PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC PLACES : Hard, Dirty Work in the Abode of Demons

It seems at times as if there is no way left to touch the past--to feel the flesh of history. To hear the clang of life that was. In a world of blow-dried service industries and 24-digit ID numbers, it is hard to walk in the footsteps of our ghosts.

Imagine, then, a long, dusty track by the railroad in the city of Commerce. Pylons and poles straddle industrial plants that bleed dirt and neglect. There is nothing fashionable about this commercial heartland where hazardous-health notices are everywhere and barbed wire seals contaminated sites.

John Pratto’s father opened the Globe iron foundry here 64 years ago. Studebaker was nearby, Willys-Overland and Consolidated Steel were still open. He remembers walking through unlit nights back to the foundry after dinner with his parents. He was 4 when he first went to work, picking up scrap iron, cleaning, straightening rusty nails on an anvil. Son of a foundry man, grandson of a miner, he never questioned that a man’s working life was hard and grimy.

He is 60 now, a large man with quiet blue eyes and rough hands. There is wood paneling of sorts in his office, yellow leatherette on a swivel chair and a fish tacked to the wall, trophy of a weekend on his boat. But, in the end, his working days are hardly different from those of his father. The rumble of monster machines shakes the floor of his office, a rumble men have known in foundries for centuries. The pride he takes, those men would recognize, too. “We are making something,” he says at one point, “that is going to come alive.”

He holds up a heavy iron plate, one-hundredth or one-thousandth part of a truck. Man’s tools are the fabric of his survival, the test by which the most ancient have been judged. Here, in this worn office, is a thread that runs beyond language and place to a time when man first wrested his living from the earth.

Outside John Pratto’s office, a narrow corridor leads to the platform on which the furnace burns, a barbaric caldron, 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. A white, seething river of molten scrap iron runs out; sparks and danger flash everywhere.

The furnace marks the entryway to the foundry, a Styx of sorts. Within is some kind of pandemonium, the abode of demons. It is a place of unimaginable extremes: barbaric noise and darkest gloom. Against this, the red hard-hats startle with their color and the fires leap from black dishes as in a Dickensian nightmare. Figures in blackened overalls move slowly, each in the world of his own inscrutable task. The men who have lived their years in foundries, the $8-plus men, the $17-an-hour skilled, talk of how interesting it is: No two parts to be cast are quite the same, no chance for a moment of daydreaming lest the savage metal turn on its masters.

Sidney, his large black hand held totally still, waits for the raging metal to run into the molds before he turns to cough the deep and sulfureous rattle of the heavy smoker. He is 62, has worked here 15 years and arrives every morning at 4, to sit in his car until the 7 o’clock shift. “I feel funny when I’m not here.”

Valery, the metallurgist, learned his craft in the Ukraine. “In Russia, no one want to work in foundry. Hard, dirty work. Here everyone want to work--that’s United States.” Valentino, Moses, Ray, Cassada, Mike--among them, they have worked a century like this. “Dirt is not unhealthy,” says one. “My father,” says John Pratto, “went through dirt, booze and women and lived to be 86 years old.”

Sand from Nevada, coke from Alabama, and nearby, the slag waiting to go to the dump, writhing green bile, frozen for all time. And everywhere, OSHA notices like letters from a spinster aunt: prim warnings about health hazards, as much part of the scenery as the goggles, masks and blackened sand. There are enormous cardboard boxes waiting to be shipped: 14,000 pitching horseshoes, pump parts, bits of brake or traffic signal, cutters for industrial machines, replacement parts for the vast underbelly of industry that America both lives on and disowns.

Bitterly, Pratto talks of warehouses around him full of Japanese goods, of steel bought overseas, of foundries closing month after month. He looks outside at the foundry men eating their lunch beneath the six wizened acacia trees in the gray “fresh” air, and, as he sees it, he is looking at millions of cars spewing poison, millions of householders discarding toxics to eternity. It is a different view.