Steeling for Life After the Mill

The hulking factory at the tip of Sparrows Point Peninsula always seemed to be hiring, and for decades, harbor towns like Dundalk churned out the workforce.

On Saybrook Road, where Eddie Bartee III grew up, six homes in a row were owned by families of Bethlehem Steel. If you believed in destiny, Eddie would wind up there too.

And why not? He was fourth generation in a line of blue-collar workers. Just about every grown man he knew had found a job at that plant with a high school diploma or less. His grandfather earned more there than some college professors. A job at the mill meant a new car every few years, a roof over the heads of four or five kids, and a stay-at-home wife.

But the steel industry is disappearing fast from Dundalk -- the closing of the Bethlehem Steel plant last year wiped out 33,000 of the 35,000 jobs.And Eddie has just finished his freshman year in junior college. At 19, he is determined to succeed in a new economy that is forcing communities like this -- which once demolished the local high school to make way for a new blast furnace -- to rethink their priorities.

“I have to go to college,” Eddie says, repeating a mantra instilled by parents, teachers and clergy. “My father, my grandfather and my great-grandfather, they were lucky. They walked out of school and into a job. But nowadays you need a college degree to step your foot in the door.”

Failing industrial towns that never put a premium on higher education --”a little more earnin’, a little less learnin’ ” was Dundalk’s creed -- are trying to persuade a new generation of young people that without a post-high school education they’ll end up behind a fast-food counter. Here, only 4% of adults hold a bachelor’s degree, one-fourth the national figure.

If the economy had cooperated, Eddie admits he would have been just as happy to apply at the mill the day after high school graduation last year. But the adults in Eddie’s life saw the inevitable coming.

From the time Eddie was little, his father tried to talk him out of steelwork. His church pastor started a private high school to groom the children of the blue-collar congregation for college. Eddie’s mother scraped together the tuition. And Eddie spent three years squeezing his linebacker’s 300-pound frame into a blue blazer and a necktie and taking college prep courses.

Nonetheless, he sometimes longs for the old days when men like his grandfather could earn as much as $25 an hour without cracking a book.

“Eddie is on the fence,” said his father, Eddie Bartee Jr., who operates a crane in one of the few remaining jobs at the shrunken plant, now owned by International Steel Group. . “What’s important to a boy Eddie’s age is a car and a girlfriend. If he were born five years earlier, he might have had a chance to go to Bethlehem Steel too. Maybe it’s saving him that he wasn’t.”

The loyalty to steel in Dundalk, population 62,000, remains strong. To this day, many people refuse to buy applesauce in a glass jar if they can get it in a steel can. Eddie’s grandfather still laments the demise of the corrugated-metal roof.

But much else on Sparrows Point Peninsula, a Dundalk neighborhood along the Baltimore Harbor, has changed. Gone is the company town where Eddie’s father grew up, the grocery store, police force, schools and rows of small houses, their lawns stained rusty red from the factory’s smoke.

Sparrows Point High School, the one knocked down and relocated for the furnace, is still operating, but with a new mission. Administrators who once paid little attention to the dropout rate now steer their students toward college. Blue signs with large white letters that spell “EXPECT” hang in every hall, a prod to aim higher than factory work.

As soon as eighth grade, the school sends leaflets home to parents, warning: “Without extra education beyond high school, your teenager is not likely to have the same opportunities that you had when you were young.”

Financial aid forms are sent unsolicited to families that never thought of asking for them. Guidance counselors bus students and parents to area campuses for tours that might make college seem less daunting.

Even so, low-skill jobs have disappeared faster than the appetite for college has grown; Sparrows Point expects just 20% of its 2004 graduating class to enter a four-year college in September, compared to nearly 75% in a white-collar Virginia suburb an hour away.

While Eddie went to college after high school, most of his friends from the neighborhood took full-time jobs at hamburger chains or the local spice factory. The highest paid is a $12-an-hour cook at a seafood restaurant in downtown Baltimore.

But a taste of advanced learning seems to have left some students wanting more. When Sparrows Point High began two years ago to enroll seniors in community colleges for part of the school day, the number of students who continued in college doubled. And this year, all 19 seniors in Lara Caldwell’s advanced placement English class were university bound -- more than half of them the children or grandchildren of former Bethlehem steelworkers.

Dundalk is joined to the rest of the world by a bridge on one side and a tunnel on the other. Its claim to fame -- if you don’t count the mill that forged the beams for the Golden Gate Bridge and the fins for Thunderbird convertibles -- is the downtown theater used in the film “Diner.”

Eddie’s house is on the edge of town, not far from his grandparents’. (The Bartee men are known as Eddie Sr., Eddie Jr. and Little Eddie.) The plant is just 15 minutes away -- get on North Point Road and head toward the smokestacks. Eddie’s father has been making that drive for 30 years. The traffic used to back up a half-mile at shift change, but now his black Mercury Grand Marquis sails through the gates, kicking up dust in an empty parking lot.

When Little Eddie was small, he would go crabbing with his dad at the pier just across from the plant. He seemed more interested in the boiling red smoke, the noise, the coils of steel that stood taller than the men who moved them, than he was in the crabs.

That’s when he would hear a lesson in the perils of steelwork. “I tried to tell my son not to get locked into the idea that you have to work at Bethlehem Steel too,” Eddie Jr. says, stepping into his crane for another 3-to-11 shift.

Drive through Dundalk and you see men with limps and scars and oxygen tanks, souvenirs of their steelworking days. Eddie Sr., 69, has a ragged scar on his right hand; his friend had part of his nose severed.

So when it came time for Eddie to start high school, his parents would take no chances on public institutions that spent decades producing factory workers. When the Mt. Zion Baptist Church promised a school that would prepare its youths for college, Eddie’s parents paid the $300 monthly tuition, a challenge on his father’s mill pay of $20.89 an hour. They bought his textbooks and shelled out a little extra for a quadruple-X blazer.

Eddie put on the tie and persevered. But when it came time to submit applications for Bowie State University, less than an hour away, he balked. The prodding from his teachers and family suddenly felt like a hard shove. He let the deadline pass. “I didn’t feel ready,” he says now, a gentle kid with a slow, silky voice and pictures of rappers tacked to his bedroom walls. “I wanted to be closer to home.”

This month, he completed his first year at Dundalk Community College just down the road. The course load was light -- English, Reading 101, a computer class and something called Student Development, which, Eddie explains, “helps you build your character.” He got Bs and Cs.

Sometimes the scholastic road to something better feels awfully long, and the Bartees worry their son might leave college for a half-decent paycheck. “Little Eddie loves money,” his father notes.

But the family has made sure he knows firsthand how today’s world greets workers with no skills. In his senior year, Eddie started working after school. First came a job at Wendy’s, where for $5.15 an hour he flipped meat, emptied the grease bucket, sliced tomatoes, swept the parking lot, stocked the freezer and dropped cold chicken into hot grease. (His arms have the burn marks to prove it.)

“All they’d do is call ‘Eddie’ all day long. ‘Go in the bun freezer. Get the empty rack out. Check on the meat. Empty the trash,’ ” Eddie recalls. He didn’t like the work, but he loved the paycheck.

His next job, at the Chesapeake Spice Co., had him boxing tons of a Chinese spice he’d never heard of. His eyes burned. His white T-shirt was stained burgundy by day’s end. Still, he was impressed by the $16 an hour you could earn if you worked up to master mixer or crew chief.

He got laid off after three weeks.

“I thought that job would last longer,” he says, still sounding surprised.

A couple of weeks ago, he took a summer job at the local DAP Inc. plant making paste, putty and glue. He works 5 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. for $9.50 an hour, putting the tubes on a machine. Soon, he says, he might get the chance to put the putty into the tubes. But the working conditions are beginning to wear on him. “It’s hot in there,” he says.

He is enrolling for classes in the fall. In a year, he believes, he’ll be ready for Bowie State.

It is a Thursday afternoon and Eddie is getting ready to help his father move a load of glass cabinets. What began as a small family business mowing lawns and moving furniture has taken off, and his dad hopes to build it into something he can give his son one day.

A college education would help teach him how to manage the payroll, Eddie notes, to his father’s pleasure. His career dreams tack wildly from accountant to lawyer to small businessman. Still, there is a sense of ambivalence. He sums up his first year of college: “It wasn’t bad.” But the past tugs at him. “My whole family worked at the steel mill, and I sort of wanted to keep the chain going.”

He borrows his mother’s car -- he can’t afford his own -- to meet a neighborhood friend who will help with the hauling. Gary Exum just turned 20; he never has to worry about homework or reading assignments. They sit in the living room on plastic-covered chairs, finishing giant sodas from the McDonald’s where Gary has worked since high school.

The money was great when Gary was a senior, so he worked his way up to manager. Earning $8 an hour, he saved enough to buy a 1990 black, four-door Chevy Lumina. Eddie wouldn’t mind having a car like that.

But all of a sudden, Gary says, $520 every two weeks doesn’t go very far. He has to help his mother with her car payments. And with clothes and entertainment, there isn’t enough left to move out of his parents’ house.

Also, supervising 20 subordinates can be stressful. “People have a cranky attitude all the time,” Gary says. “It’s not for me, but I’m stuck. I don’t have time to fill out applications.”

Little Eddie sits in the chair, listening. He was a year behind Gary in high school and admired his management career arc. But now, who is admiring whom?

It turns out that Gary is thinking about enrolling in community college in the fall. He wants to be someone with choices, someone who might have a shot at a job behind a desk, someone who doesn’t have to work every Sunday. Someone with a future.

Someone, he says, “like Eddie.”