This is the 9th of March, 2005. Tell us a little bit about your life before you went to Sparrows Point.

Well, I grew up a tough life, grew up on O'Donnell Heights. In those days it was tough, but clean. Everybody in O'Donnell Heights played sports, primarily football or baseball. I went to Patterson, played football for Patterson, graduated in '61, first class of the new Patterson. Graduated on the 15th of February, and then I went into the military the 17th of February for four years. After being in the Air Force for four years stationed overseas a couple of times, came back. My brother worked at Sparrows Point as an ironworker erector, and he talked me into going down there and testing. I tested for ironworkers for like four days apprenticeship. In those days you took a test, and if you passed that, he gave you another test until you finally got up to the apprentice level, and the reason that was so hard they had things like algebra that you take for granted now. In those days everybody didn't have it. I mean they had general courses, mechanicals and stuff. You didn't have algebra or trig. so you had to pass those. After passing those, then they told me the good news, I passed. The bad news was there was no openings for apprenticeship until September, and this was in March. So I said well, I need a job. They said well, here's a bunch of jobs you can apply for, which I said I want the one that pays the highest because it's only temporary until the apprenticeship opens. They said well, you want to go to the tin mill. How about the roll shop? I don't even know what it is, but it pays the highest. So they gave me a test, mechanical test, which was really simple. Like they have a picture of a screw, then they have four tools beside it, which one fits that, screwdriver, a hammer, a mallet, so it was that type. So after taking the test, passing that test, you were given a name and a phone number and you called the general foreman. He made an appointment for you to meet him firsthand. So I called him, his name was -- I forget his name now. Pat Healey was his name, superintendent of the roll shop, tin mill. So he said come in tomorrow morning, bring a pink card as you go through the gate. So I did. I punched it in, went in to see him for an interview, and the interview was like this: You are a young man, have you ever been in the service? I just got out two weeks ago. He said start working tomorrow. That was the interview. In those days, military was the big thing. If you serve your country, because there was Nam and everything else going on, when you got out and you went down there, he was behind you a hundred percent. So I worked with them for about eight months until the apprenticeship finally opens. The good news was it was more training involved. The bad news was it was not nearly the salary, because you went from a real good paying job down to the lowest you can because apprentices start at the bottom.

Did you stop and think before you went to the apprentice program?

No, because I always had the idea I wanted to do the training, because in those days when you went to apprentice, it took you four years to finish apprenticeship, another year to be an A man, which is a top mechanic, and then most of the A men or most of the foreman at one time were A men. So my ambition in those days was to go up as high as I could, and the apprenticeship was the way to go, but I really loved it. I enjoyed the mathematical part, the training part, mechanical part. It was actually terrific, it really was.

What was it like your first day at Sparrows Point? Do you remember?

Sparrows Point to me was like going into another country. Everybody there was wearing protective gear, which I've never had before. You couldn't park your car inside the plant, you had to park it in an assigned parking lot, had to go through a gate, so it was different all together. It really wasn't scarey kind of different. It was just different in a strange different way. Actually I was familiar with the town of Sparrows Point, because after going away in the service my first year, I came home and we got married at Sparrows Point. Along the road was called church row where all the stores were and everything else, and we got married in the Lutheran church right there.

Was your wife from Sparrows Point?

My wife was from Dundalk Avenue, actually Dundalk and closer to Eastern Avenue , in that general area right there, so she really wasn't -- from the Holabird Avenue on was actually Dundalk . She was just before Holabird Avenue . But the day that I went in the service, I walked from my house in the project on O'Donnell Heights, went down to her house. She walked me down to Holabird Avenue , and we was only like 19, and we stopped at Holabird Avenue, and our plan was to turn around and walk away from each other and not look back, and that's how I went in the service. To this day I still remember that more so than the first day at the Point because that was really a shocker. But after I got into the apprenticeship it was really good training, it really was. I mean they had outstanding teachers. It was really tough work, so the guys that couldn't handle the tough work were my kind of guys anyway. They would drop out, so you eliminate them at an early stage, which wasn't a whole lot, but it was still some people. But the guys that stayed in were the kind of guys you would go in the service with. I mean they wouldn't do a whole lot of whining, they were just tough guys. You burnt your hand, yeah, I can put some water on it. It wasn't like I had to go to the dispensary every time you turn around. It was just tough kind of work, and to do that tough kind of work you had to be a tough kind of guy or you just didn't succeed, and that's the way it was. I remember while I was in the apprenticeship maybe 1966 or in that general area, the very first time we worked on the BOF, the very first time I was assigned with an A rate as his helper, and what we were doing was we were putting a wall beside a BOF, which was really huge, it was like 20 foot tall, maybe 60 foot long, so we were putting scaffolding up, and that was on a Friday. At the end of the day all we got done was get scaffolding up to get ready to work Monday. We came back to work Monday to go back on the job and everything over there was burnt down, the scaffolding, all the boards were just completely gone. What had happened was where they dumped the slag from the BOF, they usually dig a pocket in the ground and just dump the slag, the slag would get hard and they would come in with these bulldozers, break it up and load it on trains and then dump it out in the scrap field. What they had forgotten or nobody told them that underneath where they were dumping it was found these concrete foundations. So what happened they poured the slag in there, and after awhile it got so hot it blew up. So we come back to work Monday and here's all this scaffolding all broken down and big pieces of concrete from that explosion, so that was my first experience with the accidents down there.

Did you ever think what would have happened if you guys had been working when that happened?

We would have been really been hurt, because the scaffolding I think we were working off of was all destroyed, so I'm sure somebody would have got hurt. But that was my first experience with the accidents down there. But from that time on you always are a little leery, because you would have a meeting like in the morning, you would get lined up by your boss, and he would maybe read a safety thing like today you guys will be working around a welder so here are some of your precautions, so it was always brought to you, but it really wasn't taken seriously in the early days, because you didn't hear too many people in your department get hurt. People were getting hurt, but you didn't hear too much about it, whereas later on everything was emphasized by the safety department. I was on the safety team for the ironworkers just about my whole life down there, and it went from real good to better, then back not so good, it would bounce back and forth. But it seemed like every time that we would have a fatal accident they would get serious about safety again and things would get tougher and tougher and tougher. I can give you a good example of the safety the in ironworkers department later on. I would say within the last maybe 2000 or so, in that general range, at this point in time I think we already lost like 122 people total. A lot of them happened while I was down there. Some of them were in multi, and most of the multi were CO, and that was --

Why don't you explain for people what you mean by “multi's.”

“ Multi CO ” is carbon monoxide,

and all your furnaces that have heat, which most of them do, have one degree or another of carbon monoxide. So we have always been trained before you go to work you use these meters. The meters tell you what the carbon monoxide level is, and if it's a certain level, you get out right away, or if you are working and the level goes up, a meter will have a buzzer go off and you leave right away, so it's a big deal. The trouble is in the history of CO and deaths, people that were working and were overcome by CO, they would go down and the people that were working with them would try to rescue, they would go down. That's why multi. So what they tell us and to this day it's true no matter how good your buddy is, even if it's relative, if you see somebody go down with CO, suspect it, you do not go and help him. You go get help, because what's going to happen you go in there, it takes about two breaths and then you are down and there's nobody to help you. So he is going to pass away and you are going to pass away. So the number one thing is as hard as it is you leave him and you go get help and then help comes behind. If you don't -- so that was the hardest lesson to tell people this and follow through with it. That's why you have multiple deaths for that same reason. But the CO down there was really great testing devices. Had a department, plant maintenance safety, that would take care of CO. Well, towards the end of the years when things were getting lower and didn't have as many people, one of the early departments they got rid of were these people. So being on the safety team, every time we would go to a job that had CO, the chance of being there, I was always up front and get into the face of whoever the foreman was or whoever the department we were working for. Now you know I made a lot of friends. I would go in the coating lines, which was a lot of CO, and I would say to them look, I need this to be checked before we go in there. I'm not a general foreman or foreman or run the job, but I'm the safety person. My people, including myself, will not go in there until you give me a report, and they would -- a lot of times the response would be you are right, but sometimes they would say well, look, we worked it last week, so if you insist on it, and your department is supposed to back you up, they finally come through with it. Well, towards the later years they eliminated the CO department all together. So every time we would have a safety meeting, particularly in the main office with all the big wheels, and they would say all right, are there any questions? I would stand up and I would say what are we going to do about the CO problem? We have no testers at Sparrows Point. The last CO plan we had that was in writing was in 1995, and I have a copy of it. Most of the issues in this copy are no longer valid. Now what do we do? We're checking on it. Or you would address somebody who they said was in charge, and number one, they were always busy, but number two, they would say we will check on it. So I was always making a lot friends, and it's almost like being a union rep. Every time we have a disagreement with the union management, whoever loses hates you, so you are doing the right thing and you are going by company policy, but they hate you for presenting it. That's the same with the safety person. The harder you work, the better it is. I will give you an example. At one time we were averaging in the ironworkers alone like 20 accidents a year, but we made a genuine effort to diminish that level. For example, we were told in a pyramid for every accident that's a near miss, like if you trip but you didn't hurt yourself, for every one of those -- I mean for every ten of those you have an accident. Now maybe just dust in the eye or something like that. But every hundred of those you have an accident where you have to go to the dispensary and every thousand or 1,500 they get death, so we had a pyramid. So every time we saw an accident or a near accident, you would bring it to somebody's attention, and if it was something that you thought had to be in writing so it would correct it you would put it in writing. I would do this at different departments on different jobs and people would say I don't have time for that. Well, every accident you saved at Sparrows Point would save about $10,000, because of your medical people and everything else. So we're not prolonging the job, we are saving money, but to try and explain that to the ordinary person. And the number one things of accidents is eye juries, dust, BOF. There are certain areas where there's dust all over the place. The incinerating plant is one of them and so forth, eye injuries, so we had a monthly meeting. Every monthly meeting I would stand up and address all the accidents we had that month and try to not belittle people but try to have the person who had the accident explain why he did what he did. Example being a guy was drilling a hole in a piece of metal, the drill bit broke, so he took the chuck key to take the drill bit out. He still had the drill plugged in. Obviously he hit the trigger while he had the chuck key, which is a T-shape, broke his finger. So at this meeting I had him come up and address us, show us his hand, and asked if he ever changed a chuck key again would he simply unplug it, and I would bring this up every single month at our meeting for the same accident to the point -- it got to the point where I would rather -- than to hear you tell that story again, I would rather be the safest guy in the world. Well, that was the only thing we understand -- not the only thing, but the one we understood. For example, we had a guy had one eye, and I don't want to mention any names, and I had him at -- I talked to him, and he would get up and address the group about how important it is to have your eyes, what you miss, things like seeing your grandkids. I'm not that good off to begin with, now I've got one eye kind of atmosphere. He agreed to it, and he did, he did an excellent job about how important it was, how it meant to him when he lost his eye at a very young age, and as a matter of fact here's what you looked like, and he turned around and pulled his glass eye out. Now that was an ironworkers safety meeting. Was it a little rough? Yes. Did it make an impression? Yes. And different people -- the word started getting out if I see you without a pair of safety glasses, I don't care if you are the general foreman, I'm going to tell you about it, because we're giving them to you. You don't have to buy them. Simply wear them. Well, that was the thing we understood. That's why I think the biggest thing down there was the safety teams. I honestly really believe that, because when you see the numbers about how far down it went and the safety team -- you had a little bit of authority like when you would go to the main office, they had meetings with the big wheels, so it was always that kind of atmosphere, and we did -- I would say we did a good job primarily because we lowered the numbers of accidents, and we had a steady record from year to year about how we did last month this time and so forth, and that's what they understand. Here's what we are doing as far as progress, here's the numbers. That was the big thing.

Why don't you describe what ironworkers did if you were telling somebody who has no idea what goes on.

And that's a good question, because towards the very end we were going to different meetings and his name was Steve Miller was negotiating different items. Towards the very end he brought in some of the people from the new ISG at these meetings, he was going to tell them about we are going to do this, we're going to do that. Obviously we're going to cut some jobs, everything else, and I raised my hand and I asked him the same question you said, "In your opinion, what is an ironworker," and first of all, he said, "I'm not a hundred percent sure." I said so you are part of the committee that's going to cut jobs as far as how many of these we need and how many of those, but you don't know what an ironworker is? I said let me tell you what an ironworker is. Ironworker does every maintenance job on Sparrows Point. He does welding, he does burning, he does everything imaginable. He's also the plant rescue department. If anything ever happens down there, explosive or anything else, he is the guy that goes in there, whether it be high in the air on a crane or anything else, any kind of maintenance at all he does. The only thing he does not do is electrical. Even sometimes he will do plumbing. We don't do it as a schedule, but we can do it -- any kind of maintenance down there on any shift is what an ironworker does. So I say to the guy so you are going to cut people's jobs, particularly ironworkers, but you think an ironworker is just a person who works in the iron mill, and it's not. We used to be called erectors because we fabricated all these big items, beams, and you see a guy riding a beam up in the air on a skyscraper. We don't ride beams, but we do that type of work. So I said to the guy so you are going to cut these jobs, ironworkers, and you don't know what they are. I said here's what an ironworker feels under your new department, not to get in your face, but I feel like Sparrows Point is a tuxedo and an ironworker is a pair of brown shoes, and he said I'm not a hundred percent sure what you are saying. I'm saying that's the way we are coming from. People don't know what an ironworker is because we have got a simplified name, but we'll do any maintenance, any job, and I can go down the list of some of the things. Like I have a picture here that it shows ironworkers on a breakdown over the 68 hot strip. The crane loading these slabs dropped it on a transfer car tracks and just shattered it. This was the middle of December and it's as cold as it can be, and they called us and they said we need you to do something now because we need that mill to go back on duty. So that's what we did, they called a bunch of guys in, we went over and we started repairing it. Well, somebody came around and they made an investigation of the accident and he took our photographs. So you can see our photographs -- I don't know if you can see it on camera.

Don't worry about the camera. I'm going to get a copy of this somehow.

That's a photograph of --

Is this the one that the Sun made?

I think that's who it was, because it was an investigating unit, and they were there -- the Sun was there with a couple other people, and I think that's who it was, and we were just working, and he had just simply come by and he said do you mind if I take your picture? Well, in the past you could not take a photograph on Sparrows Point. They wouldn't put you in jail, but you could get in trouble, so we never did it. So when he said yes, we just said okay, but that was the kind of things.

How did you get a copy of the print?

I go back in the office a couple days later, there was an envelope there with my name on it, like one of these yellow folder, it was in there. As a matter of fact, I was wondering what is that, and I opened it up and there it was.

Do you know who sent it to you or who took it?

I have no idea. There may be a reason why it was really not advertised. I think for example towards the end -- well, maybe the last five or six years, the ironworkers -- I don't think we got as much power back as we used to as far as completing jobs, and I will give you an example. When the halogen line went down in '92, '93, they were repairing it and they almost finished, and the 3:00 to 11:00 came and they had a big fire and they burnt up all one section. Well, we really needed the halogen line for the work orders.

Let me just interrupt you, because people who are going to be watching this are not going to understand the steel industry. What is the halogen line?

The halogen line is like a dipping device. They go through this big roll of steel, big roll of sheet steel where we fed through a mill, and it goes through picklers, and picklers are acid, goes through these devices and everything else. When it comes out, it's all clean, and then they coat it with galvanized or something like that, but anyway it's a coating process.

Is it used for automobile bodies?

Automobile bodies, there's a whole variety, but it's a process. I will give you an example. If you had coal roll which comes out of the hot strip and it just goes into sheets, nothing but steel. Sells for say $40 a ton. Well, if you go through this process here it will go for $90, so it really --

High end of the steel?

High end of the steel, right. So 3:00 to 11:00 came in, and they were primarily doing the same type of work they had been doing all week. All of sudden they had a fire, a big explosion. To this day it's the '93 halogen line, nobody knows what happened, so I mean that's -- I know what happened and everybody I knew worked with --

Well, what happened? Tell us.

I think we repaired this tank. After the tank is repaired, the fluid that's in there is so toxic and so corrosive, the tank has to be rubber lined. After you rubber lined it, you put in two-inch piping all along it, we call it heating vents, and then you run hot water through them, and that heats the fluid up. You are not allowed to do any burning or anything else once they glue this rubber in until a certain time period until it hardens. So they put the glue on at the end of the daylight shift, all these rubbers, pipefitters put in the pipes, and they turned the pipe on to check them for leaks. That was the end of the shift. The next shift comes on and they start burning like they have been doing all week, and all of a sudden they had an explosion. What it says to me is when they put the glue on and put the rubber on, put the pipe on and put the heat in, it's like heating up a can of oil, it's going to put fumes out. Now the oil won't burn, the fumes will burn, and then the oil will burn. So I'm thinking, as well as a lot of other people, that this heat from these pipes heated the glue behind the rubber, which made the fumes, so the place has now got fumes, and you can't tell it because the whole place is full of the toxic smell to begin with, and then when you hit a torch, that flame set off the fumes. That's what most people that I know worked there thought. Well, having this accident happen, we were told we have to get this back up and running within three weeks, because it's primary to operating the plant. So we all worked all kinds of shifts to get this thing back up, and we did, and it was less than three weeks actually, so we were told that everybody that had a beard had to shave it because you had to wear gas masks or a possibility of wearing gas masks because of the toxics. So we went in there and we worked it. It wasn't just only ironworkers but primarily. You had pipefitters and so forth. Put the thing back together, now everybody is happy, the mill is up and running. So the plant manager, who was Dwayne Dunham at the time, said I want to come around lunchtime and meet some of the guys who worked that job. So in the morning we're told that day at lunch time he is going to come around, there will be free sodas down there and maybe some sandwiches, so naturally all the ironworkers said we'll be down there. So we did. So we went down to the halogen line and there's a big walkway between these two mills, and somebody had built a little stadium, a stage for him to walk up there, he is going to address everybody, had a microphone and so forth. So we are all there, and it's about quarter to 12:00, and as we are sitting there, we, all the ironworkers, we kind of like pushed up close to the front because we were going to be the first to get sodas. Well, I'm working with a guy -- all the ironworkers have nicknames. The guy I'm working with is the oldest ironworker at Sparrows Point, his name is Louis the Hog because he'll eat everything. He eats oysters on a half shell for breakfast. That's his nickname, Louis the Hog, but he's the oldest ironworker, and unfortunately a lot of things that you accumulate after a period of time, loss of hearing, asbestosis and so forth. Anyway, he was sitting up front. He has a hearing aid. As Dwayne Dunham went down through the back of the crowds walking up through was shaking hands. So as he came up to us, I had a thought, why don't I mention that this guy here is the oldest ironworker on Sparrows Point. So that's what I did. He walked up, and I said I would like to introduce you to Louis the Hog, he's the oldest Sparrows Point ironworker, and he looked at Louis and he said to him, "Wow." He said, "I bet you have seen a lot in your time," and Louis, because of his bad hearing, said, "I think it's about ten after 12:00," because he thought, you know, but that was the kind of story. So we had rebuilt this thing, and what they did was they gave us all hats and they gave us some sodas, so that was pretty good really. Like I said, ironworkers do anything at any time in any kind of weather. I mean I was told like we were working the cold field where there's hired cranes and everything like that. Most of the time you worked the cold field is winter time because that's when they don't have as much shipping because of the freezing water and so forth, and you would go out there and be so cold, I mean it was unbelievable, and you would said say to your boss like it really is wet out there, and he would look at you and say, "It don't rain on Sparrows Point." That was the way it is. After awhile you got to the point where it really didn't bother you, you overcame. If it took wearing plastic trash bags, that's what you did. And so to hear this guy say yeah, we're going to cut some ironworker jobs, you know, I just -- of course I'm leaning one sided. Now one time they came around, and they started the new plant within the plant, it was called the pellet plant. I don't know how many people were even aware of that because there wasn't that many people involved. This was on the back side of the coke ovens. Now what they did, they came up with the idea that they could convert coal into coke without going through the coke oven process. Not only that, they could control the uniform diameter between five-eighths, three quarters of an inch of a ball. So somebody came up with this idea, the scientists, and they said yeah, we can do that. So they had four or five companies other than Sparrows Point -- I mean Bethlehem Steel invest time and money and built it. So what they did was they went around to the plant and they said we need 40 mechanics, but we need so many electrics, so many fabricators, so many welders, and they went around to different departments, and anybody who wanted to sign up for it signed for it and you were interviewed. Well, our ironworker department general foreman whose name was Bob Seathen, super duper guy, if you were an ironworker, you were like a Marine, I mean you were his people. He didn't want to get rid of anybody because they were his ironworkers. Then the word finally got out because they are calling different mechanicals, and he said well, the union said everybody is going to have an opportunity who wants to be interviewed. So it sounded like a great idea, because there's some good training involved, so about maybe 20 of us went down to be interviewed and they selected me and a couple of other guys who were ironworkers. So we went down there, and we were the fabricators more or less, the guys that climbed the steel and so forth. If they had a breakdown, that's the type of work we did, and it seemed very simple. This guy came in, he said here's what your job is, we're going to try and convert this coal into this process and make round coke, that's the whole thing. We're going to take six months or six years, we're going to do it because we have to do something to replace the coke ovens. It made sense. So we would all go in and we did everything we could. I mean it was a higher pay grade, but like if you went as an ironworker and you had an electrical job, you would help the electrician as his “augmentee.” You weren't an electrician, but you were a helper like, and the same with ironworker if they needed more ironworkers, so it worked out really good, but it was really dirty. Coke is really unbelievable, coke and coal. So everybody wants to be -- then they said to us look, we have to cover this plant around the clock, how do you guys want to work? The union people were given the opportunity to come up with our own schedule. Do you want to work an eight-hour shift, do you want to work at six o'clock, seven o'clock? All these years a lot of people said I wish I could make my own schedule. Now we were finally given the opportunity. So we all sat in this one room to come up with a schedule that covered the whole plant 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it seemed like a simple thing. It took us four days, four days. So now I will never say it again I wish we could make our schedule. Some guys wanted to start at 6:00, some guys wanted 7:00. Some guys wanted to work eight straight days without any overtime and then take off four days. Some guys wanted to work a regular schedule. Some guys wanted -- the senior guys didn't work any night shift, those kind of things, so it took us four days, so we finally did do it. Now that next thing is who is going to be the first person to produce the first pebble. We had it broken up in six-man gangs, so you're daylight today for this week, you may be midnight or 3:00 to 11:00 next week. But now we're getting close to making this first pellet, and it went through a great big drama, it was 13-foot diameter about 30 foot along, and when it went in as a fluid and it kind of like rolled it and turned it and it came out as a little pellet. We're almost ready to make it and something would break down. Oh, man, we want to be the first to make this pellet. All right, we repair it, it may take a month. We did the repair and now we're on again. Now the team ahead of us is almost there. As a matter of fact, those guys are volunteering to work overtime because they want to make the first pellet. Almost there, it breaks down again. This happened numerous times and it's a little frustrating. We're on a 3:00 to 11:00 shift, we're almost there. Everything is working fine, everybody is working fine, we're on the job and it's getting close to quitting time, and we were asked do you guys want to work over four years to see the first pellet, and we did stay, and sure enough we made the first pellet. Small problem, instead of the pellet being five-eighths to three-quarters in diameter, it was a ton and a half. They made one that was like nine foot in diameter. It made a pellet, but instead of being small, something happened. So now they had to shut the whole thing down, and the man holes were 30 inches, they get inside the tanks, so we had to climb in there with jackhammers and bust it up and start over again, but that was the kind of the way it was. But finally during the weekend, not our team but another team did make the pellets, and they proved the process. This took about I guess three and a half years, but now the negative side is now they proved it, what are they going to do about it? Everybody is saying they are going to build another pellet plant down there's that's larger, that you can produce more. Then he said we're going to sell it to some of the coal companies. To this day until I left there until right now I have no idea what happened to the process. I don't know if it went overseas, where it went, because it was like a big hush. We were told within six months we'll be closing this, we're going back to our old departments. So we had stacks that were like fifteen foot in diameter, maybe 120 foot tall for the exhausts and stuff like that. It was all brick-lined because it was heat. So they asked us how do we seal that from the elements of rain and so forth. So we came up with the idea we'll take a piece of half-inch plate, burn it in the right diameter, maybe an inch a half wider than the opening and then sit them on top, put a couple bolts to hold down to keep the rain from going down. Only problem is how do we get the plate from the ground up in the air. So being an ironworker, I volunteered just stand on the plate, ride the crane up, 120-foot crane, sit it on top and then put a couple bolts in and then go back on the crane, put my foot in the cable and go down the side. I mean the heights really didn't bother me, and it sounded like a great idea from the ground, so that's what we did. The only problem is this thing was so large in diameter, 15 feet, 12 feet, whatever it was, that I'm in the center of it riding the crane up in the air. Now once I get up here and he slides over, I'm above the crane. The operator can't see my signals, because now I'm stuck, now I can't tell him to stop or anything. So what we did was a guy climbed up -- there's an adjacent building and he came up the walkway and leaned over, and he gave the signals, but anyway he lowered it down. Once he lowered it down -- I mean really hairy. When you are on a tank you don't realize what the wind is going like this to it, so that was really hairy, but that was the things we did. And then after that, they closed the plant down, we went back with our ironworker department, and that was -- of course a lot of people there were not necessarily happy to see us back, especially the guys with lower seniority, because now we're above them as far as layoffs and so forth, but it wasn't too bad, but down there we were getting paid a dollar an hour extra plus a higher incentive, so we lost that part.

That was a great story. When you started there, you had just gotten married. How did your family adjust to the shift work?

Well, the first shift work we got I would say was -- you probably get shift work about every two months, and what it would be would primarily be breakdowns, and in those days it was mostly the blast furnace. When you got on the blast furnace and you worked daylight, you would be on daylight for a month, and then you would be 3:00 to 11:00 for a month, and then you would be midnight for a month. So it was like a planned thing, and I never really had a problem working like that because when -- I have three little girls and the wife would always tell them daddy has got to sleep because he's got to go to work tonight, and they were always very, very good, so I never really had a problem with the shifts.

So the ironworkers basically didn't rotate the way the other production shifts did?

No, because like you may go like eight weeks all daylight, and then all of a sudden you may be a whole month of midnight, depending on what the work load was. When ironworkers worked all shifts at all times, no matter what the job is, if it requires more people, that's what you are going to do. With that understanding, it really didn't bother people so much. I remember one of the things that was scary about it, working so many different parts of the plant as an ironworker, you get to see so many different aspects of it. For example, like you would work hand in hand with bricklayers. Before the bricklayer could put a brick in, you had to put the metal inside, then he would put the brick up against it and so forth or you work hand in hand with carpenters, and the one memory I have that was over at the 56 pickler, and the guy went through apprenticeship. I just call him Scotty, and when you walk into a pickler, you just walk into the building, not do anything else, your eyes tear up. I mean your nose starts to run just from the toxic fumes and stuff, and it's hydrochloric acid or differ varieties of it. Well, somebody came up with the idea on this one tank, really wasn't a big tank, maybe only six foot tall, but it had acid in it. I don't know if it was waste acid or new acid, but I think it was like 140 degrees or somewhere in that general range. They would take two-by-three's or three-inch boards, 20-foot long and lay them across the top, it would keep the fumes down, so it would help people that worked in there, which sounded like a basic good idea. So this guy was in there working on something, and instead of walking around the tank, if you saw a tank with a car on it, you walked across it. Unfortunately when the acid ate these boards, they ate the boards from the inside, so you are looking at a board three-inch thick which will hold anything, it will hold a car, looks like it's in good shape, but acid was eating it away to the point where they were just fragile. He walked across it and it broke and he fell in, and when he fell because of the acid and the heat and everything else, he hollered, ingested it. So Scotty knew at that time he was dead. We weren't working too far away from there. They called the ambulance, go through the right procedure. They came in right away and everything else, and actually when they got him out he actually helped himself out, walked to the stretcher and laid down on the stretcher, but he only lasted one night, everything was gone, his eyes, everything else, internal. That's the things you see all the time. So this happened because somebody covered a tank with wooden boards. So that was the thing where you always trying to enhance don't take anything for granted no matter, and you could work so many different mills whereas like a millwright was assigned to a mill, so he got to know that mill pretty good, danger signs and so forth, but you may only work this mill once every year or you may work this mill twice a year or something, but you don't know the ins and outs, so you always have to be extra, extra careful. So that was one of the things.

When the ironworkers, when you came to work every day, was there a locker room for just the ironworkers?

No. It's really funny you mention lockers. When I first started down there, you were assigned lockers, and like the ironworkers we had four or five different areas, blast furnace. So you would be assigned a locker in the blast furnace or the tin mill, you would be assigned a locker in the tin mill, or the coke ovens, you would be assigned a locker in the coke ovens, and everything you did down there in those days you walked. Nobody really complained because that was the way it was. My first locker room I was assigned to the -- it's called the bricklayer's locker, because most of the people in there worked the blast furnace and were bricklayers. But believe it or not in those days it was segregated, you had a black section and a white section. Well, I wasn't there very long, maybe a year or so, and they put everybody in by alphabetical order, so it really worked out well, and we never had any problems whatsoever. In those days, like for example in the coke ovens, if you had a locker -- you didn't have a locker, you had a locker room, your clothes were put in the basket, the basket hung from the ceiling. So you went in the morning, you have a little chain that was wrapped around like a horse cuff. You untie the chain and you load it down with a pulley, and your basket came down. There was never any problem. To this day -- when they first got lockers, you are thinking to yourself how did we ever live like that, but it was no problem because everybody did it. But the bricklayer was the first locker room that I can remember that went by alphabetical order. I don't care where you worked, what your color was, I don't care anything. You are going strictly by alphabetical order.

What year was that; do you remember?

I'm thinking around '67, '68, in that general area. I know it was in the mid 60's. I'm not a hundred percent sure.

Because there was a lot of activity that went on and racial stuff after 1964. Just did a class on the Civil Rights Act, and then by the early 70's a group of Francis Brown and those guys sued the company and the union for segregated seniority list. Was that ever an issue? Well, let me ask you this. Were the ironworkers all white guys?

I would say primarily the largest portions were white. Now we had one of the black units down there was probably one of the toughest working units down, they were called the riggers. Now if you see a blast furnace, they are going to take the top of the blast furnace off, you see all these cables and cranes, that's what they did. But any kind of weather, the same with the ironworkers -- I mean their job was so tough and to hear these guys talk, nothing bothered them. I mean they were just tough, so I don't know how long in years I was there, it was early, maybe the late 60's or the early 70's, we combined the two units. We Made the riggers and ironworkers all ironworkers, and we never had to my knowledge no problem at all. As a matter of fact, one of the black riggers, his name was Pritz, he came with me, and he said to me the very first day of working I will work any way you want to work, I don't do any welding and I don't do any burning, but I'm glad to learn. He said but you tell me any rigging job and you will be working for me. So that's the kind of guy I want, he said I will do anything. So every day we got a coffee at nine o'clock. Nine o'clock was coffee time until 9:15, and we had special areas around, mostly in locker rooms where the guy, the caretaker sold coffee, and it was only like a dime. So we're working in coke ovens, and I said to Pritz it's about like 8:30, do you want to go get a coffee for everybody? Of course I'll pitch in, and he said glad to, because you guys are doing the burning and welding and he said I'm helping you, but I'm be glad to do that. So he goes and he is gone -- and he is really a nice guy, never had any problems as far as being late or drifting away from the job or any kind of conflict. He is not back yet. He should be back in 15, 20 minutes because it's not that far a walk, and it's a half an hour. Anyway, so I finally see him pulling up there, he's got an old cardboard box all busted up, and the coffee laying there and everything else, and he said to me I hate to tell you this guys, but I'm a little late. What happened? He said I was carrying these coffees across the railroad tracks and I tripped, and I didn't want to spill them, so I kind of held my elbows down. He said but I hurt my arm, he broke his wrist, and my boss had said to me earlier during the day, you know, this is going to be the first working group, so he will work with you and work with him, but kind of look out for each other, you know make sure you don't do anything that you're not familiar with, uncomfortable, don't get hurt. So when he came back with a broken wrist, of course he's got to go to the dispensary, then you've got to make a report. My boss pulled me into the office, and that's when he said when I said you've got to look out for each other, this is not what I had in mind. The very first day he broke his wrist. But we never had any trouble. They worked with the shift work. Just like -- I don't think anybody even looked and said well, you are a black and white guy working. It was just you were an ironworker. I mean that was the way it was. It was tough jobs that actually was tougher than this thing about black and white. It was tougher than that, so it never really had an effect on it. Honestly didn't.

Did you hear stuff about other parts of the mill that there were problems?

I would say primarily in operations they had problems. I mean like not only a black and white issue, but they had female problems also. Like certain females were assigned in different operation jobs and stuff like that. Luckily we never had the female problem, because we didn't have any female ironworkers until very later. I remember the very first female operator came down in the plant in the late 90's. I can't tell you -- her name was Priscilla. But anyway, she was from the outside contractors at one time, Local 16. Some of the Local 16 guys hired on, and they got her to take the test and she was on there, but she was tough and never had any problems. I mean she would look you right in the eye and tell you what's on her mind, and that's what you had to do. That's the same with the black and white situation. You tell people what's on your mind, we're all working together and it's done. Never really had a problem. But she was the only female that I remember, and I don't think she lasted very long. I think she transferred out and moved on to another state or something. I haven't heard too much from her.

Did you guys ever socialize off the job?

Socializing off the job was primarily at a place called Micky's on North Point Road, which everybody knew about, or The Friendly Tavern is where most of the ironworkers went. Of course you can't tell anybody this, but like if you worked 3:00 to 11:00 and midnight, and between the shifts you have guys coming and guys leaving, and you might go out and get a hamburger or something. Nobody really said anything unless you abused it really bad. So that was all North Point Road , but socializing was primarily done after work, and I would say The Friendly Tavern was probably the number one. The negative side about that was you always had guys that extended it. Two or three beers you are in good shape, but you get five or six beers and a bunch of ironworkers, there's going to be some kind of pushing or fighting or argument going on. So you always hear about it the next day, unless you stayed long enough to go into it. In my case, I never really was big into drinking, so I would drink my three beers and I would see you guys tomorrow, but you would hear about it the next day, but there was a lot of socializing in those two places primarily. Something else I wanted to tell. Way back when, a lot of people don't remember, but it happened. Before we had safety teams, we had something that was called LMPT, it was the Labor Management Participation Team, and what you would do is you would sit down as a group, primary laborers, but you had management also, and you would sit down and you would say well, we had a problem this week on this outage, is there anything we can do to correct things and stuff. So as ironworkers took up one task that was really phenomenal, but we never really got credit for it, and the task was this. When you set up a job, the first thing you had to do was get burning gear and welding gear, and for each gang of three people, you need three bottles, two oxygen and one bottle of gas. Always costs money to set this up. So we came up with the idea if we can run pipe lines in all the major mills of BOF, the high strip, and have gas a major source so when you come in you don't have to go through this assign the guys here to do all this stuff, just take your burn it and hook it to the existing lines. So as ironworkers we came up with this idea, and like we would go to different meetings and we would say look, here's what we think we can do, and people -- when you say ironworkers, how did they come up with this idea? So we did, we took seven guys and we broke a committee down and go see all the CEOs of Sparrows Point at their main meeting, and we are going to tell them exactly how we can save them money by doing this putting these lines up. So we assigned each person in the team like a ten-minute talk so you memorize your lines, so you are going over -- like we had a guy he was on the cost thing, how much is it going to cost to rent the gas and air from the outside vendor and basic things like the vendor says if you guarantee to rent this gas and air for one year, we'll give you the tank for free. One guy said he can contact the pipefitters, how much would it cost to run the pipeline. Well, the pipefitter said to him well, we have so much pipe that is left over from different jobs that's already been purged, because you had to have clean pipe, that we will donate it. So that was the kind of thing. So we had all this program put together, we're going to meet with all the main office, personnel, and give them the program. So our general foreman gave us the okay, and we sat down with them, and then the night before it happened a guy called me and he says I'm drunk, I'm supposed to give the part tomorrow, my car just backed over and broke my foot. I can tell you his name was John Moyer, but he said my wife is going to bring the paperwork in and said somebody has to give my five-minute spill. So I said okay. My part was I was going to stand up in the meeting and introduce everybody and tell them why we were there and then introduce the person who was going to give his part. So when it came down to John's part, he was the one that was going to connect with the pipefitters and say how many feet of pipe we need and what the costs we are going to save by giving it to us. So when it came to his part, I stood up and just said my name is John Moyer, acted like I was him, and I said the pipefitters said we needed 6,000 feet of total pipe. Oh, yeah, by the way, asshole, bring home some bread and milk. His wife had written on his notes and I was reading it. That was exactly what happened. So everybody in the room got up saying I can identify with that, because they kind of smiled, and that's exactly what happened. We did get that believe it or not, but like the BOF they got -- now they got it on all the floors, gas and air, so when you go to work you don't have to roll all these bottles up to the third floor, just take your hose and your torch and hook it up to. Hot strip has it. So how much credit did the ironworkers get? I think we got a T-shirt, but that was the way it was, but nobody really complained because we know we're ironworkers. Towards the end, a lot of millwrights, particularly millwrights were given uniforms. Instead of wearing these paper pants because you work around grease and oil all the time, they were given uniforms, and actually it was saving money because a uniform gets dirty, you get it cleaned. Paper pants, which probably costs almost half as much of a uniform you've got to throw away. But everybody -- the maintenance unit is there that did similar work got these uniforms except for the ironworkers. So I would go to these different meetings, and when they would talk about this and everything else, I would say I would like to ask a question. Why are not ironworkers getting these uniforms? Well, we're checking into it now. There's an agreement because they started the new coal mill that uniforms will be provided. Well, everybody here has uniforms but the ironworkers, so it was ongoing. So I go over to the hot strip because we have a project coming up and I'm going to meet with their safety team about some of the things we can do prior to going into it, and I walk into the office and here comes a guy that's representing these uniform companies, and he walks in. I said, "Ah, I would like to talk to you, do you have a minute?" The guy said, "Yeah, I would be glad to." Have you heard anything about getting uniforms for the ironworkers throughout the plant? The guy said you mean like the maintenance units? No, I mean the ironworkers, because you are confusing us like everybody else with the millwrights, maintenance units. He said, "I'll check on it." I said, "Okay, let me ask you a question. I'm representing the ironworkers. Is there any chance of me getting a uniform or a shirt or something and taking it to my boss and show them what they look like?" He said, "What's your name?" So I said, "Joe Ed," because I always go by two names, Joe Ed. So he said, "Okay." So I'm thinking just something else they are going to check on, I will never hear again, that's the way it goes, we tried. I'll just continue as we go to these meetings bringing up why we don't have uniforms. About a month goes by, my general foreman, whose name is Dan Christopher, who is a super, super general foreman, I mean he was really safety conscious. He said he got a package here, I have no idea what it is, but it's in your name. So I go down there to his office at the meeting and he gives it to me. Believe it or not, it's a shirt, it's got a blue shirt with pearl buttons on it with the name Joe Ed on it, but it was the only uniform we ever got. To the time we left we never got uniforms, and they kept telling us well, we're checking on it, we don't really know.

What was it like, your expectations when you started there when you would work your whole life, and obviously did you suffer any layoffs?

Yes. When I first started, my expectation was like everybody else's, the normal thing would be you work towards a decent, for your family, income and also a decent retirement. Knowing the work is hard, knowing all you have to put up through, but when you look at the end of the rainbow you say well look, I'm not too far from being retirement, and the more years I put in, the better my retirement is, and so that's what we always thought. So the good news was we did go through layoffs, but we always kind of new that the layoff were only like a couple months here and there, so it really wasn't that bad as far as time off the job. The big thing was we always knew -- I got another option to go somewhere else, but I'm halfway through this thing. Do I want to forego my pension? Like for example, my brother -- well, he's been gone a lot of years from down there, and when he first started back in the early 60's, if you worked there -- you had to work fifteen years to get a vested pension. So he worked there when he had just turned -- I think he had like 16 and a half years or something like that, and he left to go to Florida . Now he is retirement age, so he asked me to check into his retirement. Now what they didn't tell him was the federal government says you must have fifteen years. Anyway, those guidelines now are down to five years for a vested pension. But besides having fifteen years for vested, you had to be 40 years old. No one that I know of in either side of that management or union ever told anybody that when we were way back when, so to this day he gets zero pension because he wasn't 40. He left when he was 39. Had he known that, obviously he would have spent another six months, but he gets no pension. So those things make you a little leery when they tell you something so you've got to always kind of like check on it. So towards the end when everything was coming, we would go to these meetings, everybody at that meeting you would look at each other and you would ask questions, and the primary response from the responsible people would be we're going to check on that, we're working on that, which really litanies goes off right away. I mean it's almost like we've got a meeting again today, we're going to have a meeting again tomorrow, going to have a meeting again next week, but every time you go to the meetings and you bring up topical questions, it's always we've got to check on it. It felt like we were doing Mach speed without a compass. That's what the feeling was, because at the end of the meeting we would look in each other's eyes and say we're doomed. That was the way you really felt. Typical questions, if we take a buyout, what's going to happen to our insurance. Well, that's a good question. Good, I need a good response. But towards the end we never did know, no one really knew a hundred percent what's going to happen to our 401. So that was the frustrating thing. Here you are getting close to your retirement, your pension age, now I have an option. Here's your options. If you want you can retire and work for the new company, still get your retirement, but you get your retirement from PBGC, you don't get it through the new company, so it has no effect on them. Or if you want you can retire and get a bonus if you have over 30 years of $50,000, but you can never work for the new company. So if you take the retirement and work for the new company, your seniority still counts. Everything else is pretty good. So if you are in the 50-age bracket, you would be silly to take the bonus because you lost your job. Here you can get a retirement and work. Or if you are around 62, 63, do I want to give up a year's salary and I might retire anyway next year. So that was the thing. But nobody really said when you had to make that decision. First they said you had to make it April. April 1st you have to say I have a desire to take a buyout. Well, then they changed that. Well, you don't have to do it until the end of April. Well, you have to do it by the end of Friday. No, you have to do it next week. They kept changing it, and every time there was a change, you would go to human resources and say what is the actual thing because I don't want to go pass this, and most of your response was we ain't really sure, we know about it as much as you do. That was the frustrating thing. I know guys that said well, I'm going to take the buyout, I'm going to go sign the papers. They went and signed the papers, and they were told when they came back by telephone clean your toolbox out because you are done today. So what my option was I was going to take the buyout because reaching the 63 age. So at the meeting I asked will this affect your Social Security, because I want to file my Social Security early. Would it involve what type of retirement you get as far as pension, and most of the questions were we have to check on it, again frustration. But the information I did get like the options of PBGC, it came through them and said you would have option one, option two, option three. Option one was this, and everybody who wants to take care of their family would think this, if you retire and something happens to you, your wife would get 50 percent of your salary the rest of her life. But what they left out -- I mean they didn't leave it out, they didn't emphasize it enough, if you took that option and you retired, she is the only beneficiary of retirement. If she died the next week, nobody is a beneficiary to your retirement. Not only that, if you decided to sign her up for the beneficiary and you want to change it, for whatever reason you get a divorce or your kids might need it, you can not do it. Once you signed up, you were locked in for the rest of your life. So that was really to me -- it's your pension, but you lost total control. That was option one, so I opted not to do that. I went to the one where I get as much as I can, and if something happens to me she gets absolutely nothing is what she has now. The reason being by doing that I saved $350 off my retirement because to go to option one that's what it would cost you to pay for it. So that $350, we went and got a term life insurance for my wife. If something happens to me, she is covered $250,000 for the rest of her life, which is untaxable. But getting that information -- if somebody would have explained it to me very simple like that I would have did it right away. But to get that information, I had to go through five different financial advisors because they would say we'll get back with you, and nobody from the plant, nobody at any time would ever tell you what to do. Here's your option, they would give you a piece of paper saying this is this, this is changing. The same thing applied with your 401. What do you want to do with your 401 now that you left the company? Do you want to go to an IRA? There was so many options. Once in awhile the union would sign up and they would say we have a meeting with these financial advisors, but you would go to the meeting hall and there would be 150 guys, and two guys sitting at one desk and trying to get information out of them. Unless you were really lucky -- I mean they were doing the best they can, but in that atmosphere it's hard to really to soak into your brain. So we would set up different financial advisors, come back to the house and talk to them. That's how we finally came up with it. But it was tough because here you are working for your pension. I mean everybody I know is an ironworker, everybody has two things wrong with them, everybody. You are losing your hearing, and it's inevitable it's going to happen because we work around noisy equipment all the time. And the next thing is you are going to have asbestos. If you worked in that plant you are going to have asbestos. So what you have to do is tell everybody this upfront with it but protect yourself as best you can. I have asbestos, but it's a minor kind of asbestos I hope, and the main reason being I went through a research with a guy named Dr. Williams from Hopkins . He was in charge of all the asbestos programs, and his primary thing was almost 95 percent of the people he knows that's passed away from asbestos smoked. Having said that, why would anybody in their right mind smoke in an atmosphere. Having said that again, I see people do it all the time. Here's a protective mask specifically for asbestos. Guys would put it on to start the job, halfway through it because it's hot and uncomfortable take it off. Now, if you have wife and kids and know they are depending on your salary, forget about that heat, forget about the temptation for cigarettes. You are going to do what it takes to take care of you. I have seen it over and over again, and I can list the guys that have died from asbestos, and every single one that I know of at one time smoked. So I mean that was the kind of things, but very seldom would you have a meeting and say well, we're going to do this job here. Oh, yeah, by the way, there's asbestos there, be aware. They would say things like there shouldn't be any asbestos, but why are these masks here? That was the kind of atmosphere. So after awhile you've got to say to yourself well, I have to take care of me before anybody else. For example, in the ironworker department, the last one was the 423, everybody in that department I would say that's been there more than five years, every single person, all but two have had accidents, all but two guys that I know of had an accident, never been to the dispensary. Because I go to the safety items, I go through the accident reports, you know what can we do to save this, what can we do to stop this, and only two guys in that whole department, ironworkers, have never been to the dispensary. When I say the ironworkers, that's the 423 department. At one time way back when we had 350 people there was a 424 department, so it was a different number, but the current one, which has been in since probably the last 25 years, everybody but two people had an accident. Luckily I'm one of them, and people would say -- if I say to you look, I'm one of the ironworkers that never had an accident, a lot of people would say well, that's because you don't do anything or -- I mean that was the atmosphere. Well, some of the guys know hey, well, I work with him, I know safety is number one, period. But another guy that I know, he asked me not to mention his name, he would fill in for me every once in awhile. He has never been to the dispensary. So there was only two of us in the whole ironworkers. So that tells you right off the hand what kind of work it was.

How many experienced ironworkers are still there?

See, that's a hard question, because I go back and forth with the union hall and I contact people that I worked with, and it's hard to come up with a concrete number, because some of the ironworkers that were there transferred to different departments and now they are back again, but my latest count was 21 people. When I was there, it was about 300, and they went down to about 150, now 21. Now I understand combined -- here's the strange -- this is something that's very hard to explain. An ironworker is a craftsman. A craftsman means you had apprenticeship. Pipefitters are craftsman. A bricklayer, craftsman. They go through an apprenticeship, and it's really hard mathwise. Now your millwrights that were directly assigned to a mill never been a craftsman, there's no apprenticeship, it's almost like a helper that you learn -- I'm not saying they are not skilled, but I'm saying they are not a craftsman. Well, the latest contract agreement they changed the name millwright as not being a craft to multicraft. So here you have never been a craft, but now you are a multicraft, so you've got multicraft and craft, craft being the ironworkers, multicraft being the millwright. Explain that. But the best thing I could go to some of these meetings was what they included in most mechanical jobs down there was a welding skill. They sent everybody who wanted to go to welding school, and if you got out welding school they increased your craftsman, because welding is a craft. Now you are a multicraft because you were a millwright and a welder. The reason I say this is what they did was now -- they only have 21 ironworkers, they combined the millwrights and the ironworkers. Now they have got one unit of a hundred people. Now I heard this last week. So a guy that used to be a millwright is now an ironworker or a multicraft. I don't know what their title was now. They may have -- I don't know what it is. But some of the guys that I saw -- well, all the ironworkers bosses, every single one of them is gone. I don't know any ironworkers there. We have bosses that were a carpenter, bosses are now ironworkers. The only ironworker boss that I know is still down there has been transferred to the BOF is like a sales rep. in materials and stuff like that. But all the other bosses now are gone. The next thing I heard -- now this is again -- there are so many rumors and innuendos it's hard to say anything that's true until you actually see it. They did away with the safety department all together, and they had two people that ran it. There was a girl named Mary Ellen and Glen Adams who are super, super coordinators, I mean safety was their thing. You could tell -- when they talk to them, you could see the vein in their neck. I was told that they were part -- they were asked to leave also, but then I ran into a guy at Home Depot who was a general foreman down there, he told me no, they are back, and he goes back as like a consultant kind of thing. So maybe the safety department is not diminished like I thought it was. But these guys really -- I mean they save numbers, jobs and money, and I was told they got rid of them, so I don't know.

When you first grew up and started working down there, you were living in the area of Sparrows Point and your wife was down there. When did you move up here?

When I came out of the service, my wife lived on Dundalk Avenue . My sister lived in Dundalk because I think they left the bungalows in the late 50's, early 60's. They were living in Shipman Way , in that general area right there. But when I came back -- see, the thing of it is when I went in the service, I was out in the projects, and the project is again something you don't hear too much about. Where your family lives is depending on dependents, and the projects, some of the houses have two bedrooms, three bedrooms, so forth. So when you get out of high school, you've got to get a job or you have to leave, because they raised their rent if you stay there, and if you leave they move over to a smaller area. So our option was to leave and move into a smaller area, and my option was to go right in the military. When I came back out, I couldn't move in with her. Of course we were married then also. So when I came back out, we first moved to Fort Bragg , North Carolina after coming back from overseas, and my wife worked for BG&E. Well, I was getting out in March and they contacted her in December and said if you want your job back and if you start before December, we'll give you that whole year vacation. So she moved up and got an apartment in Halethorpe , and when I got out of the service I moved in with her. And then when I started at the Point, we were able to get enough money together to -- after about a year to buy a house in Violetville, which is like around Arbutus, so we stayed there for ten years, and then we moved up here, because going from Violetville to Sparrows Point was unbelievable traffic.

You had to go on the beltway?

Right. In those days I went up Guilford Avenue , Pratt Street and everything else going around through town, and I had -- you could park your car at the Union Hall and take the old 26 in, and what it did was avoid all that traffic down there and all the toxic orange and dust and everything else. So I would park it there and get a 26 up to the Union Hall, take my car from there to Arbutus, and then we had an option of buying this house. You mean to tell me I can go from here to 95 to the beltway. Between here and Sparrows Point I think is like a dozen red lights at the most. When you get from here to 95, there's nothing until you get back on the beltway. So I think from here to Sparrows Point it only takes about 20 minutes at tops. But I was using an hour and a half each way in Arbutus. That's how that happened.

Do you find that it kind of broke up the community? When you were living in O'Donnell Heights and your wife was on Dundalk Avenue , you could have gone to every house and found somebody who either worked at Sparrows Point or had a relative who worked there, and it kind of created a community outside the plant. Did you miss that at all when you moved up here?

Absolutely. Because when you moved up here, I would say you saw less and less people that lived in the general area that worked at Sparrows Point. When we lived down close to Dundalk Avenue , everybody either worked there or had a friend who worked there. It was just the main thing. It was like a community thing. I mean it wasn't just work, and I think that was the part of it was so fun. I mean you enjoyed getting up going to work and seeing all your friends again, and like sometimes we would have baseball games after work and stuff like that. It was like you are buddies again. It wasn't like I saw him all day at work, I don't want to see him. It was like a community thing. It was almost like a senior citizen home for younger people. Everybody liked to get together. I mean there's always fights and stuff like that, but generally it was almost like in the military kind of thing, you depended on each other and you worked with each other really hard. That was the best thing about having the hard work. I could tell you stories about some of the jobs that they gave us down there. Like you work in the coke ovens and they have a filtering system for the coke oven dust, and they call them pallets, and they are about maybe five foot by four foot wide, and they are like little vents, and you would move them from these towers because they are so dirty and you replace them with new ones. But how do you think you hook them up? You climb down in the tower or you are lowered down with a crane, and you hook on to it and pick it up. Now this thing is full of toxic dust. So as they are pulling up, all the dust is flying all over you, so when you come out of there they can't recognize you. We did those kind of things. You knew when you are in there something bad is going to happen. Well, like they had a benzine plant in the coke oven or a cobalt plant, and you go in there and the biggest warning would be like at the entrance leave your striker at the gate because you no longer can have any strikers or anything with sparks, or can't go past this area without wearing a mask. So you knew what was going through you, it was just a question of time. So you always got to take care of yourself in those aspects. The same thing with asbestos. Some of the stuff that they put people through, again a lot of people want to talk about it. Like the court case, who goes to court, who doesn't go to court. Asbestos. You go to see [Peter] Angelos and then go through a whole process of a physical, and it really is strenuous, it really is. Then you are given the paperwork, and the paperwork says you have asbestos. So you get a check that's rounded off, say a thousand dollars. From a thousand dollars, Angelos gets his part, but then the physical is also paid for. So here you are taking a physical because you've got hurt in the company for something that they knew about to begin with and you are paying for it. So I went back to Angelos after awhile, and I said you know this doesn't make any sense, I have Blue Cross and Blue Shield or an insurance plan. Well, that was supposed to cover that. Well, how would I know that unless I thought about it. What do we do about it? So here's what we do. Well, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, they are different insurance programs now. Wait a minute, I've got the bill here. Oh, yeah, so we'll resubmit it. It's only like $250 for the physical, but this goes back in '87. Okay, so they resubmit it and after about a year later you get a check in the mail reimbursement. Okay. All through this whole process every so often you've got to go see Angelos and take a new physical. I'm working midnight over at BOF and I've got an appointment in the morning at eight o'clock for a physical. Instead of canceling it, I figure I'll go over there, it's on -- downtown somewhere, I forget the name of the street. Go over there and take the physical, and this is really hard, you have to breathe through a machine, and they count your lung capacity. Well, this time after you do it three times you stop. Now you are really dizzy, you have to inhale something and you wait five minutes and then you do the same test again. Well, now I did it again, now I am really dizzy. When I say dizzy, because I'm trying to my best -- this is my physical, and they come by and he said yeah, we got all the information. I said well, look, I'm really dizzy, I can hardly move. She said well, it happens to a lot of people. Just sit here for about ten, fifteen minutes, you will be okay. I'm thinking myself well, you really took it pretty good. I'm so dizzy, I can hardly stand up. So I am sitting there, she leaves, I'm sitting there and it's a hard chair, and I get to thinking right outside of here in her office is this fancy room with all these office -- it's got like this, nice little couches and stuff. I'll go in there and sit down for ten minutes. I sit down there for ten minutes and I said well, it's not too bad. Next thing I know she is waking me up, it's noon. I worked midnight, right, I took this test and I went to sleep. She said well, I'm going to go to lunch. I don't know if you want to stay any longer or not. I said no, I've got to go home. But that was the kind of stuff you do. Well, two years before they finally closed I get another bill -- I mean I get another payment, and again guess what's on there? Another physical. And so I go to Angelos, the guy's name was Fred Dirsk, and I tell him about it. He said yeah, we have to refile. I said well, you know they are talking about closing the plant down. Yeah, well, it shouldn't take that long. Refile, I don't hear anything for six months. So I call him and he said yeah, the problem is whoever took the physicals before, they kind of like spread out, they were like a team and they spread out, and I don't know whose got your paperwork. I said who billed me? Wouldn't that be -- anyway, he said we're working on it. Now I call him every month, now I call him every week. Now it got to the point where he doesn't even answer my phone calls, and guess what happens? Now we're under. I see him at the hall, and I introduce myself to him. I said why is it you never just -- it wasn't a lot of money, it was like $160, why wouldn't you reimburse in a two-year period something you already reimbursed me for, for another time for the same item, the physicals? He said well, we worked on it. There was a lot of people involved, we never could get it in concrete. The only thing I can tell you now is they are closed, you can't do anything about it. Now that's one item. Another item was a guy -- this is really -- you won't believe this. A friend of mine got burnt down there with steam really bad. They had a big inspection, and he said part of the steam, something was unsafe, but it was written up ten years ago and it had to do with a certain type of valve or something. Anyway, so he got burnt real bad. When you get burnt with steam, it brittles your bones. He got to the point where -- he was out for like a year, and when I would see him, you couldn't shake his hands or he couldn't make a muscle because he would fracture. So they finally gave him a disability through the company. Would you believe he lost that? The latest accident down there that you probably heard about was electrical, a guy grounded out, and what happened was he was told -- went through all the safety procedures, contract by phone, this is down, this is down, this is down. He said okay. So he had the proper testing equipment to test this to make sure it was down. It was 440 testing equipment, but what he was testing was 6900, so he tested it out. It was just like putting two bare wires. Insulation for 6900 is almost nothing you can imagine, and it just burnt him, and actually fried his hard hat and his glasses and everything else. So I ran into him -- this is going back a couple of years. I ran into him recently at a dance once and he was just walking around, he had a short-sleeve shirt, and you could see the scars. Looked like he was in a guillotine, and he said he had lost all his benefits from this. So those are the kind of things that just doesn't make any sense. I mean like the guys that we hoped that were backing up politically -- I mean you don't want to mention democrat or republican, you want to mention them all. Why would they stand back knowing that this was such a large part of the community? I mean our government grew up in that district. Knowing this was such a large part, everybody involved, not just a laborer, everybody that has a set of lungs and stand by and let this happen? It was so at one time uniform. One time at Sparrows Point -- now it may be a little bit of mindset, but we blamed everything that went wrong on foreign steel. You name it, foreign steel. At one time at Sparrows Point we had one vehicle that was a foreign steel on Sparrows Point believe it or not, and still remember the guy's name, I can't say it because it's Bill Thompson, but he had a Volkswagen “beetle,” the only car -- he was a welder foreman. At the end of every single day written in the orange dirt on his thing was "Foreign piece of crap." That was the only vehicle there because they said foreign steel was going to do us, and the same thing with cans. You had to buy your soft drink in tin cans because if we don't we might lose that market. We don't want to do this. But that was the mindset the whole time. And you really believed them because everything they said -- you didn't ask any questions, you kind of believed them. I'll give you another good example that's current, United Way . When you agreed to sign on at Sparrows Point, you signed in your voucher that you would give I think one-tenth of one percent or seven-tenths of one percent. It was a small number to United Way. Now, nobody understood it because that was part of your job, if you didn't take that, all of a sudden you weren't qualified. Now they would never say that, but that would be the end result. But it really never bothered me because it was such a small amount, and you would have an annual meeting about United Way about how much we are giving, how proud everybody was, and it makes you feel good. I mean the money is going to something you kind of believe in. Going from that to one of the best contributors in the whole State of Maryland down to a minuscule joke. It got to a point where my wife was involved in Hopkins with United Way , so I would go with her, because some of her classes she gave to was for night shift, and I don't particularly want her to go down to Hopkins at night shift, so I would ride down with her and listen to her program. It was so professional, flip charts, overhead screens, any questions, professional help as far as paperwork. Now you go to a typical Sparrows Point United Way , here's what it is. Any of you guys want to give? That's it. Or come up and see Shelton , and he will show you how to sign the paperwork. We went from one of the best to down to there. It just doesn't make any sense. Once they have something that everybody agrees to, everybody likes, everybody thinks hey, it's the right thing to do, how could you possibly lose it? That's what we've got now. I mean it was really bad.

Well, here's a question we always ask people, if you had to do it over again, would you?

What do you think about -- I would do the same thing all over again. I mean I might do a few things differently. For example, I would never take the buyout. I would still be working there, because two things that play a role mainly. I really liked working there, I really liked the people there, and you stay thin and stay in shape by working. Unless you've got a regimented plan of what are you going to do when you retire, this thing about retiring, just take it easy nobody likes. I don't know anybody of my friends that are retired that really like that. I mean you might appreciate it, looking out the window and it's snowing, I don't have to go in. You might appreciate that part, but as far as the actual not working, it's ridiculous. Everybody likes to do something with their time and their skills. I mean I've done things down there like my mother's birthday, I was able to take and burn 90s out of steel and make her a little plaque. You do it on your coffee time, you do it on your lunch break, or if you do it on night shift you might have time, but you enjoy that kind of stuff. Now we've lost it all. Your meetings with different people about what are you going to do this weekend or what are you going to do this vacation, not seeing those, I really miss that part. But as far as the problem solving is, we're going to start a new job, what's the best way to handle it. You miss those kind of things, you really do. Right now I'm doing things like I rebuilt a house on the inside, all the bathrooms and so forth and everything else, but it's still not the same as down there. That's what you really miss.

What do you do for health insurance?

Right now I was fortunate enough I put 30 years in the military. I put four years regular and the rest of the time National Guard, so the military offers an insurance plan, and had it not been for that, because we take a lot of prescriptions because the atmosphere and so forth. Another thing you don't hear too much about asbestos. Now some people say it's a fact, it's not a fact, but as a matter of fact I will tell you how scarey asbestos is. We don't want to go to court if you think you have it on either side of the project, whether you are defense or the other one, because if you go and you think you have it and you go to court, you might prove you have it worse than you have, so it costs them more money. Or on the other hand if you go there and you think you have it and they prove that you don't, you don't get anything, so nobody wants to go court, but it's really terrible. But you get things like allergies. I can tell when it's going to rain because of the barometric pressure, my nose and my lungs will ache, so I do a whole lot of blowing my nose and so forth, and I never had that before. Now, do you develop allergies later? Some of the doctors say some of it could be a whole accumulation of things, and there's a whole lot of different things that could cause it, but I have never had it before and I know what it is. But those are some of the things that you do. Now, can I go get life insurance or health insurance and tell them hey, I've got asbestos, would you like to cover me? There's not too many people knocking on the door, but fortunately with the military I'm able to get a decent insurance, it's not the same, but here's some of the things you miss. If you have a family doctor and you have a family dentist particularly that you have gone to all your life that you finally really enjoy and you trust him, you've got to go to a new health plan. Does it cover him? No. So my dentist now I've got to pay him out of my own pocket unless I go to their dentist, and I would rather pay him out of my own pocket because I trust this guy. Those are the things that you are going through that you never thought you would ever have to. To this day I don't know why the government took over our pension. We were told in all these meetings, towards the end anyway, that the two things that keep us from making money are our legacy and our pension because there are so many of us. Well, just prior to selling the plant, the government took over our pension, and they just said we will just eliminate the healthcare, and then they sold the plant. So is there anything that they tell you that you really feel comfortable with? I mean they are telling me the truth. Just like the first of those conversations with management is the truth, and it really is. I mean I really believe that because it's hard to say -- I mean I had a good job all these years, but the way they treated the people once they retired, it's almost like we're in Taiwan or Cambodia or something, I mean that's the way they treat their older -- they don't treat their older people that bad. It's just uncivilized, and to see so many people when you go to a hall and you see guys that are in the hall and you hear the stories, most of them are on walk-around bottles or they have canes and they can't breathe, I can't go out, you know, and there was nothing that the company didn't know or the asbestos people didn't know, but then you come off as being the victim because you -- I don't think anybody should get paid for asbestos. Personally, if you have asbestos you shouldn't get paid, unless, and it's a big unless, you need the physical help. If you need an operation because of asbestos, they should pay for it, but don't give me a thousand dollars because I might have it. I don't want it, I really don't. But if I need it or if I die and the wife needs something because I died from that, that's what it should cover. All this stuff about these class action and everything else. Asbestos is an individual thing. You and I might have the same thing, and it affects me a lot harder, then that's where it should cover. Just to cover everybody with the same amount is absolutely asinine, and everybody I talk to basically feels the same way. Well, some people will say well, you have asbestos, you don't think you should get money? No, I honestly don't unless I need it. But once I need it or the family needs it, I don't want to have to go through a whole bunch of stuff, you know probate and all this other stuff.

Well, then you are lucky in the sense you have the health insurance.

Yes.

That's usually where the people need the prescriptions and they want the money for that, and anything that they can do to generate some income to cover that part of it.

Yeah, and I will give you a good example of exactly what you said. My sister and her husband are in their 78's, so they have been retired for a long time. Well, he was told to transfer from Bethlehem Steel in Sparrows Point to Burns Harbor , and he going to be a big wheel in the plate mill, and they helped him with the house and everything else, which really worked out fine. He went over there, and after they are there awhile they are going to retire so many upper management, so they offered him a deal, as well as lot of other people, and part of that deal was a really cheap life insurance for the rest of your life. When I say cheap, I'm talking six dollars a month. This goes way back now. Well, after you are gone about two or three years, they decided it was too costly for the company and they said no, we're no longer going to do that, so these are mostly managers. So instead of getting angry like ironworkers would do, punch them in the nose and all that nonsense, they said we're all going to get together and file a class action, which is what they did, and they won it. So all these years they won that class action after going to court. So do you know what their coverage is now? Zero, because the key word is we went bankrupt. So they are in their 78's, and you know what kind of medicine and so forth are like, and so they have to pay for their own insurance. Again, it goes back to the same thing, file for new insurance once you reach this critical age. It really is terrible. And then the last thing, you won't believe this. This is hard, still hard for me to believe this. When I finally took my buyout and I finally got all the papers, now I got to a point where my wife does proofreading for Hopkins , so she's up to a computer and everything else, so she can read the fine print a whole lot better than me. We finally got everything organized, now I'm going to file for Social Security. Now, they told me if I took the buyout it wouldn't affect my Social Security, so I believed them. However, everything else at Sparrows Point after this point in time you get a little cautious. So when I went to Social Security, I had all the paperwork and forms filed, everything written down what we're going to get, and I had two people, one was a learner and one was a person who does it all the time, and I gave them all the paperwork that I have at Sparrows Point. Here's my buyout, I'm going to get a buyout of $50,000, I'm getting it in May of '03 and the other half in January of '04, will that affect my Social Security because I'm going to file for it in February of '04. Now as long as you have a paper saying it's severance and it's a one-time shot, it will not affect you, so I signed everything. I took Social Security for a year, and then I got a letter from them saying I owe them back in years because that's now included as ordinary income. I went through everything that they say you are supposed to. If they had said to me when I signed up for it no, you don't want to sign up for it now because you've got an income and you won't get anything anyway, so why not wait until an older age? I would not have signed up. So having said that -- now the way you handle that is instead of getting angry again is you go through their thing, you protest it and go down and have meeting and everything else, and I did that, and they said -- that woman said well, I don't understand. You've got all the paperwork that you have, but it's not in the one folder. What do you mean it's not in one folder? I gave you everything and I left. Everything I have now is a copy of what I gave you, and here's the paper and it had to do with the buyout and it said it was on there as severance pay. So the woman said well, I don't understand that. So she said I will guarantee that it will be corrected. A month goes by, it's not corrected. Call her again. To go through Social Security is unbelievable. You've got to hang on the line for half a day. It's astronomically -- anyway, so we finally get an appointment and go down there. Now I take the wife with me, and we sat back there and I go to the same woman, and she started telling me the same thing well, I thought -- well maybe they are checking. The wife said look, I'm angry and I'm going to tell you right now what you did is bologna, you can't say this. She said now my anger, you can get mad at me for being angry, but the reason is it's generated by what you guys did or did not do right. So anyway, the woman said well -- and not only that I want to talk to your boss. So of course we sat there the whole time. She goes gets her boss, and she came back, and they sat down. They said yeah, well, we don't know why they are saying that you owe it back because it is a severance pay. I never worked a single day in '04. All that money was for '03. The only reason I'm getting this '04 was because it was easier for them to pay for it, and we didn't have to pay as much tax in '03. We said we never agreed with that, but I never worked a single day in '04. So having said all this stuff, they said well, yeah, this should be taken care of, and so the wife said also I want a name of the person in charge of Social Security that I can contact if this is not, and the one woman said I don't know if I can give you that. The wife said, "Wait a minute, why not?" We're just tired of repeating the same thing. Now you are saying it's settled. That was the stuff we went through with Social Security. So as of right now she just went online and said we were getting the right amount and it should be no back payment. Again, I retired -- my actual last working -- I retired the end of May. Actually I worked until the end of June.

In '03?

In '03. I retired in May, all my paperwork was in, and they asked me to stay on on a weekly basis, because at that time I was a crane operator and they needed crane car operators. So I worked a week at a time, so I actually got four checks from the new company, the ISG, but you would not believe of the four checks, none of my salary was the same for the exact amount of hours. As a matter of fact, on one of the checks they paid me as I was on vacation, and each time I would take -- after the first time I would go to the main office and I would say we've got a problem here, here's what I'm supposed to make and here's what you paid me. Well, there's a lot of people that got a problem. Well, I'm glad you are taking this so great. So they put the paperwork in, the next week the same thing. So when I finally left, I was going to leave the end of June and take unemployment. The week after I left I got a check for a thousand dollars saying it was the difference of all those checks. So it was actually salary so I couldn't file for unemployment, and then the following I think two weeks later I got my first retirement check. So I never really had to file for Social Security. But I know a lot of guys that had hell-raising stories. Believe it or not the ones that affected most of them that was similar to it is the guys that had been married more than once. Who gets their pension? Their first wife, their second wife, in some cases their third wife? The one guy told me that his first wife got his pension and he threatened to take her to court because she wasn't going to do anything about it, she was taking the money. So he finally got lawyer and the lawyer said well, I contacted her and everything is settled. This is after about six months. And it's going to cost you more to go to court than it would for her to pay you back, so let her have that and start from here. So it was those kinds of stories. Now, how many are accurate? I don't know, because this is all going through the hall by word of mouth, and a lot of guys are still angry.

What was it like the last few days? I mean you had worked there 40 years?

The last few days or the last week in particular when I knew it was coming, after May the 1st I knew I could go on a weekly basis, I just started taking away some of my tools that I had accumulated for 40 years, like old wrenches and stuff like that, different things I had in different lockers, because being an ironworker you have a locker in each part of the plant. You've got one in the blast furnace, one in the tin mill, and so I went back to each of those and just checked through them and stuff like that. I would buy a combination lock, but I would force it open so you could pull it open and close it. I didn't have to remember a combination, I just knew where the locker was and just pulled it over, and I really never had any trouble. But I had went around the last week or so to all those and cleaned everything out, make sure everything is good, said goodbye to all my friends in the last month or so, and then the last day that I was there, you come in in the morning and you don't even change into work clothes, you stay in your street clothes, and you go to the break room and have your coffee, listen to the lineup and say goodbye to everybody, and you walk around to different parts of the plant and you say goodbye to those people and then you leave, so you are done about -- by noon you are done. That was the last time.

How did you feel?

I felt happy in a sense that I didn't get killed down there, but on the other hand I missed the people. Even the guys I didn't particularly care for, because they had specific things I wasn't really fond of, I still miss those people, because it was like a -- not confronted them, but you kind of like overcome them kind of stuff, but there were so many good guys that would sit down and give you a hand with anything. Like I know a guy that on the outside had like a little towing service right. He got a call once, a friend of his broke down in Pennsylvania . He just took off and went and got him, didn't charge him anything. It was those kind of guys. Again, it was like a best scenario was a military group that's either going into combat or come back.

Did you ever think about having your daughters go to work there?

Never, never. My daughters always -- when we were growing up, I never really thought about college, but after going through the experiences you realize how important college was. So my girls, they went through a daddy thing like when they came home from school, you sat down here for an hour and you did homework. You are going to be the smartest kid in that school, whatever it takes, and luckily I didn't have to do a whole lot because they were all girls, and to the point where they were really -- I will give you an example. My middle daughter is the first female to go to Perry Hall Senior High and be class president all the time. Those kind of atmospheres, and my older daughter has got a BA from Townson and a Master's from Hopkins . My other ones are -- I've got one -- well, she's a doctor at Hopkins now. She got her Masters and Doctorate and everything else, she's at Hopkins . My youngest one is the charge nurse at Kennedy Krieger, and she went through the community college and did excellent, absolutely excellent. So it was always put in their mind that you are going to get an education. I could see how important it was, and you could tell, when they sit down and read something, they actually get into it, they don't just glance through it and stuff like that. And fortunately her mother is the same way. Her mother into that education stuff. So when we were growing up college wasn't even an option. As soon as you leave here, you are going to work at some place, either a Chevrolet plant or some place like that or get in the military. In my military career, I love the military, I really do. I was on certain things that nobody has ever even heard of. I guess I can tell you about them. One was -- I just came back from overseas, England , which was really great, but I had been back in the country only about like a couple of months, and they were talking of going over Nam . I was stationed at the Pope Air Force base right next to Bragg. That's what the rumors were. So I went to the commander and I said I'll do my tour, but I hope I'm not on this because I just came back and there's guys in my same career field that have never gone over. He said that's a consideration, but if need be, if your name comes up, if they take everybody in the unit, you are going to go, no doubt about it, that's no problem. It's just you've got 30 people and you take 15, I shouldn't be on that list doing the same job. Well, we'll see. A friend of mine come to me that I met down in Carolina , he said if your name is called, I'll go in your place because I want to go overseas to begin with. So luckily a lot of names were called and mine was not in there. So I came home and told my wife, we are really lucky that we missed this time. I will be home at least six months. In those days in the Air Force -- I'm the crew chief on the aircraft, you kind of rotated. So after having said that, I get a call about three weeks later, said pack your bags, you are heading south, and it was like an exercise thing. You go to the base if you live off, go to the base and you sign in, and you have to do that within an hour of the telephone calls, it's called “on-call rostering,” and then most of the time you just sit there for a couple of hours and they say look, you guys got a day in, see you tomorrow, and the best thing was you only had to work a couple hours. Well, I do this one time, and they said you are assigned to this aircraft, so me and my friend we saying -- now they are going to assign you to an aircraft, really looks real. Well, they had to call you by name to get on the aircraft. This is really well. Now we take off, and then the rumors are -- there's a couple of the guys, particularly for the career area have been around awhile, they said well, I know we're going to Nam . This is like -- we're going to transfer our C130's. Well, if that's the way it is, that's the way it is, right. So we land at MacDill Air Force Base, and we're told don't go near the phones, this is a secret mission. So we refuel, we go in there, there's like a little snack bar. We go into a place and get a soda, and everybody in that place is in line for a payphone, including the pilot. So I call her, she was Fayetteville at the time. I called her and I said we're heading somewhere, we may not be back tonight, but don't worry, that's the only thing I can tell you. So we take off and we land in Versethy (ph), Brazil , stay over night. Take off again, landed in the Ascension Islands , stay there over night, same uniform. This is like four days, right, and we can't stand each other, and there's like 60 of us on one aircraft, three aircrafts. So we take off again, and now the guy from career said -- now we're getting to know everybody. He said there's no doubt about it, we're heading for Nam , I hope you guys packed summer clothes and all that stuff. So we take off again, we land in the middle of the night on this runway, the three aircrafts lined up behind each other. The pilot comes back and says all I'm going to tell you is just sit in your seat, there will be somebody on board to tell us what our mission is. Okay. So we see headlights coming down the runway and here comes a Jeep. The tailgate lowers down, a Marine colonel walks on with a guy with a clipboard, and says, "All right, you assholes" -- that's what he said, Air Force assholes, when I call your name you say here, sir, and shut up. I will tell you why you are here. After he called everybody, he said, "Welcome to the Congo , you are in the Belgian Congo , you are here to transport nuns, and I don't want to hear any crying." We flew into the Congo , I was there about I guess about four months, and we were doing -- that's when the Belgians first pulled out of the Congo . They sent us there to transport nuns. Here's what they were doing. Everybody in the Belgian Congo that had any official position, the mayors, the governor and everybody else were all Belgian. Anybody in the military who were officers were all Belgians, they all pulled out within a month, and so if you were in the Congolese Army and you had prior service, you moved up from a private to who knows, a colonel. So you can imagine the chaos, so they were killing each other. So we went over there transporting nuns. When I came back, we were told we couldn't tell anybody, although the paper in Fayetteville said three aircraft went into the Congo to assist in visa, whatever they call it, but in my group alone we were flying back and forth every Friday and have a new aircraft come in. You didn't leave, just a new aircraft, flying crew. In my group alone we had fifteen aircraft, but the paper said three. So how much propaganda could you believe, you know the stuff you see right now? How much do you think?

You can say beyond this, but would you do it again? Good thing you're not in the military again.

Yes. I have a lot of my relatives, particularly my sister's kids, nieces and nephews are all military. Most of them are in the Navy. First officer in our whole family is a female, little Terry. When she went to OCS, she had been in the regular tour, she was a sergeant. She went to OCS, and she was there in Tyson , Tennessee , and after about three weeks, it really is hard, OCS -- especially on a young girl -- she wasn't ready to quit, but she was really depressed, and I wrote her a letter about some of the things I've done, and it seemed like it helped her anyway. Because my one daughter who is a doctor at Hopkins , she addressed a graduating nurse class. We went there and her speech was very -- something I have used a hundred times and since that time. Her speech was -- and I have used it on the ironworkers. Being a nurse is the same as the movie the Wizard of Oz and everybody was like what? Let me explain it. She said to be a nurse, you have to have heart, you have to have courage, so those kind of things, and then she said during the speech the wicked witch of nursing school is insurance companies, and everybody in that graduating, including the faculty, stood up and cheered. So I used it, and I used it on this time when she was in OCS, and I said to be on OCS is like the Wizard of Oz, away from home. I will tell you what I've still got that speech, every once in awhile I use it on different occasions. I tried it on the ironworkers, I gave like a little safety talk thing, and they were like what is he talking about? So it didn't work as good there.

All right. Were you guys ever on strike?

Believe it or not the very first year I was in high school and during the summer they used to hire summer help at Sparrows Point was in '59.

That was the big strike. So you were involved in that?

I was still in high school, but I was going to go down for a summer job, so you had to go down and apply for it. So I went down on the old 26, and as you went up in there they had signs all over the place. That was the first time I was ever called a scab. Wait a minute, I'm just here for a summer job, I'm not a scab. But other than that, no, I was not involved in any strikes at all. We had a couple layoffs. None of them real major, but we had some items that happened that they won't tell you too much about. They cut jobs back and one method was they offered a bunch of guys a buyout because they are going to get laid off anyway and never come back, and a lot of apprentices in my department, a lot of guys took it. After a couple years, they decided they were shorthanded and they offered these guys the thing back, hired again. However, when they did, they lost all their seniority, which is a big thing down there. The only person that didn't do that was a guy that took his check and never cashed it, and when he came back he turned it back to them, and they gave him back his seniority, so those kind of things happened, but I have been laid off before. Like I said the longest one was for only a couple of months, and it really hasn't been too bad.

Any other memories that you can think of?

I think I have done pretty good.

It's been a real pleasure talking with you and hearing all these stories, very thorough and very good.

I think that's about it. I'm glad in a sense that they did it, but I still do not know why they offered us a buyout. In the past -- if you are going to cut work forces, you simply lay them off, and that's been our history all these years. Here, they gave us a buyout to eliminate some of the work force. Why? I'm glad, because if they had said to you no, we're strictly going to be eliminating jobs by seniority, I probably would have still been there and just worked with them. However here I got a bonus, but I do miss the working part, but I know a lot of guys -- I know guys in my department now are 77 and still working, 77. I talked to them and I said why? I mean your Social Security and so forth, why are you working? He said because of my health. That's the only reason. Not because of the money, because of the health or what the health could cost him, and a majority of people that are Social Security age that are working, that's exactly what they are saying.

I noticed when I met you the first time you were at the retirees, you enjoy getting together with the guys?

Love it.

Telling old war stories, like going back in time?

Yeah, that primary is, really, because things you forget about. The negative side is you forget names, and you honestly do. But as far as the times when they tell stories, oh, yeah. Like I said every ironworker there has a catch phrase or some kind of name, nickname, and you sit back and look at them and you can analyze and say you know, that's a pretty good nickname. Like the guy that's working there now who is 77, his nickname was Howdishell -- I mean his name is Howdishell, so his nickname is Howdy Doody.

Well, that's about it.