Wheelbarrow Races
For all the grimness and dehumanizing machinery, the fire, smoke and brimstone that filled J&L’s Four Shop, joy blossomed among the massive, brick and iron furnaces that transformed molten iron into blinding-bright, liquid steel. Tom Williams was a sturdy man with dark, curly hair. He remembered his own beginnings at J&L. “I worked as a laborer, first,” said Williams, “then worked as a stocker, which is actually part of the job line up onto the furnaces. “The stocker, at that time, used to load the stuff by hand. We used to shovel ores into the charging boxes so that the charging machine could” load the ores and scrap metal “into the furnace. It was a backbreaking job. You just shoveled all day. Williams chuckled. “I think it was more fun in the old days, too. … You could carry on a little more. Like, you know, you’d be walking along and the next thing you know you’d get hit with a water hose, or somebody would be dropping bags of water from up above on top of ya. … And, once you got hit,” he grinned, “you always planned your revenge.” Eyes twinkling, he said, “We used to have contests to see who could wheel the heaviest wheelbarrow. Everything in those days was, like I say, by hand.” Back then, in the 1950’s, “you had to wheel all your stock behind the furnace.” Some old time steelworkers actually moved a thousand pounds. They painstakingly positioned the heavy but dense manganese over the wheel. “You really weren’t picking up too much,” Williams said, “but still, it was pretty hard to do because those wheelbarrows in those days weren’t all the greatest either. … They were primitive type things. “ Williams followed his father’s footsteps and worked his way up the job line from labor gang to Melter. Remembering those wheelbarrow races, he added, “You had to be real careful, because you could end up skinning your knuckles. And, if the wheelbarrow tilted on ya,” he laughed vigorously, “there was no way you were gonna stop it. Many a time you’d come out of there, boy, your knuckles would be all goofed up from hitting the (furnace) railings, but you wouldn’t let that thing go! Well, you’re young and foolish, you know, and it’s just lots of fun.” Photo (c) Sandra Gould Ford Image: In Four Shop, a ix-foot-three-inch man stands beside two charging buckets used to fill the furnaces.
Coke Oven Peaches
Cloudless blue covers meadowland, the river and hills. Southward from Hazelwood Avenue’s railroad tracks, the land slopes down to the Monongahela River. When I gaze west, I marvel that the behemoth coke oven batteries, the fuming by products plant, the coal handling facility with its tug boats and barges, the world of coke and iron is gone. A mix of majesty and mourning fills my awareness that a vast, green plain buries a world that was once gray and gargantuan. A wish forms. In 1884, one dollar bought as much as $24 purchases today. That year, the first long-distance phone call connected Boston and New York, the Statue of Liberty was presented to the United States, and Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation opened its first industrial plant on the 168 acres between Second Avenue and the Monongahela River. Before the Civil War, hazel woods shaded those grasses. Those twenty-foot bushes produced filberts or hazelnuts. The tree was believed to protect humans from snakes and was sacred to the Celts and Druids. Hazelnuts were considered a source of wisdom. The Greeks wove hazel branches into headpieces to protect warriors from evil. And the Irish believed hazelnut beverages improved prophetic powers. On January 27, 1901, The Pittsburgh Leader reported, Districts that 15 or 20 years ago were beautiful with handsome homes, splendid lawns and fine old shade trees, are now mere ghosts of their former selves, sad pictures of decay and neglect. The former occupants have moved away to avoid the unpleasant associations which smoke or grime or the plebian air that inroads of the wage-earners’ class have given the neighborhood. Such is the fate of Hazelwood, which 30 years ago was perhaps the choicest suburban section around Pittsburg. Coke began replacing charcoal in steelmaking by the time railroads supplanted the pack horse, Conestoga wagon and canal boat and when Hazelwood’s genteel class abandoned the “multitude of great, noble trees that threw their protecting boughs over the stately, hospitable homes.” The coking ovens burn away coal’s hydrogen, methane, nitrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ethane, propane, tar vapors, naphthalene vapor, ammonia gas, hydrogen sulfide gas and hydrogen cyanide gas, leaving carbonized coal, a fuel that generates intense heat and very little smoke. Coke also removes oxygen from iron ore, converting it to metal. In 1910, the Boy Scouts of America was founded. Earth passed through Comet Halley’s tail. Forty-eight thousand beehive coke ovens blistered Pittsburgh’s skies, with the world’s largest collection blazing beside Jones & Laughlin’s Hazelwood blast furnaces. One year later, the U. S. Immigration Commission reported, “The smoke and gas from some ovens destroy all vegetation around the small mining communities.” In time, J&L built the By Products plant to improve profits and satisfy emission regulations, to convert raw coke oven gas to fuel and otherwise cool the coke oven gases, to remove tar aerosols and ammonia and recover benzene, toluene and xylene and to treat the waste water generated during the coke making process. In 1961, General and President Eisenhower left office warning against the accumulation of power by the “military-industrial complex,” John F. Kennedy was inaugurated President and Hazelwood had four, coke oven batteries, totaling 295 ovens. Each one was a 40-foot-long chamber, 13 feet high and just 15 inches wide on the pusher side (where coal entered) and 18 inches wide on the coke side. An oven held seventeen net tons of coal and, after burning off impurities, pushed out twelve blazing tons of coke. Minimum coking time per oven was 17 hours, with a mix of 18% low volatile coal and 82% high volatile coal. By Products’ five tar extractors could handle 1,000 cubic feet (MCF) per hour. The three gas exhausters could handle 88,000 cubic feet per day. Each of the two ammonia stills processed 12,000 gallons per hour. One ammonia liquor tank held 20,000 gallons. The other a half million gallons. Six tanks held 20,000 gallons of acid each. Two tar tanks held the same amounts. The other pair held 600,000 gallons of tar apiece. When I visited that facility, guys talked about how the sizzling coke had to be cooled or “quenched” so that it could be loaded onto railroad cars. Otherwise, the coke would continue to burn because it held heat. One said, “When water hit the coke, huge funnels of steam were released and, as the steam gushed up into the sky, a light sprinkling of rain fell as some of the steam condensed.” When I drove along East Carson Street near Becks Run Road, I saw those columns foaming skyward, enormous and as lathery as shaving cream. By Products employee Kenneth Randall said that he came to the mill from the Duquesne Brewery. His first work was in the warehouse where they processed steel for customers. Randall then transferred to Hazelwood’s Ingot Mould Foundry. He said, “It was one big room. They had piles of sand and you had ovens in the middle and a place down below where you would use the sand to cast the moulds. You had to shovel a lot of sand, and then tamp it together and then put blacking on it to hold the sand together while you baked it. Then you set it down and poured hot iron into it.” Another man added, “In the Ingot Mould Foundry, you wore long underwear, but the dust and sand penetrated, and when you went in the shower, you had that dust and dirt on your body underneath it. I asked a guy, I said, ‘Well what did the old timers do? Did they ever NOT have showers here?’ He said, ‘Yeah. They used to go home like this.’” Ray Topper recalled, “The first girl came into the mill during the war.” Oscar Jernstrom added, “The company got straightened out on the bathroom facilities when women came in. They had to have separate facilities in the mill. When it was all men, you just went wherever there was water running. When women came in, things changed.”
The Tap
The Universe resounds with the joyful cry, I am. –Scriabin Tap: to pierce in order to draw off liquid … to draw (liquid) from a vessel or container –The American Heritage Dictionary In 1977, I worked for Frank Rote who supervised construction of Pittsburgh Works’ electric furnaces. When completed, those twin electrics would cook as much steel as the eleven open hearths, and Pittsburgh’s open hearth era would end. On that late spring morning, I stuffed my feet into hard-toed shoes, pulled into the green fireproof jacket, slipped on protective eyeglasses, fit an orange hard hat on my head and clomped up East Carson Street to the 29th Street Gate. My new boss and I clomped toward a five-story, three-block metal barn. Below Four Shop’s truck ramp, steelworkers in green asbestos jackets and orange hard hats scurried, hollered and laughed. Forklifts, trucks and tractor trailers rumbled across concrete. Trains clanged. Loudspeakers squawked. Horns blared. Sirens whined. Beyond the wild grasses, blackberry, catalpa, sumac and maple that rimmed the river, tugboats hooted. Four Shop was a windowless, five-story, three-block barn of corrugated tin. From the Twenty-Ninth Street Gate, it looked like The Works’s other sheds except it was tan instead of black and a half century newer. On the grounds below Four Shop’s truck ramp, steelworkers in mint green asbestos jackets and orange hard hats walked, most with brisk purpose. They drove fork lifts and trucks of all sizes. Engines thrummed. Horns blared. Loudspeakers squawked. Men hollered. Laughed. When we reached the steel shop’s western entrance, its huge portal sliced off daylight like a guillotine. Inside, whistles and beeps, rumbles and clangs thickened the cavern’s smoky air. Crunching over cinders and crushed stone, we passed piles of white dolomite and brown magnesite. I gawked as hooks taller than men hoisted buckets big as small houses. From outside, Four Shop looked like Pittsburgh Works’ other somber, smoky and windowless sheds, except it was taller, longer and newer. Rote and I climbed a steep truck ramp to Four Shop’s charging floor. The huge portal sliced away daylight like a guillotine. Glimmering lights poked through the gloom. Inside, the distant ceiling covered like night. Small beacons flickered through shadow. Whistles and beeps and rumbles and clangs punctured the dust-thickened air. White dolomite and brown magnesite dunes cluttered the cavernous floor. Paired hooks taller than men hoisted iron buckets bigger than cabins. I breathed sulfur. A persistent thunder shook air that tasted like metal and char. Crunching over crumbled ores, I watched a fifty-foot, clanking dragon ride wide-set rails as its head snatched black tubs and dumped ten thousand pounds of ore into an Open Hearth’s red-orange glare. Our footsteps crunched as we moved past mounds of ore. Hooks bigger than men and buckets larger than rooms dipped in and out of Four Shop’s darkness. A 70-foot-wide no-man’s land dominated by a clanking dragon called the charging machine separated the ore storage area from the hearths. The charging machine’s horrid head lifted the bathtub-sized ore bins and shoved them into the furnaces. The eleven open hearth furnaces lined up like 60-foot-long shoe boxes. Their walls were three feet of brick with six iron gates that lifted like windows. Inside, the white-orange “bath” simmered. The eleven, eighty-foot furnaces needed more than eight hours at ninety-five million BTU per hour to melt a half million pounds of molten iron and nearly as much iron scrap, steel scrap, ore, sinter and flux into three thousand cubic feet of steel. Through holes in the furnace’s heavy, iron doors, the fire and brimstone lake – called a “bath” or “heat” – shone eclipse intense. Depending on the carbon-oxygen content, the knee-high brew either lay like a pond, rolled like the ocean or bubbled like tea. Seething limestone trapped impurities in a white satin foam called slag. A fifty-foot, clanking dragon called the charging machine grabbed huge, iron boxes with its head and shoved them through the open hearth doors, dumping ten thousand pounds of ore into the fire and brimstone lake. It took eight to ten hours at ninety-five million BTu per hour to turn a half million pounds of molten iron, fifty thousand pounds of iron scrap, two hundred thirty-thousand pounds of steel scrap and one hundred thousand pounds of assorted ores, sinter and fluxes into three thousand square feet of molten steel. I winced at the white-orange glare piercing the five-foot doors. Liquid steel shines too bright for unprotected eyes. Depending on the steel’s chemistry, the knee-high “bath” lay like a pond, rolled like the ocean or bubbled like tea water. Limestone became a bright, white slag that worked like detergent, gurgling down and then suspending phosphorus and sulfur — which make steel brittle — and other impurities. Slag looked like white satin when it overflowed, seething under the doors and over a furnace’s charred “breast.” The steel inside the furnace was called a “bath” or a “heat.” When finished, the “heat” was tapped or drained. Rote asked a First Helper, one who worked the furnace’s charging or front side, which of the eleven hearths would tap next. Above the clamor and the furnaces’ roars, the man shouted that far off, No. 50 would go in an hour. No. 43 in ten minutes. A corridor between each furnace led to a narrow ledge above the deep ladle pit. There, we found No. 43’s Second Helpers, the men who worked a furnace’s tap or back side. Assembled like midwives, they wore long, silver coats and hoods with face shields. Waiting, they stamped their high, heavy boots and joked beside the ladle, a two-story, fifteen-foot wide bucket. Third Helpers worked both sides of the furnace On that narrow platform, below the hissing No. 43, Second Helpers assembled like midwives. They wore long, silver coats and hoods with face shields. Waiting, they stamped their high, heavy boots and swapped jokes on that cliff above the ladle pit. Steel poured best at 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit. Molten steel always “chewed,” gouging its crucible.
