Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  Still, even then Jamie could sense a regret that never faded. “I think he wishes he could’ve made it,” Brown said. “And thinks he should have.”

  On Thursday, August 6, 1981, readers of the Beaver County Times were fed the usual hefty diet—local and national updates, four nearby murders, features about the Pirates and Steelers, ads for watermelon ($1.79 and up) and “ground beef or meatloaf mix” (“$1.33 lb. for a 3-lb. pkg. or more”), news about a crackdown on teen drinking, and a wire story out of San Francisco predicting that computers would soon handle “daily accounting chores” in American households and “drastically change the way of life for businessmen.”

  Indeed, it’s easy, while scanning those pages, to feel like you’re happening upon a century-old advertisement for the maiden voyage of the Titanic. The mind screams at the innocent names set by typesetters and printed by presses long gone, Watch out! There’s disaster ahead. . . .

  Because there on page one, above the flag and under the banner headline “Reagan firing controllers; union claims strength,” is a story about President Ronald Reagan’s unprecedented decision to fire 11,345 striking air-traffic controllers. And inside, atop the lead editorial praising a new, innovative labor-management partnership at the Aliquippa Works, is another headline: “A Good Omen for the Future at J&L Steel.” Looking back, the two pieces feel like updates from the camps of iceberg and ship.

  At the time, of course, it was hardly clear that Reagan’s hugely popular act would signal Big Labor’s demise. The firing of the air-traffic controllers was in its early stages, and the fate of elite federal workers—striking illegally and with little support from fellow unions—didn’t figure to affect life on the shop floor. In 1981 nearly 10,000 workers were still flowing daily through the tunnel in downtown Aliquippa. If anything, J&L’s willingness to try initiatives like “Labor Management Partnership Teams” seemed proof of a new era of employer-worker cooperation—not some too-little, too-late stroke of desperation.

  But the ills ravaging the U.S. steel industry—high-level strategic blunders, mid-level mismanagement, and low-cost competition—all decades in the making and well past the point of reversal, went deeper than anything “LMPTs” might fix. Reagan busted the air-traffic controllers midway through a period, 1974–86, that saw a free fall in domestic steel production—from 151 million net tons of raw steel annually to 85 million—and the loss of 337,552 jobs. Steelworkers were facing an existential crisis well before federal and popular support shifted against union protections. The Times’s idea of the “future,” of a blue-collar security that had held for two generations, was fading fast.

  Perhaps some saw this all coming in 1968, when James Ling’s LTV first acquired a controlling interest in J&L. “Ling’s goal in doing this is not altogether clear,” reads the definitive history of J&L, 1999’s Portraits in Steel. “A desire to break into a ‘bastion of the Eastern Establishment,’ a lack of understanding about the nature of steel’s peculiar ratio of assets to sales . . . a desire to get at J&L pension funds to help buttress LTV’s shaky financial underpinnings, a desire to reorganize J&L as he had Wilson and Company have all been suggested. Whatever it was, it would be a gamble that would cost him his fortune and ultimately result in bankruptcy for both LTV and J&L.”

  By 1974, J&L was subsumed as a wholly owned subsidiary of LTV. Juke Suder was in his twenty-fourth year in the welded tube operation then, and told anyone who’d listen—and many who wouldn’t: This is the beginning of the end, fellas. “They thought I was crazy; they said, ‘No, LTV is a big organization, they’re going to expand. . . .’” Suder said. “I said, ‘Don’t bet on it.’ A lot of companies were buying places, then selling them off. And that’s exactly what they did. They started selling stuff off.”

  But for a while, the Beaver Valley seemed just fine; the mills were still churning. Gary Grandstaff, then twenty-five, began work as a crane follower in J&L’s seamless tube annex in 1978, the year that the steel industry, as Jimmy Carter crowed in Aliquippa on his visit, regained 24,000 jobs. Beaver County’s unemployment stood at 5.1 percent, ahead of the 6.0 national average. “It was a workman’s paradise,” Grandstaff said. “You could literally leave one job and cross the river and go somewhere else and pick up another job that day.”

  Perhaps, in the long run, it wouldn’t have mattered how badly LTV mismanaged things. Historian Barbara Tuchman dubbed the twenty years preceding 1978 as a period of “collapsing assumptions” in America, but when the industries, jobs, and towns began to fall, too, the impulse to blame a single culprit proved irresistible. The notion of LTV being venal and incompetent, a bunch of outsiders with little firsthand knowledge of the industry, remains the most popular one—no matter that the job cuts begun in Aliquippa in 1980 were made with butter-knife measures like reduced man-hours and early retirement. But there were also larger factors—the unstoppable transition from steel to plastics and lighter metals in construction and car design, a push for better fuel economy—that conspired to demote steel, like the once-vital horse or train, to a less central role in modern life.

  “We also lost a lot of competition to other parts of the U.S.; mills in Alabama and the West have been growing for many decades,” said University of Pittsburgh labor economist Chris Briem. “But the real story is, the way we made steel changed between the end of World War II and now.

  “Pittsburgh, Aliquippa, all these places had the large integrated steel plant making coal, coke, and iron ore, and you put all those together with a lot of manpower, you make steel. What came around was the electric-arc mini-mill, and that makes steel a lot differently. It doesn’t use coal and coke; it uses electricity. It doesn’t use iron ore; it uses scrap steel. And each of those things changes the competitiveness of steel. This is a big coal region and that coal advantage went from being a very positive thing to not very helpful at all.”

  It’s inevitable, perhaps, that conventional wisdom would blame labor nearly as much as management for J&L’s demise. Prod many a union man and it’s not long before he’ll admit that at some point the unions lost their way. By the late ’70s, there were too many abuses on the mill floor, too much featherbedding, too little interest in producing the finest product—and yet an average pay of $23 an hour for a USW steelworker, not to mention, every fifth year, that glorious, cartoonish thirteen-week vacation.

  Grandstaff, who finished as a crane operator in the seamless tube annex, had come out of the Army, then served a stint as an emergency room worker, before joining J&L in 1978. His four years there, he says, were the best of his working life, but he found the aura, if not the fact, of laziness appalling. “People would work for six hours, then sit for two,” he said. “And everybody had the attitude: that ain’t my job. If they’re sitting somewhere and there’s a pile of garbage right next to ’em? They ain’t going to touch it. That ain’t my job. It was like that throughout the mill. And it was terrible. It truly was.”

  The garbage pile isn’t apocryphal: Once, Grandstaff says, a foreman did approach a lounging thread operator and told him to sweep one up. The operator had worked hard that day—had, in fact, busted his ass to hit an incentive-rate of production: twelve hours’ worth in just six hours. But that left two hours on his shift to kill, and he just laughed and said he was done working. And he wasn’t alone; men were reading newspapers, exercising, or just kicking back in corners to kill time all over steelmaking America. And no colleagues complained about the sight, because that would reveal that the incentive rates were too low and hurt the less productive workers. But the fact of it only reinforced peer resentment and the traditionally hostile boss-worker divide.

  “The foreman insisted,” Grandstaff said. “That escalated to the shop steward in the union, then to the steward of seamless tube, which escalated to the vice president of the union to the president. And the president came down, walked into the seamless tube annex; everybody knew he was coming and everybody knew who he was.” The pre
sident then lifted his safety helmet above his head, signaling a walkout—and the room drained of men.

  “We weren’t out more than forty-five minutes to an hour,” Grandstaff said, and thirty years later, he still says it in a kind of awe. “But even the lights turned off.”

  But even in the worst cases, management didn’t seem to mind that much. “The union would defend everybody even if they were in the wrong,” said Bill Macroglou, who began as a laborer at J&L in 1949 and ended as a supervisor in the tin mill. “If a guy was a repeat offender, say, or just negligent at work, you’d reprimand the guy and the next thing you know you’re at arbitration. And as long as the money was there, LTV was paying out. They didn’t give a damn about the grievances, because they wanted a rosy atmosphere. You’d get a guy who actually damaged product and damaged the equipment and you’d try to straighten him out, and they’d come and hush us up: Just forget about it.”

  Yes, said Pete Eritano, president of United Steelworkers Local 1211 in Aliquippa from 1979 to 1985, “we’ve defended some people probably shouldn’t have been defended. But we did that as a job, as required by the Labor Act; we were required to represent somebody even if they did wrong things. And we did, and usually those people were fired anyhow. A lot of times we got ’em back.

  “My whole take on what happened: The men in the mill knew how to work that plant. They knew how to make the steel, how to do the coke works, the wire, the seamless pipe, the welded tube: they knew it all. And they needed those key people down there to do all that. But when LTV took over, they started changing everything. The union could’ve been better on quality issues, but LTV didn’t seem to want our help. They didn’t want to listen.”

  Ernest Hemingway’s famous retort to the question “How did you go bankrupt?” (“Gradually, then suddenly”) applies just as well to businesses and towns as it does to men. There’s the same initial disbelief, the slow nibbling away of resources and faith, then the stomach-lurching drop into the abyss. It was the fate of Pete Eritano—class of ’57, Ditka’s opponent in midget ball, mill lifer—to preside over all of it: his first year, 1979, the Aliquippa Works employed more than 10,000 hourly workers. Then, in September 1981, the slow bleed began.

  LTV shut down the rod and wire mill, slashing seven hundred jobs. “We feel the impact is going to be minimal,” said communications manager Curt Miller, who also informed the Beaver County Times that the shutdown “is not indicative of the profitability of J&L’s other departments.”

  Then, one by one, four of Aliquippa’s five blast furnaces were idled. In March 1982, 950 more lost work when the seamless tube department was shuttered; by then 2,600 had been fired and tax revenue plummeted and the town couldn’t pay its bills. The electric company threatened to turn off the streetlights. Aliquippa was not alone: the economy was in recession. One in three steelworkers in America was jobless.

  And then it got worse. By the summer of 1982, with nationwide steel production and employment numbers their lowest since 1933, nearly half of the remaining 7,800 hourly workers at the Aliquippa Works were gone; more than 1,000 salaried workers had also been fired. Grandstaff, with a $650-a-month house payment, a wife at home, and a daughter on the way, walked in one morning, 7:45 a.m., sure that he had a job for life. He was told to clean out his locker. In the seamless tube locker room, ‘the blockhouse,’ he found hundreds of his fellow shift workers, all tough men, breaking down and crying.

  A food bank had been set up at J&L, where the remaining workers deducted from $1 to $20 out of every paycheck to help out their brethren. On July 25, the phone rang in the Local 1211 offices. The secretary thought someone was playing a prank.

  The White House was calling, wanted to know if Eritano would take a call from Ronald Reagan. “Which means—and they ask me—Am I ‘going to be civil?’” Eritano said. “Of course. I respect the office, okay? I didn’t tell them I respected him.”

  The next day, a Monday, the phone rang again. “You don’t mind if I call you ‘Pete’?” Reagan’s voice asked. Eritano didn’t. “God bless you all in Aliquippa for doing such an outstanding deed,” Reagan said about the food bank. One president to another, he also told Eritano that the union was a good example for the nation because they were helping themselves. He sent his congratulations and said something about the “spirit of America.”

  The call lasted five minutes. Reagan said his economic policies wouldn’t work overnight. “We’re hanging on,” Eritano told him. “And hoping the economy will turn around. But we won’t be able to hang on much longer.”

  Reagan wouldn’t hear of it. “He said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Pete, this’ll all work out,’” Eritano recalled. “‘There’ll be a good steel mill there when you’re all done. It’ll be leaner, but it’ll be good. There’ll be good jobs.’”

  Fourteen months later, the number of laid-off workers in Aliquippa had climbed to 4,000. Eritano wrote a follow-up letter to the president. “Where have you been when our people needed you the most?” he began. He reminded Reagan of their phone call, his promise of a recovery being right around the corner.

  “Our people have paid a high price in this game plan you call recovery,” Eritano went on. “We have a 30 percent unemployment rate in Beaver County. . . . Most of the layoffs have been for a year or longer. Homes and dreams have been lost; marriages and families have been torn apart.

  “We currently have 1,000 steelworkers at our plant who have run out of benefits. These people live on a $25 food certificate that we supply every two weeks. Our food fund of over $200,000 will be gone in three months. Where have you been?”

  One by one, over the next two years, departments kept shutting down: the A-5 coke battery; ingot steel production; the blooming, billet, bar, and round mills. A total of 250 jobs gone in one round, 360 in the next, and—always—the threat of more firings to come. Crime in Aliquippa was up 40 percent since 1981; police were arresting men who’d never been in trouble. Wives found themselves being hit for the first time. In 1984, Jerry Malesky was in his eleventh year on the basic oxygen furnace. “They’d put in a new round caster and told us it’d be twenty-five years before we peaked because we were the only ones in America making this kind of steel,” he said. “So I bought a house, two new cars; I was very high-paid. Six weeks later they shut the mill down. Ruined everything.”

  On January 3, 1985, LTV, fresh off a desperation merger with Cleveland-based Republic Steel—originators of the emblem seen each Sunday on Pittsburgh Steelers helmets—announced the close of Aliquippa’s welded tube division, killing off five hundred more jobs. “I shut the welded tube down,” said Juke Suder. “Shut the lights and locked the door. I felt so bad about the place, because I worked there for thirty-four years. I felt like I lost a friend.”

  On May 17, 1985, LTV delivered the coup de grâce, laying off 1,300 in Aliquippa’s coke plant and steelmaking facility. Eritano was in the 1211 office when he received the notice in that day’s mail. He held himself together the rest of the day. “I didn’t want them to see it,” he said. When it ended, the union boss packed up some papers, walked to the parking lot, got into his car, and drove home to Center. He walked through his front door and veered into his bedroom, chest heaving now, and closed the door. Then he broke down and wept.

  Only seven hundred workers, in the 14-inch and tin plate mills, now occupied the hollowed-out, seven-and-a-half-mile tract along the Ohio. The scramble for jobs elsewhere, anywhere, left the streets desolate; within five years only 13,374 Aliquippans—down from 17,094 in 1980—remained. One, electrician Chuckie Walker, was laid off late in 1986 after thirteen years. When he made it back home to Plan 11 that night, Walker broke the news to his wife, Chedda; his daughter, Diedre; and his twin sons, Dwan and Donald, and then walked out to the front porch to get some air.

  Dwan followed him. The evening sky was pitch dark His father looked so alone.

  “Who cries when I cry, son?” Chuckie said soft
ly. “Nobody.”

  PART FOUR

  October 14, 2011

  . . . . The crowd troops slow and happy up the stairs to the parking lot. Coaches gather to gloat in Zmijanac’s office while the players scatter, some walking home in their football pants. Soon only one remains. Davion Hall, son of a Quip who lost in the ’88 state title game, nephew of a Quip who won the program’s first state title in 1991, has just played his final game at The Pit. All his life, Hall heard that he had to win titles, uphold tradition, do the family proud. His mother died when he was two; his has been an all-male upbringing, dodgy and hard.

  “We have the town on our back,” he says. “Days through the week, after practice, we see people on the streets and they ask: ‘You have a good practice? Make sure everything’s good. . . .’ They think we can do it. But more than that, we think we can do it. The whole town, they’re depending on us.”

  There are few things deader than a football locker room after. What had been, a half hour ago, a bustling hive of ego and brawn is thunderously still; Hall collects his things and bolts as if chased by a spirit. Who can blame him? Cold is overtaking all of it now: the pile of flung white pants, the pile of flung black jerseys, the floor littered with leaves, sod-clumped cleats, balls of sticky tape, a tipped bottle of Faygo pineapple-watermelon soda, Skittles wrappers, an abandoned black duffel, pink socks, a receiver glove, skewed benches, clods of waffled dirt.