Before the heat began, the guy breaking me in on the job said “Make sure all these nozzles are turned to the right.”
That was the “off” position to ensure that water didn’t accidentally leak during The Heat. The flow to these nozzles was controlled by a switchboard at one end of the platform about forty yards away, which I’d turn on later.
***
When I was in college, I never took a year abroad. I never participated in a foreign exchange program. But I did spend ten weeks in one of the most alien and exotic places I’ve ever known. It was the Basic Oxygen Furnace at Jones & Laughlin Steel in downtown Cleveland.
I’m not kidding when I say it was exotic, an experience that has provided me with some of my most vivid memories. It was 1976 and I was 19 years old, in between freshman and sophomore years of college. My football coach, Carm Cozza, had helped get me the job through the alumni network.
The Basic Oxygen Furnace was a semi-enclosed building about six stories high and the length of a city block. The steel-making process began here. The BOF, as it was called, was essentially a soup kitchen in the Land of the Giants. In fact, they used kitchen terms to describe much of the equipment. At one end of the building, a huge pot – which they called a ladle - of molten iron slid in on a crane that operated on tracks built into the ceiling. The “broth” was poured into two gigantic furnaces, which operated like twin pot-bellied stoves. They cooked up this iron, tossed in some scrap metal, threw in a wooden pallet or two for seasoning, and called it steel.
Once the steel was cooked, they’d pour it back into another ladle, which would then slide across to the other end of the building and get poured into concrete molds to form ingots. Once the ingots were poured, the train with the ingots would trundle out of the BOF and head off to…
I don’t know. We were just the kitchen help. Where they served this stuff and to whom I had no idea.
The first thing you had to get used to were the explosions. At various parts of the process, they sprayed water on the molten metal to cool it down. The dripping water formed puddles on the dirt floor. Whenever the liquid metal, which was heated to 3000 degrees, splashed out of the ladles and landed in the puddles, it displaced the water so fast it exploded. All day long you heard the pop-pop-pop of exploding water all over the BOF. On my first day, I flinched when I heard what sounded like gunshots, but they soon faded into the general din. A young Latino war vet told me that the constant explosions often flashed him back to Viet Nam.
It was a union job. Even the temporary workers got the entry-level union wage. I was in my mid-twenties before I made as much money in a year as I made those ten weeks in the steel mill. I remember one guy my age – he had long blond hair – who couldn’t understand why I was going to college when I could make twenty-five grand a year at J&L. At the time, not knowing what my future held, it seemed like a very good question.
The plant ran 24/7, in rotating shifts: 8 to 3; 3 to 11; 11 to 8. Day shift, swing shift, and—graveyard. I rotated through all three. We were all issued green pants, gray long-sleeved shirts, and a white construction helmet. That was the uniform. When I got home after my shift, I wiped out my nostrils with a Q-tip, which came out black with graphite, one of the by-products floating in the air at the BOF.
My job title was “material handler.” A foreman explained it to me this way: “You see all that dirt and crap over there? That’s what we call your ‘material.’ I want you take this broom and ‘handle’ that ‘material’ into these garbage bins.”
Sometimes we’d get assigned other jobs. When we came in for our shift, we gathered in the foreman’s office, and he told us what needed to be done that day. Sometimes that meant going to other parts of the mill, like the Electric Furnace. The biggest difference between the Oxygen Furnace and the Electric Furnace was fire. The Electric Furnace had no fire. No water.
These days we think of electric power as quiet like a Prius or a Tesla. But this building was loud. It was like sticking your head into a jet engine or sitting in the front row of an eight-hour Black Sabbath concert. Except they’re playing just one chord. With no breaks.
You had to wear earplugs, or you’d be deafened within days. Guys had to yell at each other all day like they were stuck in a 500-decibel frat party.
“What’s your name?!”
“Skrovan!”
“What?”
“SKRO – VAN!”
“Scrotum?!”
“Close enough.”
I did one shift at the Electric Furnace and was so happy to get back to the relatively benign explosions of the Basic Oxygen Furnace. It was like going from a heavy metal station down the FM dial to “The Quiet Storm.”
Another time I was assigned a job called Mag Coke. This job required me to dress in a shiny, heat-resistant space suit. A crane lowered what looked like a diving bell. It was my job to take a long iron rod and knock off whatever debris clung to the bell, like knocking coals off a burning log. It was part of the de-sulfuring process. You had to wear the suit because you couldn’t stand five feet from this thing without getting burned. And you had to keep moving around it. If you stood in one place too long, even with the suit, the heat was unbearable. At one point, I lingered too long poking at a particularly stubborn chunk of sulfur. I felt an acute pain in my wrist and quickly backed off. When I stripped off the suit later, I found a blister had bubbled up on that wrist.
The graveyard shift was less active and quieter than the other two shifts. One time, we were sitting in the foreman’s office getting our assignments. One job required one of us to sit alone in a metal shed. Every forty-five minutes a crane with a ladle came through and you had to signal to the operator that no one was on the floor, and the crane was clear to pass. That’s it. It was a boring job that made the night drag. No one wanted it.
One of the guys working at my level was probably in his mid- to late thirties. His last name was Paydon. That’s what everyone called him. I never learned his first name. I don’t know what circumstance in life put Paydon in an entry-level job like this at his age, but he got the assignment. He wasn’t thrilled and asked if anyone had anything to read.
Of course, I, the bright young college kid, had a book.
He said, “What is it?”
I got excited and explained, “It’s called Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. It’s by Hunter Thompson. He followed Nixon all during the 1972 presidential campaign. It’s really interesting! Thompson was basically the inventor of what they call gonzo journalism, and he-”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa…” Paydon put up his hand to interrupt my disquisition.
“What?” I said.
“Is it fuck book?”
“Uh… no… no… it’s not.”
“You can hold onto that.”
Fortunately, someone had a spare Hustler in his locker.
In fairness, this is the same guy who one day announced to us his great idea that was going to make him rich. He took a pause for dramatic effect, fanned his hands out and laid it on us, “Health insurance… for pets.”
We all looked at him like… “What are you, crazy? For pets? Who’s gonna pay for that?”
Sure enough, today you can get health insurance for pets. I just hope ole Paydon got himself in on the ground floor.
About halfway through my run at J&L, another young guy came to work as a material handler. I was assigned to break him in. He was a tall, lanky white dude who seemed to resent my five weeks seniority. He immediately made it clear that he thought I could teach him shit. He looked down at me from his six-foot three-inch perch and informed me that he was there because he was studying metallurgy, and he knew more about steel than I could ever dream of.
“That’s impressive,” I said. “Why don’t you take that broom and metal urge that shit on the floor into one of those bins.”
One night in the foreman’s office on the graveyard shift, we were all sitting around, and the foreman, Kurtschuk, told us a story. Kurtschuk always struck me as out of place. He seemed more educated, wore glasses, and had a larger vocabulary than the other foremen. I don’t remember why he was telling us this story. It was the beginning of the shift, and we were waiting for our assignments. Kurtschuk mentioned how he used to work on the management side and how there had been a strike at the plant a few years back. They sent him out to take pictures of the strikers on the picket line. He took a picture of one of the picket leaders. After the strike ended, the guy he photographed got fired. And soon after that, he heard that the guy was killed in an accident at another job.
The room grew quiet.
Kurtschuk took off his glasses, stared down at his desk and said, “…I think about that every once in a while…”
Then he glanced up and seeing our concerned expressions quickly added, “…for about ten seconds.”
His tone was almost scolding as if to say, “Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.” But in that moment, I believe I caught a glimpse of why this white-collar-looking fellow with the glasses had traded in his camera for a hard hat and was now a foreman on the graveyard shift.
It was toward the end of my time at the Basic Oxygen Furnace when I was assigned a job that marked the end of the BOF process called The Heat. After the steel is cooked in the furnace, a crane hovers over a set of railroad tracks. On the flatcar sits a series of ingot molds. A team of about six works on a platform above the tracks led by the Steel Pourer, who operates a spigot on the side of the ladle that holds the molten steel. He controls the flow of liquid into the molds. After they fill the mold ingot, the crane moves a few feet to the next one and the rest of the team tosses a sheet of aluminum on top of the previous ingot to cap it.
As low man on the org chart, my job was to work the spoon, a twelve-foot metal rod with a cup on the end of it. The Steel Pourer slowed the flow to a trickle, and I held the spoon underneath to gather a sample, which I poured into a smaller cup shaped like a test tube. I put a flag in the tube, which was delivered to a lab for a quality test.
Just because the steel is in liquid form doesn’t mean it’s not heavy. It’s heavy. It’s really fucking heavy, especially falling into a cup at the end of a long rod. Anyone who has had trouble maneuvering a cast iron frying pan has some idea what I’m talking about. But picture that hefty frying pan with a twelve-foot handle. Just swinging this cup of boiling steel to the test tube on the platform without spilling it took a tremendous amount of strength in the forearms and wrists. Despite my lifting weights all summer training for football, I was no match for this awkward piece of equipment.
The first couple of times, my arms shook so much I spilled half the cup before I got to the test tube. It took me a few more reps to learn success was more about balance, speed, and concentration than about brute strength. Place one hand farther down the bar. Slow the pace. Focus on one maneuver at a time, catch, swing, pour. More Tai Chi than power lift.
That was only half the gig, though, as the guy breaking me in explained. He was only a few years older and wore a bandanna that peeked out the back of his hard hat. For the second part of the job, we had to hose down the capped ingots from a series of water nozzles mounted above the platform.
That’s when he instructed me to make sure “All of these nozzles were turned to the right.”
Being the good student, I made damn sure all of those nozzles were turned to the right.
About halfway through The Heat, he gave me the sign to turn on the water at the switchboard to get a jump on the cooling process, which would commence once the last mold was poured. I eagerly hustled the forty yards down the platform and started flipping switches.
Before I even got to the last switch, I heard behind me “Boom! Boom-boom! Boom-boom-boom-boom!”
I whirled around to see about half the hoses shooting water into the uncovered ingots of molten steel, which were exploding like grenades.
The whole crew dove for cover like an ambushed platoon during a mortar attack, including the heavy-set Steel Pourer, who had been working at J&L for thirty years and was a month from retirement. Horrified, I slapped at the switches until the nozzles stopped spraying.
That summer I had also been training to do forty-yard sprints for time, topping out at about 4.7 seconds. It felt like it took an hour for me to cover the forty yards back to the team of steel workers staring me down from the other end of the platform. I wondered who was going to get his hands around the dipshit college kid’s throat first.
I shrugged my shoulders tight against my head and held my hands out in supplication, “I swear to God I turned all the nozzles to the right.”
The Steel Pourer said, “Who told you to turn all the nozzles to the right?”
Not wanting to be an obvious snitch, my shoulders still scrunched against my neck, my eyes shifted slightly toward bandanna man.
They all turned to him. He took a step back, rubbed his chin with his fingers, and said, “I guess some of them nozzles you gotta turn to the left.”
That was it. The crew slowly shook their heads, then went back to work. We finished The Heat as if the near-death experience had never happened.
Gotta make the steel.
Those steel mills used to be the heart of the industrial Midwest, but most if not all have closed down or moved away. J&L doesn’t exist anymore. Cleveland is now known for its hospitals and health care—the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve medical school. I’m sure most of the people I worked with thought it would last forever. Especially that guy making 25 grand a year who thought he was set for life.
I’m sure they don’t remember me. I was a fly on the wall for ten weeks on my way to somewhere else, somewhere I didn’t have to swab the graphite out of my nose when I got home. I wonder where they all ended up, the Vietnam vet, the cocky metallurgist, fuck-book Paydon, the Steel Pourer about to retire, and Kurtschuk, the foreman who regretted taking the picture of that striker on the picket line.
Today, when the leaves from our magnolia and rubber tree fall into our backyard in sunny California, it’s my job to sweep them up. I’ll grab the big push broom from its rack and grip it at the end with both fists at my chest. I’ll push the leaves forward with the same short strokes I learned all those decades ago at the BOF. And I’ll expertly handle that material into Shelley’s compost bins.
Whenever I grip that broom, I think about that exotic industrial soup kitchen, a place so large and loud and substantial it seemed indestructible. Yet it vanished like the Lost City of Atlantis.
From that extraordinary summer, I learned more than how to push a broom. I learned about the power of impermanence. I learned the difference between a fuck book and a regular book. And most importantly, I learned as in life…
Some of them nozzles, you gotta turn to the left.
I got a job at the Linden Chlorine Plant for summer between Sophomore and Junior year. Kevin Gardner had the same job. We should change into work clothes at the plant. Green pants and shirt. Mercury vapor mask, helmet goggles, rubber boots and gloves. We also had real gas masks that we carried with us to use when there was a chlorine leak, which happened every couple of weeks. Then we had to run through the maze of plants and pipes to the parking lot with a loud siren sounding.
We had lots of jobs, but most of the summer we had to knock out a concrete wall of the factory with 16 lbs sledge hammers. Chlorine is made by running an electric current through salt water in a factory the size of a couple football fields. Mercury is used as a catalyst. (Some days we swept the mercury that leaked into bins. The mercury sort of rolls along.). There was a big thermometer on one wall of the plant. Because of the electricity running through the steel on either side of the salt water it was hot. How hot? The termometer only went up to 120 decrees and the arrow was always pinned at 120. And we were covered from head to toe.
Another time, Kevin and I were told to spend the day banging on huge metal silos, like what you might find at a farm, to dislodge salt that had caked on the inside. Absolutely crazy. We are slamming the sledge hammers into the sold steel silos, and absorbing the recoil and vibration, while standing on a little perch set up for us 20' high, FOR 8 HOURS!
The crew we worked with were characters...all of them. Stan was our foreman. I think Vietnam Vet. Very nice guy. Stan the Man.
One day OSHA came to check on the levels of mercury at the plant. The plant somehow had a heads up, so the day before we spent the day spraying some sulfur compound that knocked the mercury out of the air. Smelled like rotten eggs. Then when OSHA came, they selected some of us at random to wear tags to measure our exposure during the day to mercury. As soon as they left, those with tags were sent to the parking lot to put wheel barrows together all day. We came back to the plant before OSHA returned. OSHA took our tags and tested them. The recorded mercury was found to be at an acceptable level.
Absolutely crazy summer.
I had no idea you did this! When I left LA to come home and run the family business of aluminum and zinc die casting, much of what you described was familiar. Water was the enemy. Any liquid getting into the molten aluminum (1200 degrees) and molten zinc pots (800 degrees) could cause a mass explosion that could wipe out the entire plant and the city block too. I was always having to educate insurance agents because we had to turn of the overhead sprinklers which were required by regulations. I had to actually make them watch videos of real explosions and the workers covered in molten metal and/or running for their lives to drive the point home. Tough business, but necessary to be able to bring manufacturing back to our shores.