Interview with Bruce Ward for Beyond Steel
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Interview with Bruce Ward for Beyond Steel: An Archive of Lehigh Valley Industry and Culture.
INTERVIEWER: All right? This is the life history interview of Bruce
Ward. It’s November 16th, 2005. It’s four-forty in the afternoon,
and the interviewers are David Webster and Stephan Sawicki. So
we’ll go ahead and start it right now. Bruce, when and where were
you born?
BRUCE WARD: I was born in Bethlehem in July 3rd, 1949.
IN: And can you describe the neighborhood you grew up in?
BW: I grew up on Wood Street in Bethlehem, right between Northeast
Junior High School and Liberty High School, about, oh, three
blocks from the YMCA.
IN: Can you tell me a little bit about your family, number of siblings,
your father and your mother’s occupation?
BW: I have a brother Dennis, who is two and a half years older than me.
My mother and father—my father—that’s too loud, isn’t it? Okay,
I’ll start over with that last question.
IN: Sure, that’s fine. Can you tell me a little bit about your family, the
number of siblings, your father’s occupation, and your mother’s
occupation?
BW: Okay, I have a brother Dennis, who is about two and half years
older than me. My father worked for Banko Beverage Company in
Bethlehem, later in Allentown. My mother worked various
restaurants as a waitress in Bethlehem. And she passed away when
I was thirteen. My father remarried when I was sixteen, and my
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step-mother also was a waitress, and she worked various places in
Bethlehem, and also worked at the steel in the executive cafeteria.
IN: Where did you attend school, grade school and high school?
BW: I went to Lafayette Elementary School in Bethlehem, which is now
demolished. It’s a vacant lot right now. I went to Northeast
Middle School, and Liberty High School, in Bethlehem. I
graduated in 1967.
IN: Did you know what you wanted to do after you graduated, or left
school?
BW: After I left school I had not a clue what I was going to do. I went
to community college for nearly two years, and I went for
accounting. And accounting was a little bit too dry for me. And so
I left school, and did, oh, I don’t know, any number of jobs, in
town, before I went to the steel. I was twenty-four in 1973. I was
married and living in Fountain Hill. And I originally did not want
to go to work at the steel, but at that age I had a family, a wife, and
was thinking about raising a family, so I went to the steel
company!
IN: What was the attitude of your family, or community and the peers,
towards Bethlehem Steel at the time?
BW: Well, at that time, in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, if you
worked at the steel, you had a job for life. Good jobs. They were
well-paid jobs. You were held in high esteem in the community
because you worked at the steel.
IN: Bruce, were there any other reasons why you decided to work at
the steel, other than those you just listed?
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BW: Well, I had been at a lot of different jobs, and they were usually
low-paying jobs, and I was looking for a little bit more
permanency, a job where I wouldn’t be laid off, a job where I
made a little more money, and that’s what the steel provided.
IN: So what was your job title at the steel, and what did that entail on a
day to day basis?
BW: Well, when I started at the steel in 1973, the employment person
asked me what jobs I was interested in, and they had several
openings available. They had a job in the boiler house, where I
would be shoveling ashes out of the boilers. They had a job at
ingot mold, where I would be shoveling sand out of the mold pits.
And they had a job in the beam yards, where I would be outside.
And I thought, “It’s spring! May of 1973, I think I’d like to be
outside.” So I took the job in the beam yards. And the fellow told
me jokingly that it never rained in the beam yards. But what he
meant was: it didn’t matter if it was raining or not, you’re working
outside.
IN: What was your first day like on the job?
BW: Well, the first day was an orientation day. They’d get you your
safety shoes. They’d give you a helmet. They’d give you safety
glasses, or they’d have prescription glasses, or they’d have goggles
that fit over your regular glasses. And they’d take you through that
particular department, and they show you the hazards, and what to
watch out for. So when I got oriented, it was very loud, it was very
hot, it was very big.
The scope of everything was huge! I had lived in town all
my life and had only heard the steel, and heard of jobs at the steel.
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A friend of mine was a machinist; another friend worked in the
boiler house. Another friend worked in central tool. When I
started in the beam yards, it was a whole new world. It was this
huge, huge facility with these overhead cranes, moving these I-
beams all over the place. And there were roller lines and beams
coming out of the middle, and some of them were glowing red, and
some of them were just moving along. And it was this loud,
obnoxious noise, and these sirens going, and these whistles
blowing. Actually, it was pretty scary!
IN: And from there, what other jobs did you end up holding at the
steel?
BW: Well, I stayed in the beam yards for nearly two years. I got laid off
in 1975, and I took a job in the rolling mills, which is where the
beams came from. And I had never seen that before; I only saw
the edge of the rolling mill where the beams came out. And so I
went further into the bowels, the guts of the steel company, so to
speak. And I learned how the actual ingots turn into beams. I saw
how they roll the beams, how they cut the beams, how they weigh
the beams, and measure them, and gauge them. So it was also an
educational experience.
I worked in the rolling mills for probably six months, and it
was a dirty job. I was a laborer, a scale man. The only things I did
were empty the scale pits, and on shut-down days you shovel
scales. So I went back to shoveling again. In the beam yards I had
a job that commanded a little more respect: I was a slip maker for
the beam marker. I would measure the beams, and write down on
the beam what the weight of the beam is, how long it is, what its
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chemical composition was, what customer it’s going to. And that
was a pretty good job, but I didn’t have enough time or seniority to
hold that job. So when the layoffs came, I went into the rolling
mills.
I got laid off in the rolling mills, but before I got laid off, I
signed up for a posting to become a rigger. I didn’t know what a
rigger was, but there was an apprenticeship available. And I
signed up to become a rigger, and then I went to the rigger
department.
IN: And of those three jobs, which one was your favorite, would you
say? Did you really enjoy the rigger position?
BW: Well, the rigger position was by far the most difficult, and the most
challenging. It had a four-year apprenticeship attached to it. I was
a rigger apprentice, and then I became a C rigger when I got out of
the apprenticeship. And then I became a B rigger, or a burner.
And that job was good, because I didn’t get laid off very often.
The job was interesting, because I went all over the plant. And of
course, I was outside in the weather most of the time. It seemed
that you always got outside when the weather was lousy, and
inside when the weather was nice.
But it was—I guess you would say it was plant maintenance
on a large scale, and the rigger department was very unique. It
was—all kinds of people in that department, and we did the most
demanding and dangerous work in the plant, along with pipe
fitters, carpenters, millwrights, and other craft people. So it was a
crafted position. You had a degree of responsibility that you don’t
get in some of the production departments, responsibility for
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yourself and for your fellow worker, because it’s a dangerous job,
doing these heavy lifts, and big alterations, and demolition and
construction projects.
IN: In terms of the whole steel-making process, what were the roles of
the riggers in terms of facilitating the steel-making?
BW: Well, riggers didn’t have anything to do with making steel. A lot
of the crafts or trades did not have anything to do with making
steel--it was the maintenance of the facility. If the blast furnace
went down, if there was something wrong with it, if a hole got
burnt into the blast furnace with a BOF, we would get called in to
fix it. If one of the skip tubs fell off the track, and they couldn’t
charge the furnace with metal and the materials, we would fix it.
So I guess our job would be to make sure that the steel company
kept running.
IN: In terms of your experience on the job, I mean, how did breaks and
lunches work, for instance?
BW: Well, in my department, it was not a production department; it was
considered overhead, which means that they have to show
something for every hour you were there. So they would always
make sure that you had something to do. In a production
department, you might not have to work your whole eight hours,
because the mill was rolling. So if you are something that is—if
you are pushing levers to make these beams go down the mill, then
you’re working as long as the mill is working. If you are a
maintenance person in the mill, then when the mill is working,
you’re not working, so maybe you’re getting rolls ready for the
next roll change.
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But in the rigger department, you’re always working. And
the foreman is always making sure that you have ten minutes for
break in the morning, and twenty minutes at noon time. So, if you
were up on a job up on the blast furnace, you got to come down off
the blast furnace for ten minutes, grab a cup of coffee, and a bite to
eat. But when those ten minutes were up, you were back on the
job. Same thing at lunch time. You had twenty minutes to eat
your lunch. You got called down off the furnace at twelve o’clock,
and at twenty after twelve, you were told to go back up on the
furnace and do whatever it is you’re doing.
And the reason being is: the facility that you were working
at was usually down, or usually not working. So you needed to be
working to make sure that facility is going to go back online in a
timely manner. Very often, if there was a breakdown, we would
have to spell each other for breaks, because they needed the people
on the job all the time, to get the work done.
IN: So in a sense, there were sort of different shifts for the riggers,
even when it came to breaks and lunch, and things like that.
BW: Very often you might not get your lunch, or your first break or
your second break right at everybody’s break time. You might
have to go at twelve-thirty instead of twelve o’clock. You might
have to go at ten o’clock instead of nine-thirty, yeah. And also, we
went round the clock. We went middle shift, night shift, and the
shifts sometimes overlapped. You might work eleven to eight.
Day shift would come in seven to four. Middle shift would come
in three to twelve, so that there was an overlap, so that while the
other guys were getting to the job, getting lined up on what they
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were going to be doing, that somebody’s also already, or still,
working on it, until they come to take their place.
A lot of the production departments worked that way, so that
production would not slow down or shut down at all, so that they
would always have somebody working, so that the place was
always going, so that production was always being made. When
there’s no production, there’s no money. So, you had to always be
mindful of that, and the company was very mindful of that.
IN: Did you ever find yourself on call, sometimes, when you were
home, and you’d have to come in and handle a problem
specifically?
BW: Yeah, that happened pretty often. I tried not to answer the phone
at those times. I tried not to be available, but sometimes they get
you. And if you got called in for an extra shift, it was good,
because it was time and a half, and very often, you’d want to do it.
Of course, there were times when there was so much overtime, you
had to refuse it, because you get tired, and you need a break, and
you need to get away from that, that kind of stress.
IN: Bruce, can you talk a little bit about the different shops that were at
Bethlehem Steel, and what shop you were in?
BW: The different shops: there were so many shops at the steel. There
were hot metal shops. There were machine shops. There were
shops that made bearings, for instance. There were shops that
made castings; there were shops that made molds for castings.
There was the railroad shop. There was, well, the rolling mills.
There was the hand-rolling mill. There was the drop forge. There
was just all these different facilities—a shop that just took the saw
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blades that cut steel, both cold and hot steel, where they took the
saw blades and renewed them, or remanufactured them, so that
they would always have saw blades to cut steel. There were shops
that, all they made were things that were welded. There were
shops that made machine parts. There were shops that made gears.
There were shops that made wood things, and wood molds, and
wood for offices, or wood for packing things to be shipped.
My particular shop was a maintenance shop, a service
division shop, and there were several of those. They included all
the crafts and trades. They included the carpenters, the pipe fitters,
the millwrights, the electricians, the laborers, the bricklayers, the
riggers, the field millwrights, and the shop millwrights. That was
the service division, and I was part of the service division.
IN: Ands when it came to your job, how were you trained for your
position?
BW: I went through a four-year apprenticeship where one day every two
weeks we would be in class, and we would be doing an
international correspondence school program that had to do with
print reading, T-square use, slide rule use, math, geometry,
metallurgy. The field training was the actual cutting and burning,
welding, fitting. You got into the different shops and worked as a
welder. You worked alongside the electricians, or the bricklayers,
or the carpenters.
What they did was they trained you in all of the things that
would have to do with repairing the facility. I spent two months in
welding school. I spent two weeks in burning school. I spent
weeks with the labor gang, weeks with the bricklayers. They
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wanted you to be well-rounded, and well-versed in the things that
you had to do concerning rigging, making heavy lifts, and working
with the other crafts and trades. I learned how to drive a forklift. I
learned how to run an overhead crane. I learned how to rig up a
three-two block [unclear]. I learned how to hook up heavy lifts,
how to distribute weight, how to estimate weights on big things. It
was a pretty well-rounded program. The training was really
safety-oriented, and job-oriented.
IN: And what safety precautions did your job require you to take?
BW: Every day, you had to be totally aware of everything you did, from
walking through a shop, to anything your job entailed. And you
were reminded of that daily by the people that you worked with, by
your foreman, then your supervisor, your superintendent. They
had safety meetings on a regular basis, at least once a week.
Towards the end, we had safety meetings and line-up meetings
every day. It was a very dangerous place. You could get hurt just
walking through a shop, if you were not careful. So safety was
foremost on everybody’s mind, because the results, if you weren’t
safe, could be just disastrous, in just a moment.
IN: Were there any specific dangers that your shop might have had, or
your job might have had, that other shops didn’t have to worry
about?
BW: Yeah, I would say that some of the dangers that my position had,
as opposed to some of the production shops—we had to be very
careful about falls from heights. We had to be very careful about
electronic and electric feed rails that operated the heavy
equipment. We worked in close proximity to those. We had to be
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very careful of heavy lifts, both on the ground and when you’re up
in the air receiving that heavy lift. We had to be very careful of
cranes and overhead lifting devices. If one were to not operate
them properly, you could be pinched or squished.
The weather had a lot to do with safety. If you were up on a
crane run that was exposed to the weather, you had to make sure
that what you were walking on was wet instead of icy. And even if
it was wet, you had to make sure that you had good footing. You
had to make sure that wherever you went to work was a safe site,
meaning that there was no gas present that could overcome you,
that there was no unseen hazards that you didn’t know about, that
everybody that was working in that vicinity knew specifically
where you were, and what you were doing.
You had to make sure that your leader or your foreman
knew where you were at all times. If you were supposed to be on a
job, you were expected to be there. If you weren’t there and
something happened, nobody would know about it. If you went
someplace where a hazard existed and you didn’t tell anybody, and
you were overcome with gas, nobody would know about it. If you
fell into a hole, nobody would know about it.
So it was very much a buddy system. You had to have a
buddy know where you were all the time. You had to tell your
leader, your foreman, the people you were working with, where
you were. If you needed to go for a part, you had to tell somebody.
So everything was very safety-oriented, and everybody was really
safety conscious.
IN: How well do you think the safety programs worked for your job?
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BW: I think the safety programs worked very well from my position.
I’m still here. I did not experience any major accidents. I had a
few minor accidents: cuts, scrapes, bruises, trips, dirt in the eye,
bumping things. You had to be very careful because the raw steel,
where the raw steel was made, it could be hot, and you wouldn’t
know it. It could have rough edges; if you brushed against it, you
could be cut. They made you aware of every safety item that they
were aware of, and they tried to make you aware of the ones that
maybe people weren’t aware of, like gas. Gas is odorless,
colorless, tasteless. You could be overcome in two breaths. They
had gas checkers; they had a department that checked for gas.
They had machines that checked for gas. If you went into a
department, you had to make sure that the supervision in that
department knew that you were going there, because of the hazards
that existed in that department. So, I would say that the safety
controls that they had worked very well.
IN: Did you find that you had more or less injuries than other jobs?
BW: Well, I would say that the rigger’s job was totally by far one of the
most dangerous in the plant. One time I went for independent
insurance, and they told me that the rate of insurance that I would
have to buy was the same as if I were a race car driver, because the
hazards were that great. We had probably less accidents per man-
hours than most of the other departments in the service division,
not to say that they were any less dangerous. But I think we were
more safety conscious.
One thing about the riggers was we, I believe, were one of
the tightest-knit departments in the steel, and there were tight-knit
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departments. We played a lot of them in softball, and did other
activities with them. You had to pretty much depend on the fellow
working next to you, to help you be aware, and he very often was
depending on you. I remember specifically a fellow needed to lean
out of a building, and before he did so, he said, “Grab my belt and
hang on.” Just in case he lost his footing or lost his balance and
lunged forward, he had somebody holding onto him. You don’t
get that in every job; they don’t get that in a lot of production
departments. You do get that in a close-knit group that does high
risk jobs like heavy industrial maintenance.
IN: Were your health services free?
BW: We had a very comprehensive health care insurance. And they had
a dispensary, that if you needed any kind of care while you were in
the plant, you could go there. I remember going there for sunburn.
On vacation, I got home—I got sunburned! I went to the
dispensary, and they gave you cream. They pretty much took care
of any kind of health issues that we had, yes.
IN: Was there any special equipment that you needed for your job?
BW: Do you mean safety equipment, or--?
IN: Safety equipment and general equipment.
BW: Safety equipment and tools? Yeah. In my department, you needed
safety belts and rope, which you see hanging in the corner there.
That’s my tool bag. You needed a hammer. You needed a T-
square. You needed a chisel. You needed a respirator, you needed
ear protection, you needed a helmet, you needed glasses, you
needed safety shoes with metatarsals.
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You needed fireproof or fire-retardant clothing. So you
couldn’t wear old tattered clothes. You had to wear stuff that
wasn’t ripped, because old, tattered cotton is extremely flammable.
So you had to have stuff that was intact, because if it wasn’t, and
you were burning, and your pants start on fire, you wouldn’t know
if until half your pant leg was gone. Unless there was somebody
watching you, which there was!
So, let’s see—other safety equipment? I guess that’s about
it. Oh, gas masks. We were gas trained. And then if we were
doing a job that had to do with grinding, fitting, very often they
had shields. Welding hoods—they had welding hoods. They had
air movers. That’s about it, I think.
IN: What equipment or tools, safety equipment, that sort of thing, was
provided? And what of it did you have to buy yourself?
BW: Let’s see. In the beginning, we bought our own safety shoes.
Prescription glasses they provided, they paid for. Later on, they
bought you safety shoes; that was part of the union contract. They
provided some of the tools. If you wanted a T-square, or a bevel
square, or your own chisel, or your own personal tools, you had to
buy those.
IN: Bruce, did you have a nickname at the steel?
BW: Yes, I did! My nickname was Shakespeare.
IN: And how’d you get that?
BW: I got the nickname Shakespeare because I was involved in
theatrical productions, and all of the fellows knew that I was in the
local community theater plays. And the general foreman found
out, and he started calling me Shakespeare.
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IN: And as far as being a rigger, were there any nicknames for your
job?
BW: Well, there was a derogatory term that was used quite often. There
were also adjectives that were used in front the name rigger. Let’s
see. I think it was with an air of jealousy, or maybe—I’m not sure
what. You know, you’d come into a department, and everybody
says, “Oh, hide all your tools. The riggers are here,” you know. I
don’t know how that attitude happened, why they thought we
would steal their things. I guess it was because we got all over the
plant, and had the opportunity. And some of the riggers were very
opportunistic. Perhaps that’s how we got our reputation. And we
also had a reputation for being able to do the toughest jobs, and go
places where other people might not.
IN: Did you feel that at your job at Bethlehem Steel you were well
compensated?
BW: Well, I hate to think that I—well, let me see. Let me start that
over. Do I think I was well compensated? Yeah, I think that I was
pretty well compensated. I think, though, that when you look at
how dangerous the job was, you could have always had a little bit
more. Production departments I think earned more incentive than
we did in the service division, and I think our job was a far bit
more dangerous than a lot of the production departments.
So I would say we should have had more. We should have
earned more money, because our job was more dangerous. I mean,
something could have dropped out of the air. Somebody could
have dropped something on you. You could have fallen. You
could have been electrocuted. You could have been crushed or
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pinned or crunched quite easily, or burned. And I don’t think that
there is a dollar amount that you can put on that. You know, you
can always look for more, and you might not get it, but that’s what
it was.
IN: And how did you feel your compensation rated, versus, say, your
family or friends who didn’t work at the steel?
BW: By far, jobs at the steel paid better, in some cases much better, than
the same type of job outside of the steel. So, yeah, the
compensation was pretty good.
IN: How did new technology change your job?
BW: Well, let’s see. New technology changing the job? The older
fellows seemed to say, “Oh, we never had crane cars before,”
Pettibone crane cars--you see them with their lifting shafts sticking
up in the air, and they expand, and they can be positioned
anywhere. They were pretty good, because if you didn’t have
those, we would have to rig up something on the steelwork or
superstructure itself, and make that lift. So when the crane cars
came about, and lifting devices came about, it was probably much
better, because you didn’t have to build anything off the
superstructure.
But a lot of the techniques and things that we used—the
jacks got better with time. They had hydraulic jacks that were
powered by compressors. In the earlier days, they had jacks that
you had to jack! It was a hundred ton jack, and you would jack all
day, and you would only get that sucker to move two or three
inches, you know? We had chain block and falls, and you would
pull all day, and you would get something to lift up maybe three or
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four feet. There were places where you couldn’t use a crane car,
so you had to use the old methodology. You would very often
have to rig up a block and fall, and a lot of people don’t even know
what a block and fall is anymore. So, technology did help in some
instances, but in other areas, no, you did it the same old way it was
done a hundred years ago.
IN: Now even with this new technology, would you say that it might
have even added more to your job, in terms of maintenance for,
like, for instance the crane car? Would you have to perform
maintenance on that as well?
BW: I would say that the new technology helped, that I don’t think that
there was more maintenance that we would have to do. We always
took care of our equipment, because you needed that equipment to
get the jobs done. You took care of your block and falls; you took
care of your chain hoist. You took care of your chain ratchets and
what not. And the crane cars—they were taken car of by another
department. They were taken care of by the trucking department.
They had people—that’s all they did. They operated the crane car,
and it was their job to make sure that the maintenance was up to
date on it. So that was somebody else’s worry; that wasn’t our
worry.
We definitely took care of our own tools, pretty much, and
made sure that we had working tools when we went out on a job,
because there’s nothing worse than walking up to the top of the
blast furnace with a block and fall, or a chain ratchet, or a chain
hoist, or an air hoist, and it didn’t work. You don’t want to make
that trip too many times a day, carrying something that’s very
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heavy, when you get it up there and know that it doesn’t work.
You checked it out before you went out on the job to make sure it
worked. So yeah, we took care of our tools.
IN: If you could go back, were there any jobs that you would have
wanted to have, other than being a rigger?
BW: If I could go back, I think I would have liked to have worked up in
research, and had a desk, and maybe perhaps documented some of
the things that were going to come into the steel industry. I think
the nature of the work was such that I’m feeling physically—I
don’t want to say disabled—but physically pressed now, because
of working outside, and doing the heavy lifting, and you know,
having that much stress on your body for that many years. It’s
hard on you, and you get old very quickly, if you’re outside all the
time, and if you’re lifting all the time, if you’re bending all the
time, and straining and pulling. It’s okay when you’re young, but
when you get older, it plays on you.
And I think that it would have been nice to have a job where
you just document something, have a desk and write something
down, and check something, and have the machine do all your
work for you. Yeah, I would have liked that better, I think. I
mean, towards the end I did get a position where I was a building
inspector. But I still would have to go up to the top of the machine
shop, and walk the crane run, and make sure that there were no
clips that were falling off the rail, or that the rail was secure, and
that equipment was satisfactorily maintained. So that was a better
job, but it would have been nice to have a little office somewhere,
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where not a lot of people knew where you were, you know, so you
could just take it easy. That didn’t happen to me, though! [Laughs]
IN: Now were there any jobs that you would have never wanted, at all?
BW: Oh, yeah! The foundries were the worst places to work, I think.
The air in the foundry was so thick you couldn’t see. They had to
have lights on all the time, and you could see the dirt in the air.
They were really dirty. The blast furnace was always, always hot.
The foundries were always dirty. The coal handling was always
dirty. The coke works always stank.
You know, when I look back, the beam yards was one of the
nicer places where I did work. It was more clean. You were
outside, and you didn’t get all the smells and odors that you did
from the mills and the foundries, and what not.
IN: Now, you were speaking a lot about sort of the camaraderie that
you had with a lot of the guys, being the rigger, you know, you’re
watching over each other, and things like that. Could you describe
a little bit of that in a little bit more detail? Are you still friends
with a lot of the guys that you were riggers with? How is that
going over the years?
BW: Well, you know, you go fishing with these guys, you go hunting.
You go bowling, or played softball, or just go to the club, you
know, go to the gathering around the holidays. And we certainly
don’t see each other as much as we used to. I think that the great
thing about the rigger department is I could probably, even now,
call up a couple of them if I needed something, and I know that if
there was any way they could, they would come and help me. I
think that’s a great thing, and you don’t lose that. And I would like
WARD1 20
to feel that these could also call me, and I know that I would be
there for them as well.
It’s almost like being in the service, you know. If you’re in
the Marines, you’re always a Jarhead, you know? You’re
always—it’s Semper Fi, no matter what age or what other
circumstances you’ve gone through. Your biggest day is the
Marine Corps’s birthday, you know? It’s almost like that, working
in the service division, and working with the riggers.
IN: Now what do you want people to know about your job, that people
don’t often ask you about?
BW: What do I want people to know about my job? I think I would
want people to know that my job was as important as one at the
production shops that actually made the steel, that they could not
have kept the steel going as long as they did without guys like me.
That that steel company was my steel company, too, and you
know, we—if a basic oxygen furnace got a hole in it, we were
there until it was fixed. A blast furnace exploded and we lost heat
in it, we were there until it was operational again. These big jobs,
even building a blast furnace—almost nobody does that anymore.
I think that type of work is probably going to be lost. There are
very few big engineering companies that will even tackle a job like
that. I’d like to think that what I did was important. I mean, it was
important to me at the time. I had a great deal of pride that, you
know, I was able to do that.
IN: You mentioned a couple of times when you went above and
beyond in doing things. Was that something that was common
with your job? You had to do a lot of things that you might not
WARD1 21
have been exactly asked to do, but you guys went ahead and stayed
to get the job done anyway?
BW: Well, I think you’ll find that that’s—that’s pretty much the nature
of the worker in this area. I don’t know if it’s predominantly the
heritage of people from the area, but we have a great work ethic!
The company knew that the workers from Bethlehem would do
whatever it took to keep the plant running, and they proved that
time after time. I don’t know if that answers what you were
asking?
IN: I think it does. Who was your boss, and what was he or she like?
BW: Oh boy, we had so many bosses! I think in the beginning the
hierarchy of the steel was you had a line foreman, you had a gang
leader. Well actually, if you talk—your direct boss, he was the A
man on the job. Above the A man was the line foreman. Above
the line foreman was the shift foreman. Above the shift foreman
was the general foreman. Above the general foreman was the
division foreman, and then the division superintendent. So there
were many levels of bosses.
If you ask me: who was my boss? The last boss I had was
Butch Horn. He was down at the coke works, and he was a
division foreman. And he was not too much older than myself, and
he was very safety conscious, and he was very much a go-getter,
and knew how to do things. Of course, he had learned through
coming up much the same way I did, except he was not an
apprentice. He worked his way up, became an A rigger, and then
became a temporary foreman, and then a line foreman, and then a
division foreman.
WARD1 22
IN: What was your relationship with the management like?
BW: [Pause] That’s a tough one. I didn’t get along with a lot of the
upper level foremen. There were some that I liked, and that were
good, but there were some that I wouldn’t give you two cents for.
I think a lot of them had themselves, and their own interests, above
everything else. But the ones that were genuinely interested in the
plant, their own work, and you—they were the better ones. The
ones that were more people oriented, I think, were the best ones.
IN: What was your relationship with the other workers like?
BW: That was the best! I mean, you go in there every day, and you see
these guys for eight hours a day, five days a week, minimum. I
mean, you’re not only working with them—you come in in the
morning, and you know everything about their family. You know
everything about their entire existence. You know where they go
to church. You know what they do on their off times.
So you become very fast friends, and of course, when you’re
in that close proximity to somebody every day, you have to
develop a relationship, or you can’t trust anybody that you don’t
know that well. So, it’s kind of like a trust thing as well. So you
get these close associations, and you begin to know that you can
trust this fellow or that fellow. And these relationships just grow
and build. And you know, even today, I see somebody that I
haven’t seen in, you know, six months or a year, and it’s somebody
I worked with, it’s like, you know—it’s like it was yesterday.
IN: What were the people like that you worked with, in terms of
ethnicity, gender, background?
WARD1 23
BW: The people I worked with came from all ethnic backgrounds,
mostly men. There was one woman in our department [knocking
sound] Excuse me one second. You’re going to have to go over
that question again, sorry.
IN: Okay, what were the people like that you worked with, as far as
ethnicity, gender, and background?
BW: Okay, the people came from all ethnic backgrounds. There were
Polacks and Hunks and Italians and Germans, and English people
and Irish people. There were only two Afro-Americans in my
department. There were many Spanish and Mexicans. It was just
a melting pot. The backgrounds: some of them were educated;
some of them were high school dropouts. Most of them had
graduated high school. I think by and large, most of them in my
department were crazy, half nuts, or all the way nuts! We had
some certifiables on it, that’s for sure.
IN: What other groups did you mingle with?
BW: Gee, whiz! It was a melting pot, so you mingled with everybody
[laughs]. It wasn’t like, you only mingled with the machinists, or
you only mingled with the burners. You got to see—I mean, when
I started there were like twelve or thirteen thousand guys working
there, so I got to meet and see and work with the hugest variety of
people that you can imagine. I mean, you know, it’s just like, well,
you guys go to a big school. I mean, how many people go to
Lehigh?
IN: Forty-five hundred.
BW: That’s a pretty big group, and you guys probably know, what, at
least ten percent of them, right? So, the ethnic background that
WARD1 24
you guys see is pretty diverse as well. I think, too, that you’re
looking at natives, and people that are settled in one area, and
come from long-term people that have been in the Valley for a
long time. So that’s probably a little bit different, because you
guys see people that are more in flux than I would have seen.
IN: How did the Bethlehem Steel community socialize? Were there
separate events for different levels in the hierarchy that you saw?
BW: Socializing with Bethlehem Steelworkers—that ran the gamut.
Again, you had people that were country club bound, and people
that were corner bar bound. There were people that were very
prosperous, and then you had people that maybe weren’t so
prosperous. So again, the social experiences that you had were
probably, as a worker, limited, because you were not invited, or
expected, or allowed, at the functions of the upper management.
IN: Speaking, too, of the community—how did Bethlehem Steel play a
role in your community at the time?
BW: Well, earlier on, Bethlehem Steel helped all of the community
organizations. I think they were responsible for helping to
establish a lot of the social clubs on the south side, and the north
side. And if some of these social clubs needed something, say, a
roof, boiler, there might be people that come over from the steel to
have that done. If it wasn’t sanctioned, or taken care of by
somebody in management, it could have been just a bunch of
workers coming together to do it.
I remember one particular project. We had lights and a
couple of towers that were donated by Bethlehem Steel to one of
the ball fields down below Hellertown. And the lights and the
WARD1 25
towers were donated, but some of the guys went out to put them
up. So, it’s much larger than just saying that, “Oh, well they gave
money.” I mean, they gave money, but they also made sure that
the community that was affected realized that the people in that
community participated in those benefits to the community as well.
So, you know, if your church needed a new roof, maybe somebody
in management would pull a few strings, or maybe he himself
donated some money, but he also might have got some carpenters
and riggers over there to do the work, you know.
Some of it was paid for by company, on company time;
some of it was volunteer work. Some of it was paid for out of
somebody with a lot of money’s pocket, out of pocket expenses.
So that, too, was really broad, how the community was affected by
the steel, and the workers. It wasn’t just management; it was all
the way down, from the laborers, all the way up to the top
management. They all had a hand in building this community.
IN: I think we’re going to switch the tapes right now.
BW: Okay.
IN: Bruce, was there a union at Bethlehem Steel?
BW: Yes, there was a union at Bethlehem Steel. I was a member of the
International Steelworkers’ Union 2599, and that covered the
workers in the beam yards of the steel.
IN: And now, were there different unions for the different positions at
Bethlehem Steel?
BW: Well, there were three local unions that composed the Trilocal,
which was 2598, 2599, and 2600. And they covered different
workers in different jobs in the plant.
WARD1 26
IN: Did you have a choice to join the union, or was that something that
was mandatory once you started working there?
BW: Well, when I started in 1973, you—you were a union member as
soon as you started, and they deducted your union dues from your
paycheck from day one. So you really didn’t have a choice, and
there was only one or two people that I knew of—and this is
stemming back to 1941, when the union first came in—there were
only one or two people that I knew of that had not been members
of the union.
IN: Now, how did you feel about the union? Did you feel like it was
something that was beneficial for you? Or did you just feel like it
was something that was just kind of there, in the background?
BW: Well, when I first started, I thought, “Ah, gee whiz, you know!
There goes how much money every month to these people?” You
know, I couldn’t see why I had to pay them. But I learned very
shortly that when you go to work for a big industry, a union is an
absolute necessity. You need to have a way of dealing with
complaints that you might have against the union. I mean, excuse
me, against the company. You need to have a method to be able to
deal with complaints you have against the company, and without a
union, you have no way of dealing with the company.
IN: Now, is it safe to say that most people felt the same way that you
do about that, in terms of--?
BW: I would say anybody that’s a member of a union today is pretty
much of a staunch union member, and it’s very important to have
unions today. You don’t really realize how protected, and how
much you need that protection, ‘til you lose the things that a union
WARD1 27
helped you get. Unions were established in the beginning because
companies might have taken advantage of workers, and workers
over the years worked very hard to get certain benefits, which are
slowly going by the wayside, with the way the companies are
working today.
IN: How did you participate in the union? Were there any union
sanctioned events, and things like that? Or was it more just
something that was there?
BW: Well, you definitely go to union meetings, and participate in union
elections, and having a hand with who is representing you, and
also what’s going to happen with each contract. You try to stay
informed with what the union is trying to do, and what the
company is trying to do. Because if you don’t, then the company
can feed you this whole line, and then not back it up.
And I think that’s what happened at the end, at the steel
company. They kept saying, “Oh, we’re going to modernize.
We’re going to take the money that you gave us for not getting this
extra weeks’ vacation, and the holiday that we took away, and
we’re going to put that money towards modernizing. We’re going
to make sure that your benefits are funded into the future.” And
gee whiz, I mean, they said it, and we had contracts, but [pause]
stuff fell through. So even with the protection of a union, these
things fell through.
I’d say that the Steelworkers’ Union tried as hard as they
could to keep the advances that they made over the years. But you
can see, with the picture of today’s economy, and the companies
today, that unions are in trouble as well as these big companies.
WARD1 28
What’s going to be the result is that the worker that does the
physical things, and work out in the field, is going to be taken
advantage of more and more and more. And his level of existence
is going to decline more and more, and we are going to become a
third-class country again.
And that’s very frightening, because we worked very hard to
be the world leader in a lot of the things that we’ve done. And I
think unions were very much a part of that. You know, making
companies take responsibility for pensions and health care and
what not. That’s all being lost. So yeah, I’m for a union, and
yeah, it’s not going the way that it’s supposed to go, you know.
We’re losing ground. I don’t like to see that.
IN: How did war affect Bethlehem Steel, and your job in particular?
BW: Let’s see. You have to go to, pretty much, the Gulf War. No, even
that. War really didn’t affect my position in Bethlehem Steel all
that much, because I came in after Vietnam, and by the Gulf War I
was just about out of the steel. So war didn’t really affect my
position with the steel all that much. I mean, at one time they
supplied all the ships for the Great White Way. They supplied all
the armaments and guns for the Navy, and the Army. And all the
big guns, originally, were made by United States Steel and
Bethlehem Steel. But today, no. Can’t give you an affirmative on
that one.
IN: How were you affected by layoffs?
BW: Well, let’s see. When I started in ’73, I worked for almost two
years before I was laid off. And then I worked from ’75 until ’82,
I believe. In ’82 and ’83 I was laid off for about eighteen months,
WARD1 29
and then I worked until ’95, right up to the end of ’95. So I was
laid off several times in my career.
IN: And what was the reaction of you and your coworkers to the
layoffs?
BW: Well, I think we all had a sense that the steel was going down. I
mean, you could see that they were closing different facilities and
different shops, and they weren’t doing the repair work or the
modernization that they said they were going to do. A lot of the
foreign steel was coming in and taking the place of the steel that
we were making, because it was cheaper, and it was produced
because the country was helping to subsidize the output of foreign
steel.
There were advantages that foreign steel took of us, as a
country and as a steel producer. They could subsidize their
workers. They could import things at a much cheaper price. There
cost of labor was much less. They didn’t need pollution controls.
They didn’t have unions. They could just run their workers
overtime without paying them. They could bring steel in here at a
discounted rate, just to sell it under our manufacturing price, which
drove the price down, which hurt our business, which made us
close shops. So, I don’t know if that answers your question. What
was the original question, anyway?
IN: The original question was: what was your, and your coworkers’
reaction to the layoffs?
BW: Well, we didn’t really like to see that, because it made us aware
how at risk our jobs were, and then ultimately how we all lost our
jobs. You’ve got to understand something: all previous
WARD1 30
generations to myself—they worked their entire lives at the steel.
We came in in the early, mid-seventies, late seventies. We were
the last generation. Every other generation had new, young kids
coming in, that they could train, and that would pick up the slack,
and that would lend a hand of carrying equipment, and help them
out when they needed to learn something.
We were the last generation; we had nothing to do with
people coming in. There was nobody coming in that we were
going to tell what to do. There was nobody coming in to carry that
chain ratchet, or that burning outfit, or to roll those tanks for us. It
was, we were still the young guys, at forty-five and fifty years old.
The writing is on the wall when that’s happening, you know?
IN: So where were you on the last cast?
BW: On the last cast I was down at the coke works. I was a truck helper
at the time. And the day before the last cast, I managed to have to
come up to the blast furnace area, and I got to see the day before
the last cast. I actually have some pictures of the second to last
cast. [Laughs] Or, the day before the last cast. So I was down at
the coke works, working on the equipment handling division.
IN: What does that day mean to you, and what do you think you would
like everyone to remember about the last cast?
BW: Well, we had this great steel-making facility here in the Bethlehem
that was an integrated steel facility, meaning that we made steel
from scratch. And the last cast means that is no more. I think that
if you look at an industrialized nation that is losing their
manufacturing base, that’s pretty disheartening. I think if you
look, you need to remember that great things were done here in
WARD1 31
Bethlehem, and now there is no more of that happening currently.
So you have to—you have to be ready for that big change,
and a lot of us are suffering through that. I mean, you’re not going
to have those good jobs anymore, and you’re not going to have that
income anymore. And I think everything is changing, and I don’t
think it’s for the good. Like a lot of those changes are not good,
and I think that makes me worry about the future of the economy,
and the future of the country.
IN: How would you say that the South Bethlehem community as a
whole is different, without Bethlehem Steel?
BW: Well, I’d say that the south side of Bethlehem, as a whole, is
different because you don’t have vibrancy. You don’t have the
dirt, you don’t have the smell, you don’t have the traffic. You
don’t have the banks being full at quitting time on Thursday,
payday. You don’t have the taverns being full every day after
work. You don’t have the markets that you did at that time. You
don’t have the life, the vibrancy, that you did when Bethlehem
Steel was running.
IN: How do you think Bethlehem Steel on the whole should be
remembered?
BW: That’s a tough one! I mean, you’re looking at a company that
helped win two world wars, a company that dominated the New
York City sky line from 1920 to 1975, a corporate giant of this
great country of ours. One that had shipbuilding facilities on both
our coasts, one that had manufacturing facilities all up and down
the east coast. One that helped build the bridges and the highways
of this whole country. I think if you look around any facility, and
WARD1 32
you look at the steel that’s in it, you can pretty much realize that
it’s all gone, you know? It’s a way of life, and we’re going to see
it again. A big loss.
IN: Do you have any memorabilia, such as photos, or your tool belt,
that you took from the steel before it was closed down?
BW: Yeah, I have my tools. They’re setting in the corner there, not so
much as a reminder, but you know, I might have to pick them up
and use them again. I have pictures. I have, oh, about eight or ten
years worth of pictures that I took inside of the plant, of some of
the places that I’ve been, some of the things that I’ve done, and
some of the people I worked with. It’s kind of a family album. I
kind of took it as a way to explain to people what I did and where I
was in the plant. But it became more of a, as I said, a family
album of the people that I worked with, and where I was.
IN: And I guess the last question we have is: can you tell us a little bit
about the film that you actually just premiered last week?
BW: Yeah, I completed a two-hour documentary about six months ago,
and it premiered Saturday night at the Banana Factory here. There
were over two hundred people present. There was standing room
only. It was a comprehensive look at the lives of about twenty-five
people throughout the steel’s one hundred year history. It
chronicled people from supervisors to laborers, told a little bit
about the lives of people that worked there. It was a very long
project. I’m very proud of it, and look for it in a gift shop, or a
website near you soon.
IN: Great!
[End of Interview]
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