I live down at the Point in a boarding house. It’s not the best place to live when the wind is up from the south and brings along the smoke from the stacks. If you look at it from the outside, the house is not much to see, with the soot so heavy on the white sills that you’d think they are gray. But when it’s a land breeze and it takes the smoke back towards the water, then you have something.
The reason I live here, which is easy enough to figure, is I work at the mill. I don’t work in the coke ovens or near the blast furnaces, so in that way my job is a little easier than some. On the other hand, when I am taking the trolley car north into the city and I watch the conductor sit and say, “Next stop, Dundalk,” I think that trolley conductors might have a leg up on me and a few others at the mill.
This year I will take to writing some of my days down, as I have come upon something worth writing about, which is not the feeling that you have every day leaving a mill or if not particularly inclined to write. I will jump in here as the starting point because it is as good as any.
I am a company man, and I have done well by them, but I am trying to get ahead in this world. With buying from the company store, there is often little opportunity for that. The money comes right out to pay the store before you even see it, which can make you feel like you are working for hardly anything at all.
I work in a place that is hard to describe unless you are from Sparrows Point, and even then it would take a lot of particulars about the mill. I will assume for writing purposes that whoever reads this someday does not work at a mill.
My job is working in a small tower just next to the coke ovens. The smell from them comes up to us pretty regularly but thankfully not every day. The coal comes in off the railcars and then travels for a stretch on a belt to us. Once in the tower, gravity will take over and drop it into the coke ovens directly. After being baked in the ovens, just the coke is left to fire the blast furnaces, and the stuff you can’t use is all burned off.
As the coal goes on a belt through my area some of it falls off and me and the fellows shovel it back on. That is a simple explanation of things, but truth is it does not get a whole lot more complicated than that. When the coal falls off the belt, it hits and goes a lot of ways so you need to work steady with the fellow next to you as it is not easy to say that this piece that has fallen is yours or that piece is mine, especially with the noise from the belt and the nearby furnaces and ovens so loud you can’t hardly hear. You have to work with somebody willing to more or less split things in half and who has a good eye for doing it.
So in that way, the fellows in my area are a little closer than in others, and if you get a bad pairing, it does not last long. We have had more than one argument up there, although with things so loud it is hard to say just when an argument is happening. Not all of our operation is indoors, but our part is, and we have a few windows in there that are pretty much covered over with dirt. The floor boards have been there forever and are good and solid and they’re covered with dirt, too, so it almost looks like we are working on a dirt floor, but we are not.
To keep things straight, Beth Steel divided up stations on the belt by number, and I am station number five. Right before me is station number four, as you would guess, and working that station is a colored fellow named Reginald Spector. Some fellows around here are not partial to colored folks as a matter of course, but I more or less think about anyone based on what is happening at that particular moment, if that makes sense. And Reginald from moment to moment does a good job, especially if we get a big piece of coal that comes bouncing off the belt. He will just move on it and expect that I do the same back when the next one comes, and we do this pretty much without talking.
There is another fellow at station number six named Stanley Sowa who is good, too, but with Stanley about once a day I will have to point out somehow where his count is off and he should be doing more than he is. He is agreeable enough and usually changes how he’s doing things, but maybe he is not so good at adding or keeping track because the next day we are off the mark again, and more or less I say the same thing.
Well, a little about Reginald, he is 29 and two years older than me and living in a dormitory across the Humphrey’s Creek clearing. We have figured out a pretty good system and have never given the foreman much reason to yell at either one of us. The negroes and the whites don’t eat together in other parts of the mill, but where we work we often just sit down for awhile right on the spot when the belt goes off for twenty minutes around lunch. With only twenty minutes and us up in a tower, there isn’t much reason to leave the room unless you are heading to the bathroom. Stanley usually sits down on the spot, too, but when things aren’t going well some days on the work side you are not inclined to starting talking about old times at lunch, so we only talk about half the time.
I know that is pretty unremarkable, having three fellows having lunch at a steel mill in April, but one day Reginald mentioned that up in the city they were putting some new seats in Venable Stadium for the Army-Navy game late this fall.
His father works up there and from what Reginald says does pretty well for himself even though he’s old. Venable was built mostly out of dirt and wood a couple years back in 1922. After a good rain the dirt is always washing down the sides, and the wood after just a couple years is already rotten and splintery in spots and needs to be replaced. At least that’s how the Sun tells it. His father works the place like somebody might a farm, fixing and tending to things one right after another all day long.
One lunch he started in about his father.
“My dad’s working round the clock to get ready for the game. Usually they got him just fixing things, you know, but he says to me that they’re putting 40,000 new seats in, and he’s doing lots more than that. They got some new boys helping out, but they don’t know that place, my father says they do the work in twice the time it takes.”
Reginald kept on, “So he asked me to come up there on Sundays when we’re off here and help him out. So that would mean working every day regular.”
That is a lot for sure, and Reginald just bit into this big piece of bread with butter and said something else, but his mouth was full, and it just came out as noise, so I sat and waited for him to figure out that all I heard was noise, but he didn’t say anything else.
“What was that again, Reginald?”
He looked at me for a moment as if he was wondering about my hearing but the truth is for all the noise here my hearing is fine unless you’re talking with a big piece of bread and butter in your mouth. I have done the same and can’t hardly understand myself.
“I’m thinking about it.”
I know Reginald pretty well now, and I know that lots of times he’s telling you something without saying it, letting you figure out what he’s really getting at. Maybe it comes from working the belt, leaving out parts of conversations to save time. Stanley does the same thing sometimes.
“You think they need somebody up there for shoveling coal back on a belt?” I asked, smiling a bit through the food.
Reginald ate some more and had to think, I guess, whether that was a joke, and it was, but it is not the best that I had ever told, and so he just kept eating. He swallowed down some water from out of the outdoor fountain that he would fill up his drinking canister with each day.
“No, but they need fellows round the clock which tells me they just plain need fellows without too much care about the particulars. You can do something up there if you’d want. I can ask him.”
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