Centre of Mill Horrors
Here in this hospital building and its environment centres the horror of horrors of the untutored mill workman. Its inspiration is terror to the millman of the polyglot pay roll, as he enters the Eighty-eighth Street gate to his work.
Hun, Pole, Austrian, Bulgarian, Bohemian—the “Hunkies” of Illinois Steel colloquialism—indifferent to pain of shattered, burned, mangled body, grow frantic as the stretcher bearers near this fortress hospital. At its gates, over and over again, the frantic, hysterical wife and children of the victim have begged and pleaded for admission against the grim barrier of the guards.
Why is it? You cannot get the information in South Chicago unless it be that these men are “ignorant.”
South Chicago distinctly doesn’t like the “Hunkie.” He jams the money order window of the post-office for two long days after the bi-monthly pay day. He sleeps sometimes thirty deep in a single room after the day shift, and he sleeps again in the still warm floor bed, thirty deep, after the night shift. He has his grocer’s book on which are entered his scant, half offal meats, which day after day are prepared for him by his hired cook; he wears little and he sleeps in that; his bed is never made, for the reason that some one always is in it; his money goes to the saloon-keeper or through the foreign money order window at the post-office.
He is merely a “Hunkie” in Illinois Steel or in South Chicago. What if the Illinois Steel hospital is his conception of Inferno?
He doesn’t know much. He doesn’t know when he is spoken to, unless it is by an epithet which makes any other man fight. Then he moves doggedly and often with little understanding. Not understanding, he is the chosen, predestined occupant of the hospital bed.
From Accident to Hospital
A “Hunkie” who has been “hunked” in Illinois Steel makes a lot of strictly corporation trouble. The chief “safety inspector” and his staff are alert and active at a moment’s notice of an unofficial accident report. The Illinois Steel photographer and his camera are made ready; the stretcher bearers seize stretchers to the necessary number and a hurried move is made towards the scene of the accident, of which the Chicago police department may never know.
On the scene, the camera is set and the photograph—which so seldom is ever seen beyond the gates of Illinois Steel—is made. Then the “Hunkie”—protesting if he be conscious enough—is picked up, put upon the stretcher, and the giant bearers of the body start for the hospital, which may be a mile away. There are difficulties in the march. Surface lines for ore and coal trains net the grounds. Often a train’s crew finds difficulty in breaking a train to let the body through; sometimes the crew balks and swears, and the stretcher bearers wait for the shunting of the cars.