“The grain of the break tells them the carbon content of that heat,” he answered. “They’re ready to tap now.” He steered me to a nearby iron ladder which we climbed to a small platform (Neal called it a pulpit). There we had a perfect view of the drama below.
The crane on the track overhead moved over the ladle, and two big hooks closed over the ladle handle and effortlessly picked up the 250 tons of soup. Then the crane carried the bucket, like a dog carrying a basket in his teeth, to an empty mold. The ladle tilted, and liquid steel poured into the mold with a shower of sparks, as though a hundred thousand sparklers had been simultaneously lit.
“That’s called pouring a heat,” Neal explained. “When it hardens, it’s called an ingot. Each one weighs five tons. Time for us to head back now.”
As soon as we were outside the building, away from the noise and heat, I posed the question that troubled me most. “Neal, why did some of the men keep looking at me so strangely?”
He shrugged. “Workers are s-superstitious about women coming into the plant. Think it brings bad luck—an accident or something.”
“How awful!”
“Don’t let it get you.”
As we walked back to the office one overwhelming concern took root in my mind. How could the men stand the heat, the noise and the danger hour after hour, day after day? No wonder they staggered to the nearest bar after work. I voiced this to Neal.
He did not answer for a moment. “They get used to it,” he finally answered.
“But—it’s inhuman!”
He suddenly stopped and turned and looked at me, a glint of anger in his eyes. “That’s why we’ll have a union here someday.”
As we entered the administration building, slate-gray low-hanging clouds were beginning to spit rain. But my thoughts were not on the weather. I was wondering how Neal Brinton would come to terms with his circumstances. My mind played back to me his comment about the lucky guys who could go on to study chemistry and metallurgy. Where was this ambitious young puddler’s helper headed?
Mr. McKeever greeted us affably. “Learn anything, Julie?”
“More than I can remember. Your puddler’s helper was a super tour guide.” I shot Neal a grateful look.
“Steel is a world of its own,” was McKeever’s reply. “It’s been my world all my life. When I was a little boy, Grandfather Yoder would take me by the hand and trot me down to the plant to see and learn. Wily old Quaker.” He chuckled. “He wanted to make sure that the love of steel would be part of my blood and bone and marrow, as it was my father’s.” For an instant there was a softened, faraway look in his eyes. Then he was all business again as he dismissed Neal and wound up his conversation with my father.
“Remember my slogan, Ken,” he said in parting. “It’s easier for all of us if we work together.”
At dinner that night my visit to the mill dominated the conversation until dessert. Then Mother asked Dad how his meeting with McKeever had turned out.
“All right. I have the order for the ERP booklet.”
Mother stared at my father. “Ken, you don’t seem very enthusiastic. Are there conditions?”
“No . . . Well, in a way.” Dad looked uncomfortable.
“What’s wrong?”
Dad saw that Tim and Anne-Marie had finished dessert, so he excused them from the table to get started on homework. He looked at me doubtfully. For a moment I thought I would be asked to leave too. Then he shrugged.
“I see no problem with the booklet itself. After all, I’m just filling a print order. Certainly it’s not the printer’s role to censor the content of what he prints. And let’s face it, the money will be a godsend,” he added, taking his napkin and folding it neatly beside his plate. “But after McKeever and I had gone over all the copy, he threw something else into the pot.”
“What was that?”
“He talked about the Yoder ads they want to run in the paper. Said he and his father want to build up more respect for the company in Alderton—institutional advertisements, they’re called.”
“Anything wrong with that?”
“No. Many big companies are doing it. And I’ve the clear impression, Louise, that the younger McKeever is constantly trying to stretch his father’s thinking.”
“Then what’s troubling you, dear?”
The Editor looked pained. “It’s not easy to describe because it’s so subtle. Tom’s a master at positive talk about our cooperating toward the same community goals. He hopes that the Sentinel will take a noncritical, positive approach to life in Alderton. I had the feeling that Tom was holding all of that in one hand and the many Yoder advertisements in the other.”
“If he’s putting pressure on you, Dad,” I said with heat, “why not turn down the ads? The Sentinel can live without them.” Dad looked unhappy. Then he turned to me, his face cloudy. “Julie, not a word about this to anyone. You understand?”
“Of course,” I said. Then came a sinking sensation as I sensed the agony of choices my father might have to face in the months ahead.
So far, every conflict had driven him to his bed.
After I had concluded that Roger Benshoff did not intend to see me, the dam inspector telephoned one Friday morning. Miss Cruley took the message: Come for a short interview in the Club offices at four p.m.
The Editor made the old Willys available and I was at the Hunting and Fishing Club promptly at four, wondering if Randolph Wilkinson would be in on the interview. To my disappointment, Rand was not there. An officious secretary led me into one of the offices. “This is Julie Wallace of the Alderton Sentinel,” she announced.
Roger Benshoff, a heavyset man with iron-gray hair, was seated at a small desk, a look of impatience on his face. He nodded curtly and waved me to a chair. “We need to do this quickly,” he said. “I have to leave in fifteen minutes.”
I sat there for a moment, feeling unwanted and ill-at-ease. “May I ask, Mr. Benshoff, why seeing me is so distasteful?”
He looked up at me, startled. “Not distasteful,” he said quickly. “Just a waste of my time.”
“The Alderton Sentinel has a wide readership,” I said, in a huge overstatement. “The dam is of interest to these people.”
“Why?”
“Because the danger of floods is always on their minds.”
“The dam is perfectly safe.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Would you give me some facts supporting this statement?”
He stared at me for such a long time that I wondered if he was going to refuse to answer. Then, with a shrug, he pulled out a paper and handed it to me. “Here’s the schedule of my inspections,” he said. “They will confirm the fact that it is inspected regularly.” He stood up and reached for his coat.
Quickly I looked over the schedule as Mr. Benshoff stuffed some papers into a briefcase and placed the coat over his arm.
“Mr. Benshoff, this lists your inspection visits to the dam, but gives no details about your recommendations for repairs. The recent flood, for example. What damage did it do?”
“None.”
“But there are small leaks—”
“Those are not leaks but normal spillage,” he said sternly. “You will give wrong information if you report those as leaks.” He suddenly thrust a hand toward me. “I’m already late for my appointment, Miss Wallace. Any further information about the dam should be obtained from Mr. Thomas McKeever Sr.” He shook my hand and departed.
Curtly dismissed, I walked outside to the Willys, wondering why Club officials were so touchy about the dam. If it was perfectly safe, why weren’t they more open about it?
Though facts were few, I did a story on the dam and placed it on the Editor’s desk, explaining in an attached note how little information I had obtained from Mr. Benshoff. He read it through quickly.
“Good job, considering what you had to work with,” he said. “But some things are missing. I think I’ll go and see young Wilkinson myself. What am I to call him now?”
<
br /> “Rand.”
“Rand it is. Maybe he’ll give us some more information.”
Early Sunday morning I was in the kitchen helping Mother get breakfast. Dad was still upstairs dressing.
“Julie, your father came home so exhausted last night he could barely undress himself. That’s why he’s so slow this morning.”
“Did he say where he’d been?”
“Out somewhere with Dean Fleming. A tub bath helped some, but his hands were blistered like he’d been digging with a shovel.”
“That’s probably right.”
“Why would he spend a day doing that?”
“For the same reason Dean and his men came twice to the Sentinel to help us in an emergency. And all for free.”
“So Kenneth is returning the favor.”
“I guess so, Mother. These men, now including Dad, seem to go about quietly helping people in situations of need.”
“It all seems a bit strange,” Mother said just as Tim and Anne-Marie bounded into the kitchen.
It took the Editor a week to make a date with Rand, and then he returned from the interview without comment. I decided the story was dead. Perhaps my father did not want to take any chance of upsetting the business deals he was working out with young Mr. McKeever.
I was mistaken.
The following Wednesday afternoon when I arrived at the Sentinel, I found a fresh set of proofs on my desk. Attached was a terse note from Miss Cruley: “Have corrections to me by 4:30 today.”
The Editor had completely reworked my story on the dam. Quickly I read through it:
Alderton’s Thriving Summer Colony
Only eight miles above Alderton, set in the grandeur of the Alleghenies, is one of Pennsylvania’s beauty spots. Lake Kissawha, said to be the largest man-made lake in the United States, has become the focal point of a thriving summer colony.
I read on about the early history of the dam, the creation of the lake in 1854 by the state out of an area of forest and farmland, its collapse in 1862 due to erosion at the core, and its purchase in 1880 by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which repaired the dam and built the hotel in 1882 to serve as a resort area for its officers and executive personnel. The lake was then named Kissawha.
The railroad had also widened and redirected the bed of the stream below the dam so that all spillage from the lake would no longer flow into the Sequanoto River, but would be diverted into a new waterway which, several hundred yards to the southeast, joined another stream called Laurel Run. The waters of this stream wound down the mountain into Somerset Valley.
The Editor then went on to detail how, in 1926, the dam and hotel property were sold to fifteen Philadelphia and Pittsburgh men who renovated it and named it the Hunting and Fishing Club. My interest picked up at the next paragraph.
In 1927 repairs were made on the dam under the supervision of Mr. Roger Benshoff, a native of Alderton, who served as foreman and superintendent of the work.
Mr. Benshoff holds the position of railroad contractor in the Pennsylvania Railroad. He has also been hired to inspect the dam at regular intervals.
The original dam had been seventy feet high. The height of the rebuilt dam was lowered three to five feet with dishing (an engineering term for central sag) at the crest. The spillways, cut into solid rock at both ends of the dam, were left as originally constructed.
According to Mr. Randolph Wilkinson, Club Assistant Manager, the lake covers 450 acres and upon occasion, especially during spring rains, fed by numerous mountain streams emptying into the lake, it can be as deep as seventy feet. The equivalent of 500 million tons of water is backed up behind the dam.
At this point, the Editor had crossed out several sentences about local flooding conditions. I guessed why. No need to relate the dam to the floods that had so often beset Yancyville, Mills Ford and Alderton.
But mere facts and figures can in no way do justice to the beauty of Lake Kissawha, surrounded as it is by rugged mountain scenery. The Hunting and Fishing Club has shown us the benefits of careful planning in conservation. For instance, Lake Kissawha has been lavishly stocked with bass, pike and trout to the obvious delight of the Club’s anglers. The spillways have been covered with iron gratings to keep the fish from escaping downstream.
That should please Rand, I thought.
On the other hand, have we in the Alderton area been so preoccupied with making a living and with industrial growth as to be oblivious or indifferent to the marring of our environment? The fact is that few areas of this nation were blessed with as many natural resources or as much beauty as the Pennsylvania Alleghenies. Yet man, in his eager questing for wealth, has seldom been wise in his handling of these resources.
These last paragraphs were turning an article into an editorial. I did not know whether this was considered proper newspaper procedure, but I liked it.
I urge you to check this out for yourself. Drive up into the mountains some weekend soon and feast your eyes on the scenery. Upon your descent back into the valley and the town, you may find the contrast a shocker.
You may ask, as others have, must the open sores of strip-mining on the hills around Alderton be left that way? What about the denuding of all the hills, with no effort at reforestation? Is there a feasible solution to deal with the slag heaps and the air pollution? The genius of American industry has handled many seemingly insurmountable problems. Can we not handle these also?
These questions and many more we citizens of Alderton need to consider for the good of the community as a whole.
The Editor
Emotion choked me as I finished proofing the copy. Considering the power the McKeevers had over us, my father was showing a surprising new courage in printing this editorial.
When I arrived at the office after school the next day, Dean Fleming was making some repairs on the press. It had broken down for the second straight week and delivery of the Sentinel would be late if he could not fix it.
Unflappable as always, Dean soon had the press running again. But he was shaking his bald head as he limped into the Editor’s office. “Don’t know how long we can keep fixing it, Ken. The roller had jumped out of the frame, got wedged, and cracked part of the frame.”
As long as Dean sticks with us, that press will make it, I thought to myself.
In fact, our family was seeing so much of Dean Fleming now that he seemed like someone we had always known. His walking into the Sentinel office that first day and voluntarily offering Dad the gift of ten hours each week had been an extraordinary commitment. Again the question haunted me, why would he be so generous? We’d been strangers to him at the time.
Though he often unsettled me, I admired his way of slipping unobtrusively into the office to get on with whatever needed doing. With Dean available to repair breaks or loose bearings or to hang a new shaft line or to adjust the take-up on the main bearings when they had been shimmied, some of Miss Cruley’s fluttery nervousness was beginning to subside.
After Margo met Dean at the Sentinel one day, she told me a story about him that she had heard from one of the gossipy patrons of the Stemwinder. Two years before, a small private airplane had developed engine trouble and been forced down in a grassy field on the outskirts of Alderton. There was no airplane mechanic in our area. Then somebody thought of Dean Fleming and sent for him. Though Dean had never before seen an airplane engine, within three hours he had the plane flying again.
Dean had won the hearts of Tim and Anne-Marie with the gift of Boy, who had become a member of our family. His loan of money to Dad had probably saved the paper. Mother had quite warmed to both Dean and Hazel. Which left me in the rear, struggling with some mixed emotions.
Was I jealous of Dean’s close relationship with my father? I had to admit I resented the many hours that Dad was with him and those other men. If they were playing golf or tennis or even hiking, I could have better understood it. I agreed with Mother: the secretive nature of what they did was a bit strange.
Yet I
liked going to the Fleming farm. It had a comfortable atmosphere with its old furniture and rugs of turkey reds, indigo blues, and mustard yellows. The mellow mood was also evident in the ancient copper, brass, and pewter, as well as old china, glass, and antiques. But the farm passed another test too: liveliness.
The kitchen was continually in use, with Miss Hazel always baking, canning, or preserving. A spacious red barn contained four horses and two Guernsey cows. Milling about outside were pigs, dogs, chickens, geese, and even some rabbits.
The animal that most completely won Anne-Marie’s heart was the oldest and most decrepit of all—the horse called Shorty. He was moth-eaten brown, swaybacked, with his ribs showing. A split hoof, along with rheumatism, limited Shorty to a slow walk around the pasture. No wonder! Multiplying Shorty’s years by four made him 105! He was so bony that no saddle could be used on him. Therefore the only way Anne-Marie could ride him was to clamber on the board fence and climb onto him bareback.
My little sister loved and petted the old horse, fed him sugar lumps, crooned to him while currying and stroking him. “Julie,” she said once, “his big brown eyes make me want to cry, especially when he turns his head and looks at me.”
The rest of us knew that Dean had been on the verge of getting rid of Shorty; now the old horse would be prince of the pasture until he dropped.
On one subject Dean and I did strike a note of mutuality: trees. As a tiny girl I had wept rebellious tears when a huge two-hundred-year-old oak in our front yard in Timmeton had to be cut down. In my eyes, the men were killing a living thing as they hacked at the proud old tree.
Dean Fleming’s love affair with trees dated back to his youth. He told us he saw trees as the crown and glory of nature’s handiwork. Shade and beauty, fuel too, timber for houses and a thousand other benefits. They controlled the purity of the air above and the water in the ground; they were the earth’s greatest single controller of the climate.
In most sections of Pennsylvania, birches were scattered through the forests, their white trunks contrasting with the deep emerald evergreens. “Grace notes of the woods,” Dean called them. But on his farm, he had taken such good care of the birches that they could no longer be called grace notes—more like a melody all their own.
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