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 tuyere.
"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 tuyere comes loose with a few strokes of a pull bar. All of
these moves are fast; a tuyere 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 mediaeval 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?"