1 MAKING STEEL
At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.
—ITALIAN PROVERB
RAW MATERIAL
When I was a toddler, my parents worried that I might be blind. My father was home on leave from the navy when I was nine months old. Unaware how much I was walking, he left a fresh pot of coffee too close to the edge of a table. I reached up and dumped the contents onto myself, resulting in second- and third-degree burns that covered my left shoulder and upper arm. I healed without functional consequences, but I was left with a thick, swirling scar that looked like waves crashing on a beach. My coffee pull didn’t suggest blindness, but after I recovered, my parents noticed that I was running into things. They took me to an ophthalmologist, to whom they reported, “He’ll crash into a chair, pop up, race off, and crash into another equally obvious piece of furniture. Or he’ll try to leap from a chair to the couch, six feet away, and crash into the coffee table.” Dr. Chamberlain watched me run around his office for a minute or two, then thoroughly assessed my eyesight. He told my parents, “There’s nothing wrong with his vision. He just doesn’t give a damn.”
My parents long enjoyed telling that story and considered Dr. Chamberlain’s comment more amusing than judgmental, even as I strove to prove him right. I fell out of my crib and acquired sutures in my forehead. I crashed while practicing carrier landings onto my bed and acquired sutures in the corner of my left eye. I fell out of a tree and broke a wrist. I took a swing at my older brother, hit the doorjamb instead, and broke bones in my hand. Playing on a piece of flotsam in Lake Michigan surf, I tore open the palm of my left hand on an exposed nail, producing a dramatic amount of bleeding and an exciting police car ride to the emergency room. I crashed on a toboggan and bit through my lower lip, earning more sutures and another minor facial scar.
Early in my freshman year of high school, I suffered a serious epiphyseal fracture of my right ankle when practicing the long jump. Dr. Sweeney told my parents it had been a struggle to set the fracture, and he fretted over the amount of pressure being applied to my foot to keep the bones in place. I was an Evanston Hospital inpatient for ten days, completely immobilized with my leg in its cast suspended above the bed. A gangrenous black pressure ulcer developed at the base of my little toe; it became a thick scar and a shoe-fitting nuisance, but remodeled to insignificance after a few years.
I was back in school in January 1963 after the Christmas holiday break. In a long-leg cast, with crutches, I navigated a high school 40 percent overcrowded with five thousand students in a four-story building with one elevator. I was little (five foot two) and barely adolescent, which made me a chew toy for a certain kind of upperclassman. In the subway-crowded hallways, a few of them found it amusing to spill my books onto the floor or kick out a crutch as I lumbered by, creating a traffic jam for which I appeared responsible. I adapted. I removed the rubber tip of each crutch, pushed a long needle through it from the inside, then replaced the rubber tip, oriented so that the needle faced my adversaries. My needles were an effective deterrent when stabbed into the leg of someone trying to prank me. I didn’t use them for long—there were collateral casualties, mostly to the knight wielding the crutch.
After three months, I was cast-free and ready for daily gym class, but I was too deconditioned to rejoin my peers. In transition I was assigned to what was often called “spaz gym.” If there is a similar gym class today, the slang teenagers use to stereotype it might be less insensitive, or more ambiguously so. The class was populated by ten to fifteen boys whose spectrum of permanent disabilities kept them segregated from other students for their physical education. Almost all had at least average intelligence and weren’t segregated in classes devoted to academics. Even in gym class, they were socially much like other boys; we hung out, and conspired in loafing between exercises.
One spring day, we were ushered to the outdoor track for some aspirational jogging. Out on the track at the same time was a large group of classmates from my usual gym class. Searing with embarrassment, I abruptly abandoned my gym mates and took off in a sprint, determined to show that I didn’t belong in spaz gym. Completely lacking fitness, I almost collapsed after half a lap, and slunk out of sight. If my behavior was offensive or hurtful to my gym mates, they never let on. I’m sure they knew I wouldn’t be with them the next semester and would have loved to have reversible disabilities. Was my presence an irritating reminder of aspirations they’d been denied at birth? Or had they long known to play the hands they were dealt, and this interloper fretting over trivial obstacles was a minor amusement? I remember them well enough to tell this story; there’s a good chance they don’t remember me.
The next fall, I broke my nose playing touch football, then broke it again wrestling in the winter. I broke my wrist playing basketball in the spring. I survived the next football season without injury, then broke my nose for the third time in intramural wrestling, gaining more bone callus that interfered with breathing and led to dependence on nose drops. I made it safely to college, but the first time I carried the ball in my first football game, I tore the anterior cruciate ligament in my left knee, leading to my first knee operation. Sophomore year, I tore a meniscus in the same knee playing lacrosse and had my second knee operation. After that, I avoided injuries for a full five months, when an industrial accident ended my collegiate athletic career. Under the heading of miscellaneous, over the years, I broke several fingers and a thumb, one here, one there, doing whatever.
Why was I so frequently injured? When I was young, friends often asked if I had “brittle bones,” meaning one of those rare diseases they’d read about. There was nothing brittle about my bones, and I did give a damn. I blame a marriage of optimism and impulsivity that bred recklessness. It would be convenient to blame bad luck, but I was lucky not to be injured even more often. I became more cautious with age, and athletic injuries have been gradually replaced by chronic overuse injuries (back, neck, knees, feet) that are essentially occupational.
Reciting my litany of injuries is not a claim for unique suffering—many people have been injured more often and far more seriously. But there were other impacts. Being a frequent beneficiary of the healing arts stimulated my interest and implanted reverence for what became my profession. I was the world’s best patient. Hospitals never scared me; they felt safe and comforting. While that is still approximately true, becoming an insider made me less blindly reverential and obedient, and I’m not a perfect patient today. To experience the receiving end of the relationship, as a patient, improves empathy on the giving end. Recovering repeatedly from injuries increased my maturity and resilience, most significantly after my ankle fracture. The ability to move beyond “why me” to “this too shall pass” improves with practice. Optimism about recovery is an important part of mental and physical confidence. Are there any downsides to my experience? One is that some injuries have a very long tail. In the past year, I had my fifth—and I hope final—knee operation. I also fear there is a kind of anti-empathy lurking in people like me, for whom learning to transcend periods of suffering can make us less tolerant of anything we read as weakness in others and even in ourselves.
COAL HANDLING
In 1967, the summer of love, several of my friends and I enlisted for work at the Alan Wood Steel Company in nearby Norristown, Pennsylvania. It was dirty, hazardous, and unskilled physical labor, but it was union work that paid exceptionally well. We imagined it would be like going to war in a pals battalion, but the minute we passed through the gate of the plant, our little group was diluted by a workforce of thousands, and I was on my own. The mill straddled a long stretch of the Schuylkill River, with the more glamorous steel-making operations on one side and the lowly coke plant on the other. I was assigned to the coal-handling department of the coke plant. The coal-handling department processed the raw coal that was used to fill the coke ovens. At the beginning of the process, multiple varieties of coal were dumped in the coal yard from railroad cars; each car dumped more than a hundred tons. Raw coal retrieved from the coal yard was dumped into a massive sifting machine called the “breaker,” which extended several stories belowground. The sifted coal was carried by a series of interconnected belts to the bunker nestled in between the coke ovens. The coke ovens converted the coal into coke, which was sent across the river to the blast furnace. Coke is the critical reagent for converting iron ore to metallic iron in a blast furnace.
My official title was belt cleaner. On my first day, my foreman handed me a shovel and broom, a face mask respirator much like an N95, and sent me down the stairs into the subterranean space housing the breaker. Coal rolled off the belts here and there, he said, and it was my job to clean everything up and put it back on the belts. Applying Newton’s law of gravity, I surmised that most of the roll-off would be on the bottom floor, so I started there, at the very core of coal handling, where the enormous breaker shook and roared loudest, where its enraged bowels ended and shat coal onto the first conveyor belt. The air was dark with suspended coal dust that almost defeated the light bulbs. The coal dust thick on the floor was studded with scattered pieces of coal. I swept, and shoveled, and moved the carpet of coal from floor to belt, unreasonably proud of my clean surface. I moved up a floor. The breaker was not quite as loud there, but the floor was just as dirty; Newton had failed me. Two or three hours later, I had worked my way up a few rings in this hell, but I was still a floor or two belowground when I heard footsteps banging rapidly down the metal stairs above me. My foreman appeared through the haze, surprisingly relieved to see me alive. He hustled me up the stairs and out the door to daylight, made sure I hit the watercooler, then lectured me like an anxious parent. No one, he said, should spend more than fifteen to twenty minutes belowground without an equally long break. My eight-hour shift is now four hours of actual work, I thought. “And don’t sweep the floor,” he added. “It will be covered again the next day. Just shovel the big pieces back onto the belt and get out.” His obvious concern made me glad I was wearing my respirator, but I noticed he wasn’t wearing his.
That particular foreman taught me how to take a proper steel mill shower. By the end of a shift, the coal dust covered every millimeter of skin and hair, exposed or unexposed, in part because it filled the air, and in part because I was sweating so profusely in the summer heat that the dirt and dust stuck to everything. One of our better union-won privileges was time allotted to shower at the end of the shift. Each shift started in a locker room, where we changed into work clothes, and ended with a shower before changing back into clean clothes. Sounds easy enough, and any public school student of my era thought nothing of gang showers, but I had never in my life been so completely filthy. During my first week, my foreman stood with me in the shower one afternoon and showed me how to reach every filthy crack and crevice with a soapy washcloth by moving methodically through a specific routine that covered every piece of terrain, visible or not, including my ears, and inside each of the eight spaces between my toes. Truly a life skill that I’ve practiced to this day. My tutorial provoked no reaction from the rowdy gang of twenty to thirty coworkers in the shower that day, from whom a stream of macho commentary followed almost anything else that happened in the shower. I assumed many of them had received the same valuable lesson from the same considerate man. He was white, so he and I were members of the same racial minority in the coke plant. Most of the foremen were white, but few treated people as fairly.
One morning, the breaker malfunctioned such that impurities, mostly short pieces of scrap wood, were escaping through it onto the belts. To compensate, my foreman seated me near the bottom of the long conveyor belt that carried coal on a steep incline from the breaker building to the top of a tower about six stories high. For an entire week, I sat there and watched the coal go by. I would periodically snatch out a chunk of wood or some other piece of not-coal and toss it out the window next to my seat. It was the most mind-numbingly boring thing I have ever done. Minutes felt like hours. To amuse myself, I would stand on the belt and ride it up to the top of the belt tower, a strictly forbidden activity that I’d seen my foremen do, then run back down beside the belt to my seat. About halfway up, perpendicular over the belt, was a heavy iron bar with teeth projecting against the direction of flow that was intended to level the load. There were many time gaps when the belt was moving but empty, during which I wondered if I could pass under the leveling bar while lying flat on the empty belt. I studied that bar for hours, pondering details like whether it would be worse to be proven wrong traveling headfirst or feetfirst. Eventually, I just lay down and did it, headfirst. I passed under the bar’s teeth with an inch or two to spare, and that was that. Surfing up the belt on two feet was much more fun; I simply jumped over the bar. To juice it up a bit, I would run up, then back down the moving belt against the grain.
I worked alone and never saw another belt cleaner. My only episode of teamwork involved clearing railroad tracks. Overnight, heavy rains had washed avalanches of coal over the train tracks in the coal yard, blocking passage for the switching engine that moved coal from the piles in the yard to the breaker. My foreman assembled me and two middle-aged Black men beside the rumbling switching engine and informed us we’d be spending the day clearing track. Carrying our shovels, our team of three climbed on the running boards of the switch engine and were driven out to the washout, perhaps a half mile away. The engineer said he’d return at lunch and pulled slowly away in reverse. We started shoveling. It was shaping up to be a typically hot, humid Philadelphia summer day in full sun. This was not an enviable assignment. As soon as the engine was out of sight, my two companions dug out two shallow depressions in the lower slope of one of the mountains of coal to create some shade and lay down for a nap. One said to me, quite politely, “That shit ain’t goin’ nowhere!” Were they offering the rookie permission to join them? I wanted to show some solidarity, but would I achieve that by shoveling or not shoveling? I preferred working to napping anyway, so I left my social compass spinning and shoveled away methodically. I made barely perceptible progress against a washout that seemed to call for heavy equipment. A few hours later, my companions stirred to their feet when they heard the engine returning and joined me making shoveling motions. We didn’t return to the washout after lunch. I don’t know how it got cleared. I never quite figured out whether track shoveling was some part of a larger drama. Were lessons being taught, by my foreman to my two companions, then by my two companions to me? Was I picked for the team to serve as a tool in the first lesson? Nothing more came of it, and I will never know.
One evening, during one of my many breaks toward the end of a two-to-ten shift, I surfed the belt up to the top of the belt tower and climbed up to the roof, just to take in the view. Across the river, I could see the bright lights and flames of the steel mill proper, the blast furnace, and the rolling mill, where the magic happened. My eye followed the covered, clanking conveyor belt that departed from the tower underneath me, bearing my work product across the acreage of the coke plant to the coal bunker, a multistory building sitting between two long arrays of coke ovens. The set of ovens to the right of the bunker was shrouded in rippling flames and dense smoke, through which a large piece of equipment was moving slowly along the surface. Amid this scene, I could see what had to be a man, armored in protective equipment, moving in and out of sight through the smoke and flame, carrying a long, straight object that looked like a boat hook. A vision of hell, I thought. My mother had a book containing the artwork of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which I had pored over while growing up. The scene reminded me of Dulle Griet, a detail from which earned a full page in the Bruegel book with the legend “Spooks dancing by the light of the flames.” I had no idea that one year later, the spook would be me.
MAKING COKE
The next summer, I was hired as a lidsman on the coke battery—not a high-skill job but a more demanding and much more dangerous one than sweeping the floors around the conveyor belts. On my first day, I was issued four-inch-thick wooden clogs, a welder’s helmet, very heavy leather-composite gloves, and an asbestos-fibered fire suit to be worn over my long-sleeved blue work shirt and jeans. I was escorted up two flights of stairs to the top of the battery, where the heat hit me like something solid. The battery was the mass of 110 side-by-side coke ovens that I had viewed the summer before from the belt tower. Fifty-five ovens, packed together like gigantic gym lockers, lay on either side of the coal bunker in the center. The temperature on the top surface of the ovens was about 135°F, which is why my first instruction was to strap the wooden clogs over my work boots. It was easy to heat up a precooked meal on the surface of the ovens, as some men did.
Once fully geared up, I was taught to “catch a charge.” The ovens were charged (filled with coal) through four evenly spaced ports on top, each covered with a “lid” a little smaller than a manhole cover. Using a seven-foot metal bar, I would remove the four lids from an empty oven by hooking the ring at the center of each lid. Then the Larry car would rumble out and stop over the four uncovered openings on top of the empty oven. It would lower its four nozzles, like ovipositors, fill the oven with processed coal, raise its nozzles, and move on. To complete the catch, the lidsman dropped in behind the departing Larry car and replaced the four lids.
The Larry car was a diesel-powered coal-car the size of a locomotive, but a locomotive that moved sideways, along the axis of its width rather than its length. It traveled on widely spaced rails that ran the length of both batteries. The same rails carried the Larry car into the coal storage bunker from which it was refilled.
My foreman emphasized that I needed to watch the smoke to determine which way the wind was blowing before pulling any lid. To show why, he moved to the upwind side of a full “live” oven and pulled a “hot” lid. As if he’d ignited a giant blowtorch, a searing flame roared instantaneously thirty feet into the sky, angling sharply downwind. Working from where he was standing, on the upwind side, it wasn’t difficult to poke the lid back over the hole with the lid-pulling rod. It was easy to envision how the flame from a lid pulled downwind on a live oven would arch straight into the puller’s face. Suddenly, my heavy, hot protective gear made lots of sense. And I understood why I should always pull lids upwind, even if I thought I was opening an empty oven, because sooner or later, I would be wrong.
One bright summer day, hot lids almost did me in. A new man was turned loose on my eight-to-four shift. He was a tall, thin Black man around my age and wore glasses. He was very friendly, seemed as gentle as a lamb, and was just as hardy. When our breaks overlapped, he and I talked comfortably about nothing in particular. He carried a Bible in the pocket of his fire suit. On every break, he sat down and read verses. In his first week, as a break was ending, he admitted he was having a hard time figuring out which lids to pull next, so I explained as others had done for me. The unvarying sequence in which the ovens were filled and emptied assured that none of the fifty-five ovens in the battery would be clustered together during the most explosive stages of thermal distillation. It boiled down to “tens ’n’ threes.” If oven 15 was next at the start of my shift, I knew I was in the 5-series and that the previous crew had ended their shift by filling oven 5. I would pull the lids on 15, which had just been emptied, then walk down the battery pulling lids on 25, 35, 45, and 55. The Larry car would follow along and fill them in the same sequence. When 55 was done, I would add 3 to 5, go back to the other end of the battery, and pull lids on the 8-series: 8, 18, 28, 38, and 48. Then 8 + 3, the 1-series: 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51. And so on—“tens ’n’ threes.”
Copyright © 2023 by Craig R. Smith, M.D.