For those of you who will never know, since the gargantuan, sprawling mills are gone, the testimonies of these men and women are recorded. This is their story. You would be afraid to walk where they toiled day-to-day their whole lives at the risk of their health, either acutely or chronically, just to get by. Theirs was a world of extremes - from the North Mill, with its red-hot steel and iron and its oppressive layer of soot, to the South Mill, with its clean-swept floors and gleaming finished products: tinplate, pipe, and I-beams. They knew the contrast also between the blast furnace - a veritable hell on earth, where the hot iron flowed and the acrid smell of combustibles permeated the air - and the eerie calm and darkness found working near the river at 3:00 a.m. The Mill - the Jones & Laughlin Aliquippa Works - was once the largest integrated steel making plant in the world. The mill itself no longer exists, but go stand on the site by the Ohio River and you will feel the memories and the presence of those who have come before you...I have. In this moving and personal work, Rade Vukmir vividly recreates life in an American steel town.
Relying on extensive interviews and his own experience in the industry, Dr. Vukmir offers a retrospective summary of the life and times of a diverse group of steel workers who were the heart and soul of one of America's largest industrial facilities. Here is the story of the hopes and frustrations, the triumphs and the trials of these workers, captured in a way that will be valuable to the academic and the general reader alike.