstand an explosion or hold up a bridge. Bessemer used a blast of air to burn off the impurities. These Bessemer cannons where the ones I walked under, still booming their thunder, inside the Gary Works 100 years later.

Steel was stronger and more flexible than iron and easy to "work". The brittle iron rails that laced the American landscape where eventually replaced with steel that enabled the railroads to become one of the most important factors in the expanding American economy in the late 19th century. Huge new mills were being built to accommodate the growing demands for steel.

The largest steel mill of them all was built by U.S. Steel Corporation in Gary Indiana, 30 miles from downtown Chicago. The mill and the town of Gary were built on scrubby sand dunes on the shore of the Lake Michigan in the early 1900's. J.P. Morgan, with the assistance of Judge Elbert H. Gary, put together business deals to buy out Andrew Carnegie and hundreds of other smaller companies to create the largest business entity that ever existed in the world: the United States Steel Corporation. Eventually, their interests would also encompass iron and coke mines, railroads, stone quarries, shipping, cement production and fabrication for bridges and buildings. The Corporation grew to over 300,000 employees. The jewel in U.S. Steel's crown was to be the new Gary Works, built from scratch as a fully integrated mill that would not only make iron and steel, but finished products that at one time consisted of some 40,000 items from rails to sheet steel and wire. The Gary Works was at its peak in the 1950's. This was the time when the "old ways" were still entrenched, a time before the onset of computers, environmental controls and OSHA. They built a mill and they built a town - this was a place of true grit.

It is almost impossible to describe, in words, the power, the grandeur and vastness of this mill. Building the physical plant itself was a Herculean task, especially at the turn of the century with only the use of steam and mules - electric motors and the combustion engine were just starting to emerge.

The location for the Gary Works was ideal. The ore came by ship from the north, vast deposits of coal and limestone were nearby - transported by the greatest concentration of railroads at that time - Chicago. And the lake provided the enormous amounts of water required to make steel. Another important factor was the available labor force - skilled and unskilled, recently arrived Middle European immigrants - willing to work. And work they did, 12 hours a day, seven days a week for the "good pay" of $10.00 a week. Also, by chance, the prevailing winds blew the effluence of the mills over the lake most of the time. If you lived in Gary, you know where the wind was coming from, not unlike the Chicagoans who lived within 5 miles of the stockyards.

Nine thousand acres of land was purchased. Including seven miles of shoreline. A portion of the Grand Calumet River was moved and some of the lake was filled to provide even more area. The mill required a port for the ships and eventually a mile long "slip" was constructed. Miles of railroad track was laid as well as other infrastructure and millions of square feet of buildings built. Ovens were fabricated and great machines put into place.

The Gary Works became a self -contained "city". It had its own water works, electrical company, transportation, gas supply, telephone system, steam and compressed air systems, fire department, police force, engineering, company store, a five story hospital, maintenance shops and a restaurant that served over 3,000 meals a day. Eventually this "city" would employ over 30,000 people in its heyday in the 1950"s, of which 90% was manual labor. This place throbbed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The various plants and mills in the Gary Works kept expanding to an enormous size and included: the Coke Plant, the Iron and Steel Plants, Plate Mill, Axle Mill, Rail Mill, (the largest in the wold), Re-bar Mill, Wheel Mill, Roll Mill, American Sheet and Tin Plate Mill, National Tube Company, American Locomotive Works, American Bridge Company and the Universal Portland Cement Company. Over 250 miles of railroad track linked the elements of the Gary Works together.

The maintenance shops were a giant enterprise of their own. They produced a variety of goods. When parts were needed the mill custom built their own. The Foundry, for example, was the largest in the world. Nowhere else was there the capability for casting a steel bell (or cone) that was over twenty feet in diameter, which was accurately milled in the adjacent Machine Shop on the largest table lathe in existence. These bells were used at the top of the blast furnaces and acted as gigantic valves.

Almost everything else that was needed by the mill was manufactured by the shops and provided the mill with an unprecedented self-sufficiency. The list of shops included: carpentry, pattern, electrical, pipe, welding, forge, boiler, paint, mason, locomotive and the belt shop. The belt shop was a leather works that manufactured the large "belts" that were then used in the shops to run their machines from a central power source. This method was very "19th Century" and was used when steam was the central power source, before electric motors. The belt looped around the machine and up to an overhead wheel that was constantly turning. A wood "clutch" was used to engage the belt and activate the machine. In the 1950's about one third of the machines still used leather belts, mostly on lathes. On the quite night shifts you were almost hypnotized by the constant flap, flap, flap of leather against leather.

The craftsmanship that came from these shops attested to the "Old World" skills of men who were very proud of their work. An intricate wood pattern for shaping molds would look like a wooden sculpture. The men in the Machine shop often made objects for themselves during slow periods, such as beautiful polished stainless knives with ornamental handles - kind of show-off - "See what I can do".

The mill had its own atmosphere and fallout. There was a gritty dust that coated almost everything, inside and out. The air had a kind of a metallic "taste" along with a smell of gases and ash. You were always worried about the finish of your car if you parked in or near the mills. Producing the iron and steel mainly contributed to the grime - it was the nature of the beast. The open hearth was the greatest "beast" of all and was the best method of making steel prior to the new oxygen methods. The open hearth has produced the most steel the world has ever seen, providing prodigious tonnage through the 1970's and fed the enormous appetite of the two World Wars. At the time, it was the best way to make steel.

There are few places on earth like the inside of the buildings housing the open-hearth ovens. Some buildings were over 1400 long and 200 feet wide with dozens of ovens side by side belching bursts of sputtering flicks of fire- full of the stench of gases and smoke - dangers everywhere - a vision of Hades. When iron was poured from huge ladles into the ovens and molted steel tapped at the other end, fantastic pyrotechnics illuminated the gloom. There was a supervisor, a "Melter" who was in charge of a number of ovens. This alchemist controlled the process only by sight (no computer here either). He put on little blue goggles and peered into the blistering mass to assess the color of the melting mix that cooked at over 3,000 Fahrenheit. To verify his judgement, a laborer was handed a ladle with a sample, still hot from the oven, and was sent running to the lab for a quick analysis

The open-hearth oven was basically a shallow masonry container, holding up to 500 tons of material to make steel (a certain amount of carbon and other impurities are removed from iron by high heat). One side of the oven is charged with 50% scrap steel (another example of large scale re-cycling by the steel industry) and when this is melted, limestone is added - again to act as a flux to consolidate impurities into slag. The last to be added to this fiery mix is molten iron that is poured into the ovens from the large ladles. The old open hearths were another example where the mason is called to his art, building intricate chambers to allow hot exhaust gases to preheat the air and fuel mixture that is used to melt the materials.

What about the people who worked in such places? In the early days there were mostly middle European immigrants. In the 1920's, women, blacks and Hispanics started entering the mill. Before the unions, foremen were chosen for their brawn and had the power to fire on the spot. Even before unionizing, the steelworkers were making more money then their blue-collar counterparts elsewhere. An army was toiling in a variety of jobs- mostly arduous, dirty and dangerous. It was like going to war each day for the sake of a decent wage.

When I was working there the average wage was about 2 dollars an hour. Some of my jobs, like being an Oiler were not bad. Others were less than great. Being a laborer on clean-up crew in the Railroad Wheel Mill was one of them. On cold winter mornings you were asked to put on rubber waders like the kind worn by fly fishermen. You would then get aboard a large steel bucket drilled with holes, which was then dropped by a crane 15 feet into a dimly lit pit. You stepped out and, with icy water almost up to your waist, you shoveled slag from the bottom of the pit under a giant press that took hot blanks of steel and squeezed them into the shape of a railroad wheel with 10,000 tons of force.

There were many other jobs in the mill that were incredible as to the danger and the demands that were made. Here are a few of the more interesting ones: 1. Laborer: They were the lowest paid and were assigned all kinds of dirty work from sweeping the floor to shoveling sludge. These were usually young men, just starting. They were initiates into a strange New World. On occasions, the older men would have a laugh when the initiates were sent out on urgent missions for a bucket of steam, a left handed wrench, or a can of checkered paint. 2. Cinder Snapper: After the open-hearth melt is tapped out, the Melter would peer into the open oven door and look for dark spots on the surfaces of the still glowing masonry. Slag would sometimes scar these surfaces and they required spot repair before the next charge is put into the oven. Four sweating Cinder Snappers would then, in a kind of dance, one after another, flick dolomite toward these spots - some 15 feet away with a snap of the wrist. This was sweltering work. 3. Rail Straightener and Gagger: He muscled a rail section with a wrench and manually slammed them on a hot bed. Later, this work was performed under a forge where the rails would be handled by hand tools to work out the bends and kinks. The forge was about 18 inches from your bare hands. You had to watch your fingers. 4. Catcher: He wields a pair of tongs about six feet long and when a red hot steel bar emerges from one machine, he grabs it with the tongs and feeds the bar into another machine. The catcher worked in a kind of steel well and the margin of error was very slim. 5. Wheel Handlers: Railroad wheels, weighing tons, were stacked, almost upright, next to each other. The Wheel Handler would tug the top of the wheel to bring the wheel to a balanced vertical position, where they then could be rolled from place to place, bringing it along as you would a toy hoop. There were muscular show-offs in the crew that would take some of the smaller wheels and spin them around like a top then grab them as they were starting to wobble out of vertical. The men wore leather pads on their hands but steel-toed shoes would be of little help here. 6. Hooker: He would wrap bundles of steel with wire rope and/or steel chain, and direct a crane operator's hook to pick up the load. The rule was that no one should be under a crane load and bells announced the danger. Extra caution was the rule here, especially if you were in a yard (the outdoor component of the plant). Everything was slippery when rain and snow were present. 7. Scarfers: Steel ingots, still glowing hot, were scrapped clean of slag by hand. 8. Boiler Cleaners: A job sometimes requiring a worker to go inside a boiler on his hands and knees to scrape off the accumulated residue. 9. Flippers: Tin Mill sheet inspectors, who examined the surfaces for imperfections, by flipping the sheet from one side to the other. Women usually did this task. 10. Pluggers: Setting a clay plug with an explosive charge into the bottom of a hot blast furnace or open hearth. Just think of the danger. 11. Workers anywhere near molten iron and steel, anything can happen. 12. Acid Pit Cleaners: The worst - fumes can cause a loss of your hair if you are not careful. 13. Any Work in a Pit: There were thousands of pits everywhere - dark damp and full of the infamous mill rats. They were rats of legend, large, fearless and always trying to steal your lunch. Only lunch boxes made of steel were a deterrent against these ravenous rodents. This list goes on - men against fire and machines - day and night. Some older men were doing tasks much younger men should be doing. Surviving these conditions seems to sometimes make men of steel. They keep up an extraordinary strength and will doing some of these jobs. They just keep on going for that paycheck. So many workers, dirty and exhausted, coming home with barely enough strength for dinner - maybe listen to the radio and then to bed - ready for the next shift. Sometimes you stopped for a couple of quarts of beer on the way home to quench the thirst of a desert wanderer. Sometimes he would not come home. The early days of steel making were fraught with accidents. You could get smashed by a piece of steel or you could get in the way of molten metal, sometimes disappearing into a ladle of fire. In the old days they would dump the entire melt into the lake (like a burial at sea) which was extremely costly. Now days, the legend goes, they weigh you when you are hired and take that many pounds from the melt and give it a proper burial.

In the 1950's it was still a world of steam engines and steam machines and other machinery designed or made before the turn of the century. Now, most of the "romance" is gone. This was the plant that produced and fabricated steel for such famous projects as the Empire State Building, the John Hancock Building, The Sears Tower, the Mackanic Bridge and the Picasso sculpture in Chicago's Daley Center Plaza.

The American steel industry was in crisis in the 1970's. Aging plants, methods, the ever-growing union demands and environmental restraints contributed to the increased price of American steel. America was being invaded by foreign competitors who took large chunks out of our once great steel industry. The Rust Belt started to emerge. During this time, smaller, "clean" plants, started to appear, such as Nucor. These plants melted steel scrap with electricity and poured it directly into continuous casters that would form relatively thin ribbons of steel, which required less rolling into shapes and sheets. The oxygen furnace has replaced the open hearths (an oxygen lance is plunged into a vessel of hot iron and steel is created in less than an hour). The rich iron ore is mostly gone and (the less rich ore) now has to be processed into Taconite, in order to be ready for the furnaces. The "sinter" or by-products from the steel making processes are also re-cycled for iron production. Now there are computers everywhere and finishing mills have 5,000 horsepower electric motors pushing steel sheet 50 miles per hour in buildings over a mile long. As recently as 1980 it took 12 man-hours to make a ton of steel, now a ton can be produced in two man-hours. The world now consumes about a billion tons of steel per year, of which only 25% is now produced in America. Some of the grit and manual labor still remains even in the most modern mills to remind you of the muscle that is necessary to produce steel. Then there was the town of Gary. This is where I grew up. Gary was also a creation of U.S. Steel Corporation. It was a sort of urban experiment and, at times, was called "The Magic City". The history of Gary is the history of a Company Town; the largest ever planned and built by American private enterprise. It was envisioned to be a place,(unlike Pullman, Illinois) where workers owned their own homes and where local business and municipal government operated without excess Company interference. It was to be based on another town built by U.S. Steel called Vandergrift, a Pennsylvania steel town near Pittsburgh. U.S. Steel formed the Gary Land Company, which acquired 800 acres just south of the mill and subdivided it into a simple grid of 4,000 lots and put the land up for sale. This was called the First Subdivision. There was additional land allocated for parks, schools, libraries, municipal building and churches. Paved roads and sidewalks were built and trees were planted in the wide right-of-ways. The names of the two main streets were borrowed from New York - Broadway and 5th Avenue. Another U.S. Steel subsidiary called the Gary Heat, Light and Water provided an infrastructure sufficient for a city of 200,000. When land sales lagged, the Company built over 500 houses that were sold or rented. The town grew rapidly, beyond the more expensive Company subdivision and beyond the control of U.S. Steel Corporation.

The Wabash Railroad tracks were the southern border of the First Subdivision. An alternative, non-company town was literally built on the "other side of the tracks". A combination of emerging corrupt municipal government and wildcat land speculation created a less than great area where the lower paid workers could afford to live.

The influence of the mill was felt all over town. When there was a strike the union workers suffered and impacted the economy everywhere. The strike also kept the non-union foremen locked inside the mill for weeks, sleeping on mattresses provided by the Company. Dad would be gone for long periods of time, available only by phone. It was almost impossible to break the union lines at the bridge.

Gary grew to a population of 180,000. It became a town of old-world heritages, eventually mixed with mainstream American culture, and a meld of black and native-born Americans. The "Magic City" for the most part ended up with little magic and the urban experiment was only partly realized. However, it did have a certain dynamic and unique vitality.

I grew up in Gary in the 30's, 40's and 50's. My father worked in the mill, as I did. At that time, it was a very nice place to grow up. There were wonderful churches (mostly ethnic), live theatre, a symphony orchestra and an opera company. The parks and streets were beautifully maintained. The main library had 90,000 volumes and the schools were excellent. Beautiful beaches and dunes were nearby. You could picnic on any summer Sunday in a number of ethnic picnic grounds where music, cold beer and good food were always available. Most of these picnic grounds had a raised wood pavilion for dancing. The streetcars and buses were clean and on time. The mill opened their plants to the families of workers only every 5 to 7 years so that you could see where your father worked. Because of the dangers, special walkways were built so that wives and children could get close enough to view sometimes average but mostly spectacular sights. These events were looked forward to and energized the entire town.

Gary has not fared well since the 60's. The beautiful neighborhood, where I grew up, along with the downtown, looks like something akin to scorched earth - empty lots and abandoned buildings.

Much of the town was within earshot of the large whistle that announced the changing shifts. That call to work is a constant reminder of the dominance of this mill. The workers cross the bridge, probably still in their steel-toed shoes for eight hours of struggling with fire and friction. Turbines are now creating hot air; the old reciprocating engines are long gone. In Chicago, on certain nights, flashes of light are visible across Lake Michigan from the Gary Works. Hot slag is being dumped onto an ever-increasing mountain - another reminder that Vulcan is still at work with ingredients pulled from the earth to create a magic material called steel.

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