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Growing Up in a Steel Town: Life Centered Around the Steel Mill

Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation – Aliquippa Works

As a young child growing up in a steel town, I did not realize just how much of our lives: where we lived, how we lived and the way we lived, were centered around the steel mill. Most of the men and some of the women in my family worked in the mill. The entire town was planned and built around the mill to encourage migration and accommodate workers and their families.

The neighborhood communities that collectively comprised our town were designed to provide basic affordable housing for the general labor workforce, to live within walking distance of the mill. More upscale housing was developed in communities located away from the mill to accommodate and attract the salaried and management workforce.

Settling in a Neighborhood

As more and more workers migrated to our town seeking jobs that would provide a decent living for their families, there was a tendency for them to move to neighboring communities where other families of the same ethnic background or religion resided. The language was also an important factor since many immigrants did not have full command of the English language when they arrived. The neighborhood that I grew up in was on a hillside overlooking the mill.

The Song & Dance of the Mill

As a small child, I remember looking down on the steel mill with great awe and trepidation. It breathed fire and smoke out of stacks rising into the air. There were miles of buildings, with huge piles of raw materials and machinery and equipment everywhere. Long lines of train cars passed in the foreground emitting rhythmic sounds as they rolled along the tracks.

Combined with the sounds of periodic loud booms, whistles, and alarms going off, watching the mill from the outside could be very intimidating. As I grew a little older, those sights and sounds became less intimidating. I think of them now as the song and dance of the steel mill.  A tune, familiar to everyone in our community.

The Job

My father, the native-born son of Italian immigrants, worked in the Open-Hearth Department of the mill. His job consisted of lining the ladles (vessels that transported molten steel), with bricks to prevent the molten steel from breaching the vessel (see the link below for more on this process).

We never directly discussed the inherent dangers of his job, but I knew from hearing adults talking about the accidents, injuries, and deaths that occurred, that his job was not the safest way to earn a living. Concerned that my dad was in danger, I asked him why he had to have that job and not a job that was less dangerous. He said that most jobs in the mill were dangerous.

He explained that his job was assigned to him when he was hired and that he did not have a choice in the matter. He told me that because they believed that most Italian’s were good bricklayers, that is where they automatically assigned him. Thinking about that now, was that an early form of ethnic profiling? My dad worked in the Open-Hearth until he retired. Like many other steelworkers, his entire work life was centered around that mill and that job.

Daily Life – Payday!

My daily life, also centered around my dad’s job at the mill, in one way or another, (especially in my younger years). On payday, we walked down to the mill to collect my dad’s pay. At the entrance to the mill was a tunnel that we had to walk through to get to the office pay windows. I loved walking through that tunnel, hearing the echoing sounds of the cars driving through or a horn beeping now and then. I would often yell out or sing, just to hear my echo. My dad really got a kick out of that! When you reached the other side of the tunnel, you walked into a totally different environment. I recognized some of the same sights and sounds that I had experienced from my hilltop perch, but much closer and much louder.

At the pay window, we waited in a line outside. When we reached the window, we were handed a yellow envelope that contained my dad’s wages for two weeks. At that time, everyone was paid in cash. Later, that changed as new methods and technologies were implemented.  I remember how excited and impressed I was to see all that money. Of course, at that age, I had little or no concept of what money could or could not buy. After my first job, I completely understood what my dad must have thought and felt when they handed him his pay.

Daily Life – Downtown Shopping!

We walked back through the tunnel into a booming town filled with: a hotel, banks, a car dealership, restaurants, bars, newsstands, clothing stores, fruit stands, shoe stores, drug stores, hardware stores and jewelry stores. We had a library (built by the mill), a Post Office, movie theaters and funeral homes; most everything you need, all within walking distance of the mill.

Our next destination was the Company Store (Pittsburgh Mercantile department store owned by the mill) to get groceries, clothing, furniture or whatever else we needed or planned for on this trip. We did not have a car, so we purchased only the amount of groceries that we could carry. When we needed more groceries than the two of us could carry, we would call a taxi to drive us home.

When you shopped at the “company store” you could make purchases and have them deducted from your paycheck, just by giving the clerk your badge number. A dangerous thing both then and now, especially for the undisciplined and those who do not consider the extra cost of buying on the installment plan.

These are just a few of my memories of life in a town centered around the steel mill. I hope you enjoyed reading about these memories and I welcome your comments. If you would like to read more like this, please subscribe to my blog or follow me on Facebook.

PBS: “The Steel Business  with a section on the Open-Hearth Process.

The Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation: Image courtesy of The Post Card Collection of Mark DiVecchio 

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