VII DUST, HEAT, AND COMRADESHIP
One day I was promoted to stove-tender or hot-blast man on Number 6.
The keeper of the furnace was a negro. When he was rebuilding the runways for the tapped metal, I noticed that his movements were sure and practised. He patted and shaped the mud-clay in the runway, like a potter moulding a vessel. When it was tap time, he bored the tap hole with the electric drill easily and neatly; when the metal flowed, he knew the exact moment to lift the gates for drawing away slag. I watched him to see how he managed the four white men that worked for him. They were Austrians, and I found they joked together and showed no resentment of status. Commands were given with a nod or gesture. With the Americans on the furnace, the relation was the traditional one. The negro was light and seemed too slightly built for the job, but he performed it very efficiently, and so did his gang.
The blower was Old McLanahan, a man somewhere between thirty-five and sixty. A long, successful life of inebriety had given him a certain resignation to the ills of man, and enabled him to keep the heart of a viveur throughout his life. His skin appeared thrown like a bag over an assemblage of loosely fitted bones—the only considerable part of him being a paunch which coursed forward into a moderate point.
He was rather proud of being a blower on furnace No. 6.
After the slag had been sampled he said: "Where d'ye eat, boy?"
"I eat at Mrs. Farrell's."
"How much?"
"Seven a week."
"Too much. Pretty goddam good is it?"
"Damn good food," I said.
"Is Mrs. Farrell a widder woman?"
"No," I said, "she's not."
"Well," he said, "if you hear of a damn fine little widder woman, let me know will yer?"
"Sure," I said.
"I'm lookin' for a place ter board, and most of all I'm lookin' for a little widder woman ter honor wid holy matrimony."
After tapping that morning at 8.00, McLanahan took a silver dollar out of his pocket. "If it comes heads," he said, "I'm goin' out to-night, see, I'm goin' out ter find a woman."
He flipped the coin and it fell tails. "Don't count," said he, "two out of three."
This flip fell heads.
"Hah," he said, "if this comes heads, I'm goin' out to-night ter find a woman."
It fell tails.
"Hell!" he said, "Don't count, flipped it with the wrong hand."
He kept this up all day. Finally at 5.30 the coin came heads. He picked the coin up and put it in his pocket.
"Goin' out, to-night," he said.
"Boss wants to keep Number 6 lookin' right. Go down below, and clean out all that flue dust."
I shoveled between the stone arches of the furnace base, that curved overhead like the culverts of a bridge. Sometimes the flue dust was wet and clotted with mud, and came up in cakes on the shovel; sometimes it was light, and flew in your nose and eyes. I made a pile of it six feet high, and shaped it into a brick-red pyramid with my shovel. I washed the arches white with a hose.
"Change 'em before we tap," McLanahan ordered, nodding at the stoves.
I went among the rangy hundred-foot shafts with a certain sense of control over great forces. Every set differs in its special crankiness. Number 9's have stiff-working valves, but are powerful heaters; Number 8's are cool stoves, but their valves slide genially into place. I always a little dreaded "blowing her off." Resting my arms on the edge of the wheel, and grabbing the top with my hands, I wrenched it over to the left, and the blast began. The immense volumes of compressed air escaped with a gradually accelerated blare. I gritted my teeth a little, and my ears sang.
Then came "putting on the gas." I climbed to a little platform near the combustion chamber, and with a hunk of iron scrap for hammer, knocked out some wedges that held tight a door. By now I knew just the pressure for making the iron slab creep on its rollers. I braced my feet and pulled with back and arms.
Through the door, the combustion chamber glowed red. I went down the steps and slowly turned the gas-pipe crank, bringing an eight-inch pipe close to the red opening. I dodged the back flare as it ignited.
When the "new" stove was on, and the "old" one lit for reheating, I went to the pyrometer shanty. In a little hut among the furnaces were tell-tale discs, that let you know if you were keeping your heat right. I found my heat curve was smooth with only a tiny hump.... Two Hunkies were inside the shanty.
"Nine-thirty," said one.
"How do you know?" I asked.
He pointed to the end of the curve on the disc, that was opposite the 9.30 mark on the circumference.
"Saves me a watch," he said, with a grin.
After supper that evening, I mended a sleeve of my shirt that had been torn on a piece of cinder in the cast-house. Sounds of conversation were rising from the porch. I went out and found Mr. Farrell sitting in a rocker with one leg on the railing and his face screwed into an attitude of thinking. Mrs. Farrell, having done the dishes, had come out to knit, and a lanky visitor, who leaned uncomfortably against the railing, was doing the talking. The conversation was political.
"Before I came to this town, nobody had the guts to vote Democratic," said the visitor. "I'm from Democratic parts," he went on, "and when I first come here I used to go round. 'Come, come,' I said, 'you fellers is Democrats, you know you is. Sign up.' 'We know it,' they'd say, 'but we can't afford ter, there's the wife and kids—we can't afford ter, we've got a job and we're goin' to keep it.' That's how bad it was."
"You mean—"
"I mean you voted with the Company or pretty quick you moved out of Bouton, for you hadn't any job to work at.... I used ter work at glass blowin', that's a real business—"
"Mr. Herder is always telling us how much better the glass business is than the steel business," said Mrs. Farrell. "You'll have to get used to that." She gave everybody a smoothing-out smile.
It was fun when you could pick up "dope" in the course of a morning's sweat. I learned one Sunday a few pointers about judging conditions through the peepholes. If there is a lot of movement, your furnace is O.K. If the cinder begins to settle into the tuyère, your furnace is cold. If she looks reddish, cold; blue, O.K. Don't be fooled by different colored glasses in the peepholes.
One day we kept the stoves on "all heat" for the furnace was cold. "All you can give her, goddam it," McLanahan said, looking through the peepholes. McLanahan was always a little ridiculous. Anxiety made him hop about and waddle from peephole to peephole, like a hen looking for grain.
I heaved on the hot-blast chain, and the indicator climbed.
We had a pleasant, light brown chocolaty slag, that day, which meant good iron. When the metal runs out with large white speckles, she has too much sulphur; when she smokes, you'll get good iron.
The other day they had too large a load of ore for the coke and stone in her.
"Sledge!" yelled the keeper.
A cinder-snapper brought up two, and held the bar while the keeper and first-helper sledged. They worked well, and I watched with fascination the hammer head whirl dizzily, and land true at the bar.
At last the liquid slag broke through, jet-black as if it were molten coal, flowing thickly down the clay spout. The clay notch was hammered and eaten away, and had to be remade.
I watched the stove-tender on Number 7 as he opened the cold-air valve. His motions were exactly calculated—the precise blow, to an ounce, to loosen that wedge.
"How long have you been stove-tender?" I asked.
"Ten years," he said.
"Go down to the stockroom and tell the skip-man, one more coke," said McLanahan.
I was glad to get a glimpse of that part of the blast-furnace operation. Gondola cars bring up ore and the other ingredients of blast-furnace digestion, and run over tracks with gaps between the sleepers. The cars, by means of their collapsible bottoms, drop the loads down through, and the material falls into an underground "stockroom."
I entered it by climbing down two ladders, and found the skip-man at the base of one of the endless chains. The chamber had the appearance of a mine gallery de luxe. I looked at the tons of ore moving upward neatly, efficiently. What an incalculable saving of labor and time, this endless chain affair with its continually moving boxes, over the old manner of hoisting painfully, in few-pound lots, by hand!
I gave McLanahan's order to the skip-man and went up the ladders.
You've got to tap, "when the iron's right," and when a little later the keeper held the steam drill in front of the mud wall of the tap hole, the steam stayed at home. There was no time for a steam-fitter.
Young Lonergan and I beat it for the electric drill. It was heavy enough to make us waddle as we carried it on the run.
"That's bludy funny," said McLanahan. The electric drill wouldn't electrify. A hurry call followed for the electrician. He smiled benignly while twelve sweaty men looked on. And in thirty seconds he fixed the connection, and we tapped in time to save the iron.
When the drill had almost bored through the hard mud in the tap hole, the keeper shoved in a crowbar, and a couple of helpers sledged rhythmically for one minute. Then the molten iron broke the mud into bits, and tumbled out. Little sheets of flame from the slag skated along the top of the red river. It rose in the runway with bubbles and smoke on top. The keeper grabbed a scraper—an exaggerated hoe—and started the slag through a side ditch.
"Now try it," said Old Mac.
By then, I had the test spoon ready, scooped up a bubbling ten pounds, carried it carefully, and poured it into two moulds.
When I had broken the little ingots, still red, Mac said, "Too much sulphur."
By now the metal stream had run to the edge of the cast-house and was falling spatteringly into a ladle ten feet below.
Somebody said, "Whoop!" The negro keeper opened the iron gate of a new runway, and the metal rolled on its way to a second ladle. There were five to fill, each on a railway car. I noticed the switch engine was getting ready to drag the trainload of molten metal to the Bessemer.
"Heow!" out of Old Lonergan's throat. The bottom of one ladle had fallen out and was letting down molten iron on the track. There was nothing to do but watch it. We did that. It covered the track like a red blood-clot, and ran off sizzling, and curdling in the sand. It cooled, blackened, and clotted over one rail—about 10,000 pounds.
"Who clean dat up?" I heard a Sicilian cinder-snapper say with a blank smile.
After the furnaceful of metal had all flowed forth, we prepared to plug that tap.
I went over to the other side of the tap hole, and picked up a piece of sheet iron. A shallow puddle of iron was still molten in the runway. The tap hole was crusting over with cooling iron, still aglow. I dropped the sheet iron over the runway. The helpers came up behind and dropped others.
"Hey, you," said the keeper summoning a helper. They swung out the "mud gun" on a kind of crane and pointed its muzzle into the glowing aperture. It was a real gun, looked like a six-inch fieldpiece, but fired projectiles of mud by steam instead of powder.
"Quick," said the keeper.
I pushed a wheelbarrow towering with mud up to the sheet iron; then, with a long scoop-shovel standing against the furnace, shoveled mud in the gun. The keeper stood almost over the runway with only the rapidly heating sheet-iron between himself and the liquid-metal puddle beneath. He operated a little lever that shot mud charges by steam into the hole. Every time he shot the gun, I took a new scoop of mud. We worked as fast as our arms let us. Some of the helpers kick at this part of their duties, but it is cooler by several degrees than the open-hearth, and thinking of those sizzling nights lightens it for me. Besides, it has excitement and requires a streak of skill.
I spent several days with young Lonergan helping the water-tender, Ralph.
"Water connections damn important thing," said Lonergan. I was beginning to see why. The whole wall of the great cone-shaped furnace was covered with cooling water-conduits. Without these the furnace would melt away.
We ranged from furnace to furnace, climbing up to a platform that ran around the fattest part and spending long quarter-hours on our bellies unscrewing valves. There was always something leaking. Ralph could come and take a look at the furnace, and send us after tools.
"Ralph's all right," said Lonergan, "has new names though for everything. Doesn't call a goddam wrench a wrench, calls it a 'jigger.' Have to learn all your tools over again by his goddam Hunky names."
Young Lonergan was very "white" to me, as they say. "I'll show you how to clean that peephole." And he grabs a cleaning rod, and imparts the knack of knocking cinder out of that important little observation post.
"I used to work stove-tender," he explained.
"If you want to know anything ask Dippy, he'll talk, don't McLanahan, he don't know he's livin'.... Have a chew?"
"No, I'll smoke."
One day we had been discussing the bosses, and how they had got their start, till the talk drifted to young Lonergan and his own very typical career of youth.
"Used to work on the open-hearth," he began. "I used to test the metal—you know in the little shanty where 'Whiskers' is now. Chemist!" he grinned.
"Then, by God, I went to work in the blooming-mill, chasing steel—you know; keepin' track of all the ingots comin' in. A hell of a job—by God you didn't stop a second—you knew you'd been workin', boy, when you pulled out in the mornin'. I worked my head off at that job.
"Then I fought with Towers. He gave me a week. After I came back I had another run-in.... When I carried my bucket out o' that place, I was off work entirely. Didn't go to work for three months, thought I never would work again.
"But after a hell of a spell, gotta job, pipe mill New Naples—eight hours—a good job, but the mill's shut down now. Then the suckers drafted me. Balloon comp'ny a bloody year and a half."
There followed a very vast series of parties in the army, and explicit views on all the officers he'd had. There was usually a new army story whenever I met him. He was extraordinarily clever in getting away with A. W. O. L.'s.
"When I got my discharge, father wanted me to come to work here, so I did. Worked on those stoves where you are, for a while—stove-tender helper, then stove-tender. Then I got this job.... Don't you chew?... I'll lose it too if I take many more days off for sickness. Last time I was 'sick'"—he grinned—"Bert Cahill and the bunch and I took three skirts in Bill's car to Monaca. Had six quarts of damn good whiskey. I was out a week. Ralph says, when I come back: 'Pretty damn sick, you!' But to hell with 'em! I'm not afraid of my job."
That little blower called Dippy, I found, knew the furnace game in all its phases with great practical thoroughness. I used to try to get chances of talking with him on questions of technique.
"What about those jobs in the cast-house?" I said one day, "the helper's jobs? Isn't it a good thing to know about those if you're learning the iron game?"
"You don't want to work there," he said quickly, "only Hunkies work on those jobs, they're too damn dirty and too damn hot for a 'white' man."
So I got thinking over the "Hunky" business, and several other conversations came into my mind. Dick Reber, senior melter on the open-hearth, had once said, "There are a few of these Hunkies that are all right, and damn few. If I had my way, I'd ship the whole lot back to where they came from."
Then I thought of the incident of my getting chosen from the pit for floor work on the furnaces. Several times Pete, who was a Russian, discriminated against me in favor of Russians. Until Dick came along and began discriminating in my favor against the Hunkies.
How many Hunkies have risen to foremen's jobs, I thought, in the two departments where I have worked? One in the open-hearth—a fellow who "stuck with the company" in the Homestead Strike—and none on the blast-furnaces except Adolph, the stove-gang boss.
My recollections were broken into by a call for violent action.
"Cooler," yelled McLanahan, his voice going up into a husky shriek.
That meant molten iron inside, melting the cone-shaped water-chamber around the blast pipe. If let alone, the cooling at that place would cease, and in a short time there would follow an escape of molten metal.
"Cooler!" yelled on a blast-furnace means "Hurry like hell."
I grabbed a wrench to take the nut off the "bridle"—the first step in taking out a sort of outside cooler, the tuyère.
"Bar," said the Serbian stove-tender very quietly, picking up a specially curved one, and McLanahan took the other end.
Somebody knocked out some keys with a sledge, and the blowpipe fell on the curved bar, making the holders of it grunt. They took it off fast, for the instant the thing loosens, a flame shoots through the hole and licks its edges.
Then the tuyère comes loose with a few strokes of a pull bar. All of these moves are fast; a tuyère goes bad every other day and men work fast like soldiers at a gun drill.
But coolers don't break a lead but once in three months or so; and the cone's heavier, the gang bigger, there's less efficiency and more holler and sweat.
When the pull bar gets into action it looks a little like a mediæval mob with a battering ram. A "pull bar" is a tool designed to translate the muscle of many men into pull, on a small gripping edge against which sledging is impossible. At one end a thick hook grips the edge of the cooler, at the other a weight is brought against a flange that runs around the bar. Everybody on the gang has a piece of a rope attaching to that weight.
The stove gang moving between stoves Thirteen and Fourteen were caught and brought into this for muscle, and a couple of passing millwrights drafted.
"Hold up the goddam end," from Steve, boss by common consent.
"A little beef this time!" from a blower. "What the hell's the matter, sick?"
We all swear between breaths, and take a grip higher on the rope—the weight cracks the flange again, and makes the bar shiver.
When the new cooler, which resembles more nearly a gigantic flower pot, without any bottom, than anything else, is in place, there's a cry of: "Big Dolly!"
That involves four or five men, lifting a kind of ramrod with a square hammer-end, from the rack, and lugging it to the cooler.
I get near the ramming end this time; Tony is near me on the other side. Together we hold the hammer against the cooler. As the end strikes, the jar goes back through the men's hands.
"Now top."
Arms raise the bar painfully, and hold it poised a little unsteadily, sway back, tense, and drive.
"Hold it, hold it on the cooler, goddam you."
Tony and I had let our arms shake a fraction, and the hammer fell glancing on the cooler's edge.
"Now!"
Seated this time. Arms relax and stretch.
When things are ready, Adolph makes the water connections.
"Hold de goddam shovel, what you t'ink, I burn up."
A cinder-snapper holds a shovel in front of the hole to keep the flame from his hands.
"All right, all right."
The job's done; the millwrights pick up their tools, and the stove gang moves off leisurely to their cleaning. I hear the superintendent talking with a blower near the sample box.
"They did that in pretty good time," he says.
I used to eat my lunch and kept my clothes in a little brick shanty near Number 4, sharing it with the Italians of the stove gang. Although by the bosses' arrangement it was a mixed gang, Italian and Slav, the mixture did not extend to shanty arrangements, and race lines prevailed. I felt that I should learn low Italian in a few weeks if I continued with this group; the flow of it against my ear drums was incessant and some of it had already forced an entrance. Besides I was learning a great deal about: how to live, what to wear on your head, on your feet, and next your skin; where to get it—good material to resist the blast-furnace, and cheap as well; wisdom in eating and drinking, and saving money, in resting, in working, in getting a job and keeping it.
There was a whole store of industrial mores. In some respects the ways of living of these workmen seemed as rooted and traditional as the manners of monarchs, and as wise. I won considerable merit, when I brought in a kersey cap that I got for seventy-five cents, and lost much when I reluctantly admitted the price of my brown suit.
Everyone on the gang performed the washing up after work with the greatest thoroughness and success. They devoted minute attention to the appearance of clothes worn home. Rips and holes got a neat patch at once, and shoes were tapped at the proper period—before holes appeared. I have seen only one or two men in the mill who were not clean in their going-home clothes.
I talked to John one day on the subject of neatness. He asked, "You have to clean up good in the army?"
I dilated on the necessity of policing when wearing khaki.
He said: "Man that no look neat, no good. I no like him, girls no look at him. Bah!"
I was almost always offered some food from the bursting dinner buckets of my friends: a tomato, some sausage, a green pepper, some lettuce and cucumbers. I accepted gladly for it was always superior to my restaurant provender.
Tony told me one day that Jimmy had come over "too late from old country, to learn speak English and be American." He was thirty-one years old. He was going back this Christmas. And Tony was going too, but just for a visit. They were going to Rome. We had talked it over a good many times, all Italy in fact, people, women, farms. Tony turned to me: "You come Italy with Jimmy and me this Christmas? We go see Rome."
I assented quickly, wishing I somehow could, and was extraordinarily proud of that invitation.
I must not forget the occasion of the green pepper. One noon I sat beside Jimmy during the lunch hour. The whole Italian wing were together, sitting on benches in the brick shanty. Jimmy reached among the loaves of bread in his bucket, and hauled out a green pepper as big as an orange. He offered it to me and I accepted.
Treating it like my old friends the stuffed peppers, I bit deep. The whole shanty watched eagerly for results. I hadn't reckoned its raw strength and instantly felt like a blast-furnace on all heat. Despite all efforts I couldn't keep my face in shape, or resist putting out the fire with the water jug. The pleasure I furnished the Roman mob was enormous.
After that I learned to eat green peppers rationally and agree with my friends that they are beneficial. Beyond their health qualities they have an economic justification. With their help you can make a meal of cheap dry bread. Plain and unbuttered it costs you but six cents a half loaf which is a full meal, and hot green peppers will compel you to stow it away in self-defense. As Tony phrases it:—
"Pepper, make you eat bread like hell!"
Tony thinks that Americans eat too much that is sweet; it makes them logy and sleepy. I think he is right. Joe claims that the people in America do not know how to make bread; the wheat he says is cut when it is too green. The gang, of course, bring Italian bread in their buckets. It is certain that the American lunch of a soggy sandwich and piece of pie leaves a man heavy for the afternoon. The average dinner bucket in the shanty contains: a loaf of bread, a piece of meat,—lamb, beef, chicken, or sausage,—three or four green peppers, a couple of tomatoes, a bunch of grapes, and some vegetable mixture like tomatoes chopped with cucumbers and lettuce.
One day the gang got absorbed in stunts, climbing a ladder with the hands, giving a complete twist to a hammer with grip the same, the usual turning trick of a broomstick held to the floor, etc. My contribution was squatting slowly on the right leg with the left stiff and parallel with the floor. John complained of a lame thigh for three days after, I am gratified to say.
With Tony I occasionally picked a wrestling quarrel; he has a terrific grip and one day very nearly squeezed the life out of me in a fit of playfulness. I called him "Orso" afterward for his squeezing attribute. Tony's make-up includes a sense of humor. One day when he had rolled about on the floor in front of Number 3, he said: "Ain't you 'shamed, Charlie, you young man, fight old man like me. You twenty-two, twenty-three, me thirty-seven!"
Tony could put me beyond this vale of tears with his left hand.