Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  Rob Stanley was born on the East Side in 1947, two years after his father, a U.S. Steel safety man, came home from the war. Of English and Welsh descent, Stanley was an exotic in his ethnic neighborhood. As a student at Chicago Vocational High School, he never thought about going to college, because steelworkers made more money than chemistry teachers. He thought about rumbling with Negro gangs from across the river and playing football in Calumet Park with the local sandlot all-stars, the Bonivirs.

  “About five percent of my class went to college,” Stanley said. “A lot of the guys on the East Side didn’t have plans. What happened is, you were just enjoying life, going out. We had the park, we had all the teams we were on. Our plan was to get a better team, get better ballplayers and work, make enough money to get a car and make it to our games.”

  When Stanley graduated in January 1965, he had to pay rent or get kicked out of his father’s house, so he walked over to Interlake Steel, where he was immediately hired to shovel taconite into the blast furnace on the midnight shift. It was the shittiest job in the mill, but it paid $2.32 an hour—enough for an apartment and a car.

  “You’d just go apply,” he said. “There was so much work, especially during Vietnam. When I quit Interlake to go over to Republic, they hired fifty guys that day. You’d always see guys with new helmets walking around.”

  The Vietnam War, which brought so much work to the steel industry, made it easy for Stanley to get hired as a grunt but impossible for him to enroll in a years-long apprenticeship program. The foremen knew his conscription was inevitable. One afternoon in 1967, as Stanley was driving home from work, a friend pulled up alongside his car, waving an envelope.

  “I just got drafted,” he shouted. “And so did you!”

  Sure enough, when Stanley arrived home, the same envelope—the envelope every noncollegiate nineteen-year-old male received that year—was waiting in his mailbox.

  Stanley’s time “in country” lasted only a year, but the war lasted longer, so there was still plenty of work when he came home to the East Side. For two years, he was part of a construction gang building a blast furnace at U.S. Steel. Seven days a week, Stanley stacked bricks and dug clay out of pits. He figured he had his whole life to work in a steel mill, so he wrote letters to international construction companies, hoping to find a job that would take him back to Hong Kong, where he’d R & R’ed on the way home from the war. After he mailed them out, the Bonivirs’ season started, which would keep him on the East Side through the winter. Then he got his girlfriend pregnant, which would keep him on the East Side forever. He had just gotten back from Vietnam and had big plans of traveling the world. He hadn’t been planning for fatherhood.

  Married now, and with a daughter, Stanley needed something more than a job on a shovel crew. He needed a career, like his father, who’d put in thirty-nine years at U.S. Steel before retiring after open-heart surgery. In 1970, Stanley began a pipe-fitter’s apprenticeship at Wisconsin Steel. He didn’t know it—nobody knew then—but he could not have hired in at a worse time.

  Wisconsin Steel had been purchased by International Harvester in 1902. Fearing price gouging by U.S. Steel, the farm equipment manufacturer wanted a mill to produce plate steel and bar steel for its tractor assembly plants. In the early 1960s, Wisconsin Steel’s manager rose to the presidency of International Harvester and spent $30 million to outfit his beloved mill with one of America’s first basic oxygen furnaces, which converted iron to steel in under an hour, compared to half a day in an open-hearth furnace. In 1970, Congress passed the Clean Air Act. Chicago’s mills so fouled the skies that employees drove old cars to work, because they would be covered in soot, graphite, and iron ore dust by the shift’s end. A consultant calculated that pollution controls would cost $150 million. International Harvester decided to sell rather than clean up. While searching for a buyer, the company didn’t bother to maintain its white elephant. Several coke ovens exploded, and four men working on a blast furnace died from inhaling toxic gases.

  During this time, the local alderman, Edward Vrdolyak, gained control of the Progressive Steelworkers Union, which represented Wisconsin’s workers. Even by the degenerate standards of the Chicago city council, Vrdolyak was a shady character. The cunning, ambitious son of a Croatian tavern keeper, he was known around town as “Fast Eddie,” for his acquittal on an attempted-murder rap when he was a law student at the University of Chicago and for the mob connections he developed during his rise in politics. Every alderman rewarded his campaign volunteers with jobs, but driving a garbage truck or sweeping floors at city hall didn’t pay as well as the mills. So Vrdolyak connived to elect a political ally named Leonard “Tony” Roque as union president. In return, Roque made sure that steelworkers who belonged to Vrdolyak’s Tenth Ward organization got the best jobs in the mill. He also hired Vrdolyak’s law firm to represent the union.

  In 1977, International Harvester finally found a buyer: Envirodyne. The California high-tech company had no experience in steel, but its president, a former Stanford physicist, thought that modern engineering and marketing techniques would turn around the decrepit mill. Panicked that International Harvester was trying to skip out on its pension obligations, Roque negotiated a deal he thought would protect his steel-workers’ retirement. But the inexperienced union president didn’t understand pension law. Neither did the attorney from the alderman’s law firm. They signed away nearly $25 million in benefits, leaving the workers only what the government guaranteed.

  Envirodyne secured a $90 million federal loan to build a new blast furnace and water purification system, and install pollution controls that would satisfy the EPA. But due to International Harvester’s neglect, the plant was too far gone to save. Blast furnaces broke down over and over again, preventing the mill from filling millions of dollars’ worth of orders. As Wisconsin Steel lost money, it cracked down on the union. Rob Stanley and his fellow pipe fitters were asked to work as welders, boiler-makers, and riggers for an extra twenty-five cents an hour. Their response: Are you crazy?

  A labor dispute finally killed off Wisconsin Steel, but it had nothing to do with steelworkers. On November 1, 1979, workers at International Harvester’s tractor plants went on strike after the company demanded they accept compulsory overtime and limits on seniority. International Harvester was still Wisconsin Steel’s biggest customer, purchasing 40 percent of the mill’s output.

  When Stanley showed up for work on March 27, 1980, television news crews were gathered outside the gate.

  “Did you hear what happened?” a coworker asked. “It’s closed.”

  Closed? Stanley couldn’t believe it. Envirodyne had just spent $90 million on modern equipment. Why would they close the mill? Wisconsin Steel had been in the neighborhood for three generations. How could an institution like that close?

  As Stanley left the mill, carrying his bag of clean clothes, a foreman told him, “We’ll contact you if something changes.”

  Nothing ever changed. March 27 was the last day Stanley and his 3,400 co-workers ever spent inside Wisconsin Steel. The mill was bankrupt. Stanley’s last two paychecks bounced. He had worked at Wisconsin Steel for nine and a half years—six months short of the ten years that would have qualified him for a pension. The company promised him $4,200 in severance pay. He got a check for $700. And he ended up giving the money to a lawyer when his ex-wife—the woman he’d knocked up after coming home from Vietnam—sued him for back child support. Stanley had been earning $10 an hour in the mill, but once he was laid off, he had to get by on $100 a week in unemployment, plus whatever he could pick up tending bar at the Hot Spot, the tavern underneath his apartment. He even wrote a letter to the Chicago Bears, asking for a try-out, but the team turned him down. His ex-wife had remarried, to an electrician with a house and a boat, so he told her, “I can’t pay you what I’ve been paying you, so I’ll just take my daughter and buy her clothes or whatever.” But then she divorced a second time, and again sued for child support. Bec
ause he hadn’t saved his receipts, she won.

  Stanley and a few buddies from Wisconsin Steel caught on at a cold-rolling mill in Indiana, but after seven months, he was laid off again. Two layoffs in one year seemed like a message that the steel industry and Chicago had no more use for Rob Stanley. So he moved to Houston, where he found a job hanging Sheetrock. The high gasoline prices destroying the auto and steel industries had rained prosperity on Texas. An out-of-work auto executive drove to Houston every weekend and filled his trunk with Sunday papers. Back in Detroit, he resold the want ads to union men willing to do dangerous jobs for half their old pay. Stanley took $6.50 an hour to stand on a wobbly, fifty-foot-high scaffold with a bunch of illegal aliens. After Houston, he tried California, enrolling in a bartending school that promised him a job once he completed its course. When the classes ended, his instructor told him, “I think you’d be better off looking on your own.”

  So Rob Stanley, a steelworker who hadn’t made steel for over three years, wandered back home to the East Side for no other reason than it was spring and softball season was about to start in Calumet Park. As a thirty-six-year-old bachelor, unemployment didn’t bother him that much. Along with three friends, he paid a couple hundred bucks a month to share an apartment near the park. If his car wasn’t running, one of his teammates would always drive him to a game.

  For the family men, life after the mill was harder. Charles Walley was forty-nine when Wisconsin Steel shut down, a shear man with twenty-two years’ seniority, earning $27,000 a year, with overtime, and only a few payments left on his East Side bungalow.

  A month after Wisconsin Steel closed, six hundred grumbling steel-workers gathered at St. Kevin’s Church to hear Ed Vrdolyak promise to reopen the mill. Still tan from a Florida vacation, Fast Eddie arrived late to the meeting. The steelworkers booed their alderman when he (falsely) explained that he’d just gotten off a plane from Springfield, the state capital, where he’d met with the governor.

  “Envirodyne came into the Wisconsin Steel purchase with bullshit and bubblegum—they didn’t have a dime,” Vrdolyak shouted over the heckling. “I’ve been talking to everyone, including the president, the mayor, and the governor. I want to get the mill open as soon as possible and get you your back pay because you know that the company wants to keep going. It’s too valuable.”

  When union president Roque finally arrived, he announced plans “to get the mill open within the next three weeks.”

  Three weeks passed. The mill didn’t reopen. Out of work for the first time in his life—even during a four-month United Steel Workers strike, when he’d worked at Republic, Walley had painted houses with an uncle—he began spending despairing days asleep on his couch. Didn’t shave, didn’t change his clothes, didn’t leave the house, afraid of running into neighbors who would ask, “You working?” Instead, he hid in his living room, smoking and watching television until the late-night shows turned to static. International Harvester owed Walley over $16,000 in severance and vacation pay, but the money was tied up in the bankruptcy. Having always counted on a steel mill pension, the Walleys had no savings, no insurance. Chuck’s unemployment check was not enough to cover the bills, so his wife, Arlene, sold her high school ring to a “We Buy Gold” shop in Indiana, spending the $35 on groceries. The first Christmas after the mill closed, the Lions Club gave the Walleys a basket full of turkey and canned goods. A sister who waitressed brought leftover chicken. The food pantry at St. Francis provided the filling for grilled cheese sandwiches. Even with loans from family members, the Walleys were forced to pay utility bills with credit cards and take out a second mortgage on their almost-paid-for house.

  Having dropped out of high school to pump gas, Walley was unskilled at anything but making steel, so the only jobs he could find were grunt labor, paying half his old wage: toll taker on the Skyway, truck driver, stockroom at a truck factory. He caught on as a janitor in an elementary school, but—his explanation—the poor economy had discouraged couples from having children, so the school closed after three and a half years. (When his teenage daughter, Christine, won a full scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy, Walley at first forbade her from going, “because when you come back, you’ll look down on me for being a janitor!” He relented because a daughter in boarding school was, as she put it, “one less mouth to feed.”) Finally, a temp agency hired Walley as a $5-an-hour security guard at a downtown law firm. But he never held a full-time job again. Businesses didn’t want to hire ex-steelworkers, especially old ones. When International Harvester finally settled his claim, twelve years after the mill closed, he received $6,800 and a small retirement from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a government fund that covered workers who hadn’t qualified for a company plan.

  “When closing that mill, they took the best years of my life away from me,” Walley reflected years later. “My fifties. My fifties should have been the best years of my life. When that mill went down, I didn’t owe anybody a nickel. I had three teenage kids. I owed $900 on my house. But by listening to all these politicians and this business about starting the mills back up, hanging around here, instead of selling and getting out of here and start a new life someplace … When you put twenty years in a place, you always want to hang in there and think they’re gonna go back. It was a mistake most of us made. And when you’re out of work and when you’re making this $3.50, $5, $4 an hour, you can go in the hole awful fast.”

  In some ways, even Walley was better off than some of his co-workers. He didn’t lose his house, although the roof sprang a leak he couldn’t afford to repair. He didn’t lose his wife, either. Plenty of Wisconsin Steel families fell apart after the fathers stopped bringing home a factory paycheck. One of Walley’s neighbors attempted suicide. The Daily Calumet, a neighborhood paper that has gone the way of the steel-town life it chronicled, wrote a ten-years-later story on the men of Wisconsin Steel. Out of 3,400 workers, nearly a quarter died in the decade after the mill closed, most from alcoholism and stress-related illnesses, which went untreated because they no longer had health insurance. Their death certificates could have read “unplanned obsolescence.”

  Walley’s wife stuck with him. Although Arlene had never had to work while he was in the mill, she supported the family as a bookkeeper and a blueprint clerk at an oil refinery.

  “He isn’t any less of a man in my eyes,” Arlene Walley said. “In fact, I think more of him because of what he had to go through.”

  THE ECONOMIC RECOVERY of the mid-1980s never arrived in South Chicago. A decade before, U.S. Steel South Works, the two-mile-long lakefront plant, had employed ten thousand workers. In 1981, U.S. Steel promised to build a new rail mill at South Works—if the state repealed a rail tax, and if the United Steelworkers took a $1.25-an-hour pay cut. The state and the union agreed, but over the next two years, U.S. Steel lost nearly $1 billion—its worst hosing since the Depression. The company wanted more: a $40 million federal loan, a $33 million state grant to install pollution controls. From the union, it demanded the right to replace craftsmen with contractors and to forgo time-and-a-half for night shifts and weekends, when electricity was cheaper. The union told U.S. Steel to stuff it. Three days after Christmas 1982, U.S. Steel announced it was shutting down South Works. (Steel executives always announced mill closings the week after Christmas, when the holiday moratorium on acting like an SOB was over.) The mill was mostly gone by then, anyway. Most of the workers had been laid off for over a year. Even if U.S. Steel had built the rail mill, it would have been part of a rump operation, without a blast furnace, basic oxygen furnace, or plate, rod, and bar mill—another reason the union said no. Only the beam mill and an electric furnace remained open, employing eight hundred workers.

  Neal Bosanko was a South Chicagoan whose father worked at U.S. Steel before going on sick leave with the throat cancer that killed him. He had grown up in a neighborhood where no one complained about children wheezing with asthma because, as the grown-ups said, “if there’s soot on t
he windows, there’s food on the table.” Where smoke was as natural to the atmosphere as rain clouds off the lake. Where in the mill-gate taverns, steelworkers downed three shots of whiskey to wash the grit from their throats.

  “I thought the world was coming to an end when I saw a blue sky a year after South Works closed,” Bosanko said.

  Instead of going into the mills like the rest of his family, Bosanko became a VISTA volunteer, organizing food pantries for senior citizens. When Bosanko began his work, in the 1970s, he depended on steelworkers for donations. By the early 1980s, he was feeding steelworkers.

  “The bottom dropped out,” he remembered. “All of a sudden the steelworker families who used to contribute to the food bank were recipients, because their unemployment had run out, after a few months. We really were a self-sufficient community because we had the mills. But the dynamics of the community changed. I had to challenge the local chamber of commerce to support the food pantries. Before, their attitude had been that they were for leeches, that people using ’em just don’t need ’em.”

  Bosanko was seeing more drinking and drug use. Suddenly impoverished, families pulled their children out of Catholic schools. The white middle class had been leaving for the suburbs since the 1960s. Once the steel crisis struck, those who had stayed either moved out of state or stopped being middle-class. As they went, so went the grocery stores, the restaurants, the department stores—Goldblatt’s, Woolworth, Robert Hall. The only reason more steelworkers didn’t lose their bungalows was that they’d taken out mortgages with neighborhood banks and credit unions, which held the paper on customers whose hard times were no fault of their own.