Former Steelworker Records the Memories of Pittsburgh’s Glory Days

From the mountains hereabouts they used to mine the coal that fired the steel in a long-gone day when the Allegheny Valley was smithy to American industry.

Now all that is left to mine is nostalgia, and the lode is rich.

Larry Evans, former steelworker, believes there is still something to profit future generations in the boarded-up mill towns decaying along the river banks, embarrassments to image-makers who tout a new, high-tech Pittsburgh as far removed from the gritty past as a glass skyscraper from a blast furnace.

“This was a place that thundered with industrial sound, fire and odors,” he said. “No matter what bar you stopped at, you seemed to recognize all the faces from some assembly line or other.”

Steel Valley Stories

So Evans and a ragtag video crew are roaming those towns, talking to pensioners and other old-timers who remember the glory days of smoke and noise.

His project is called Steel Valley Stories, an oral history of Pittsburgh’s blue-collar past. Interspersed will be workers’ songs, poems and stories of mill life and comments by authorities on the collapse of steel and other core industries.

Evans said the idea came to him in 1980, soon after he co-founded the Mill Hunk Herald, a quarterly journal of workers’ writings.

“We realized we were sort of riding a wrecked ship. We had a lot of people, old mill hunks, retiring, who I would go up to and say, ‘Why don’t you let me talk to you and capture some of your mill stories?’ And other people who saw the end coming started to do more journal work. Then we saw the movie industry move to capture the last gasp to dramatize it as much as possible.

‘Must Have Something’

“But when we saw the Hollywood versions of what happened, none of them really rang true,” he said, citing the TV series “Scag” as an example. “They kept banging down our doors to get ideas, and it occurred to me we must have something all the film makers wanted.”

A new wave of working-class literature has surfaced throughout the country, scholars say, nurtured in part by huge losses of manufacturing jobs and better education among workers. Also, faith in trade unions, the traditional blue-collar voice, has flagged.

“There’s this enormous frustration because you can’t get yourself heard,” said Nat Hentoff, a columnist for the Village Voice who wrote an admiring article on the Mill Hunk Herald last year.

“Where it (the working class) was once the outspoken majority, it’s now the forgotten minority,” he said.

‘World That Has Been Lost’

Steve Brier, director of the American Social History project at the City University of New York, said, “This latest round of literature is very much for a world that has been lost.

“It’s a tragic literature; it’s personal, giving the sense of disconnectedness of a whole generation of workers. But it hasn’t gotten to the point of being organized or political.”

Hentoff said the oral history and workers’ journals like the Mill Hunk Herald are important because “there’s no better way to get the basic material for future histories.

“In New York and other places there’s hardly any labor reporting anymore the way there used to be in the ‘30s and ‘40s. All you get is how the ranks of the workers are declining,” he said.

Another innovator is Stan Weir, owner of the Singlejack Press in San Pedro, Calif., who 10 years ago began publishing workers’ manuscripts with titles such as “Night Shift in a Pickle Factory” and “A Machinist’s Semi-Automated Life.”

No Leadership Sensed

Weir, a 65-year-old former auto worker and longshoreman, said, “Singlejack’s experience suggests there’s no sense that there’s any leadership there.

“Not one trade union leader is a champion of the people. The more people feel there is an abdication at the top, the more they begin to insert ideas of their own, trying to structure their experience and make some sense of it.”

More than 100,000 men once worked the miles of steel mills lining the Monongahela and Ohio rivers east and west of downtown Pittsburgh. Today about 16,000 remain. Only one blast furnace still operates in what was once called “Steel Valley.”

For many workers interviewed in the oral history project, the memories are bittersweet.

Carman Cortazzo, burly and balding at 50, said that, when he was growing up in the town of Turtle Creek, “my biggest fear was that I was going to end up in the steel mills.”

‘Love It Here’

The nearly 20 years Cortazzo spent at a U.S. Steel plant changed his views.

“In the Steel Valley I saw poetry,” he said. “I love the look of the steel mills. I love it here. I am Turtle Creek. Yeah, I am the Valley.

“We’re a ghetto now. All they got to do is throw the dirt over it. It’s gone.”

Anne Feeney, a local folk singer who recorded songs for the project, said the mill towns until recently held on to a sense of community that much of the country has already lost, of people who “expect to be born and grow up and die in the same town.

“Until recently, there were a lot of people who could have gone to college but elected to stay in the mills,” Feeney said. One, she said, was a cousin. “It never occurred to him to leave. He loved the camaraderie and experience, the money and security,” Feeney said.

Pride and Danger

To many former workers portrayed in Steel Valley Stories, their former jobs were a source of fierce pride--in a way, a test of manhood.

Amid withering heat and deafening noise, the men faced numerous hazards from the moment they melted down iron ore and other materials in 100-foot-high blast furnaces to the final pouring of huge ingot molds. Occasionally, a hearth worker might slip and disappear without a trace into a ladle of boiling molten steel.

“People were proud of the dangers they faced,” said Evans, an athletic 39-year-old who talks fondly of the physical conditioning he got in the mill.

But Feeney, 35, said that, although she is from a “strong union family” and feels compassion for dislocated workers, the death of steel as Pittsburgh’s livelihood is “a relief in some ways.”

“That was no way for people to earn a living if it hadn’t been for organized labor’s turning it into a way to feed a family and buy a home,” she said. “It was so dirty and awful and dangerous. It was inevitable that it went to the Third World.”

‘Kind of Golden Era’

Paul Buhle, director of an oral history project on the American Left at New York University, said an “important stage in American democracy” was achieved in the impoverished ethnic enclaves of Slavs, Hungarians, Irish, Italians and blacks who fought to organize the mills.

“As difficult as life was, it was a kind of golden era,” he said. “It’s not right that it should pass without being redeemed for what it was.”

What is particularly interesting about the latest wave of working-class literature, Buhle said, is that workers are writing it themselves.

“There’s a long history of trying to get workers to write about their own lives that goes back to the 1920s,” he said. “Up until recent times, people could talk wonderfully but it ended up being an editor who had to take it down and write it up.”