Men of Steel : It’s a Tough Crew Down in the Metro Rail Pits

The name conjures up images of tough, gnarled, resolute men. Men in stained Levi’s, battered hard hats and sleeveless T-shirts who labor long and hard under the open sky, hammering and twisting and bending steel to their will. Men who make the Marlboro Man look like a wimp.

Michael Stringfellow, Jay Stevens, Dave Shingle, Rex Thompson and Jeff Holbrook fit all those images. And they’re proud of it.

They’re part of the crew that is “hanging curtains” at the Metro Rail subway passenger terminal being built beneath the Union Station railway passenger depot in downtown Los Angeles. The subway terminal is one of five stations under construction for the city’s new Red Line subway system.

The terminal--at the east end of the 4.4-mile line scheduled to open sometime in 1993--is being erected in an immense ditch that cuts 1,200 feet across the temporarily truncated tracks and platforms of the old railroad depot.

When the subway terminal is completed, the ditch will be covered and the railroad tracks and platforms will be restored to their original place at ground level.

Right now, the ditch is open, and Stringfellow, Stevens, Shingle, Thompson and Holbrook scuttle like insects across an open latticework of steel bars that hangs precariously against the perpendicular sides of the 65-foot-deep trench.

This latticework curtain of reinforcement bars, or “re-bars”--each almost 2 inches thick and up to 70 feet long--will be supported by slender “tie-back” cables until the ironwork crew has finished putting it in place and other workers have poured the 5-foot-thick wall of concrete that the bars will reinforce.

If one of those tie-backs slips, or has been improperly placed, “the whole curtain can come right down on top of you,” Stevens said.

“When you’re rigging up on high iron, it kind of keeps your blood pumping,” he said. “I’ve had friends hurt. I’ve had friends killed. But I keep coming back to work. . . . I like it.”

While Stevens, a 34-year-old from Arizona, admits that he still gets scared “every day,” Stringfellow, 28, said that sort of thing just doesn’t bother him any more.

“On one job I had to walk these 4-inch beams, 53 stories up,” Stringfellow said. “When the wind was blowing, you had to lean into it to keep your balance. When it stopped, you had to time it right and lean back the other way. That wasn’t so bad, but on cold mornings, you had to chip the ice off those beams before you could walk out there. . . .

“Look at these hands,” the Denver native said, proudly displaying the layered callouses that bespeak years of disdaining work gloves.

“I like to work hard and I like to work outside,” he said. “I like the way we’re always moving around, always working on something different. And the pay’s good--$19 an hour. To keep on schedule, we’re working 60 hours a week right now, and that’s time-and-a-half after eight hours a day, and double-time after 10.”

“This is a good bunch of guys, from all over the country, “ Shingle, a 30-year-old from Chicago, said with a sweep of his tattooed arm. “They’ve got spirit. . . .

“Ironworkers look out after each other, help each other out,” Stringfellow said. “I wouldn’t do anything else.”

Stevens and Stringfellow said that they came from families of ironworkers, and they “always knew” that was what they’d do.

“I started at 18, right out of high school,” Stringfellow said. “I’ve been at it 10 years. I’ve got 37 years to go, and that’s just fine with me.”

Thompson, 27, whose stepfather was an ironworker in Salt Lake City, said the hard, physical work can be a stabilizing influence.

“I makes me real tired each day, so I sleep at night, stay off the streets and stay out of trouble,” he said. “My wife likes that. . . .

“Besides,” he added, grabbing the far end of a 15-foot bar being wrestled into place by Holbrook, “I get to work with guys like my buddy here, Joe.”

“Jeff,” Holbrook corrected, with an amiable snarl.

“Yeah, Jeff,” Thompson said. “Ol’ What’s-His-Name.”

Holbrook, 31, whose father was in the military “so I come from everywhere, I guess,” said that, unlike the others, his family had nothing to do with the ironworking business.

“I was a bodybuilder, and I was looking for a job,” he said. “The foreman looked at my build and said, ‘You’re an ironworker.’ That was about it. . . .

“But you know, I’ve always been interested in building things and, some day, I’d like to get a degree in engineering or architecture,” Holbrook said. “I guess it all started when I saw that old movie, ‘The Fountainhead,’ from that book about the architect.

“I guess not too many guys on a construction site mention an author like Ayn Rand, do they?”