Siebolt’s face was in either a grin or a grimace–you couldn’t ever tell which, due to the ill-fitting choppers that clacked in his mouth–as he raked red-hot pieces of iron and dirt from the bed of the sweatbox. The oilburner in the ceiling of the furnace was turned down but the maw of the box glowed bright yellow-orange and cast Siebolt’s shadow demonically against the block wall behind him. The well of D-furnace, Siebolt’s sweatbox, filled up much quicker than those of the other three furnaces, sometimes once per shift, and the molten aluminum was swilling and splashing up into the bed. The bed of the sweatbox was just below chest-high, and was angled to allow molten aluminum to drain into a large cylindrical well that rested on the ground. Raw materials were thrown onto the bed and heated to melting, and after the aluminum drained down into the well, the remaining dirt and iron and steel and slag were raked out of the bed into small hoppers.
Clarence, who disliked his name and would answer only to “Jim”, was shift manager. He was running a sample from A-furnace, after which he would tap and drain the sweatbox. Running a sample entailed reaching a long iron dipper into the well, filling it with aluminum, and pouring it into a small mold. When solid, the molded aluminum disk would be shot with a metallurgical spectrograph, which would reveal the percentages of other metals present and tell us how close we were to the desired alloy.
Siebolt’s ingots were always a cloudy gray bastard alloy, too high in iron and dirt and too low in manganese, magnesium and silicon to be of any commercial use. Their only purpose was to stock the “heels” of the other furnaces after they were tapped out. Several 1,500-pound stacks of sweatbox ingots were always on hand for just this purpose. Clarence–no one ever called him anything but Clarence after his “be scary to new guys” schtick stopped working–pressed the green button on the hanging switchbox, and the gears that drove the ingot-mold conveyor belt groaned and whirred into slow movement. The belt was about 100 feet long and contained some 300 concrete ingot molds, each of which Clarence checked for signs of cracking at the mount bolts.
The furnaces each backed up to the long pit containing the ingot-mold conveyor At the furnace end. At the back of each furnace was a tap hole that was plugged by a cone-shaped sandcore, which could withstand the heat but could easily be chiseled out when it was time to tap the furnace. Clarence used a hammer and chisel to pound and dig a hole through the sandcore. Molten aluminum, opaque as milk but bright silverish orange and well above the 1800-degree Farenheit freezing point, trickled out of the tap hole. It ran down concrete-lined open iron channels through a geared starwheel that would distribute it evenly and directly to the molds, not allowing any to escape between the molds into the pit below. Clarence picked at the hole until the volume and flow of metal was to his liking. Froggy, a local boy with just enough brainstem activity left over from breathing and dressing himself to get by in the world, had drawn the assignment of skimming the final bits of dirt and slag from ingots before they froze solid at the other end of the conveyor. Nobody could explain to Froggy that sweatbox ingots went right back into the furnace, were full of dirt anyway, and didn’t need skimming, but there he was in his Skinner-box world doing what he was trained to do. He also controlled the speed of the conveyor, making sure the molds didn’t overflow or underfill. A steady trickle of water from overhead pipes cooled the ingots somewhat (sometimes cracking the concrete molds when the hotter alloys were tapped) as they moved toward the stacking end.
Harbaugh was the other young guy on the 3 – 11, and he and I stacked first, as Siebold was getting old and was excused from stacking. Harbaugh pried the now-solid ingots from the molds with a chisel tip, using a hammer on the chisel for sticky ingots. The ingots, solid but still hot enough to cause bad burns and melt rubber bootsoles, landed on a rack, where I picked them up with a short straightbladed shovel and flipped them onto the stack. The stacking frame was two small parallel 3-ft i-beams on the floor and two sheet iron walls, about 3 feet high. One wall was welded along the length of one beam, and the other wall formed a corner with the first, perpendicular to the beams. The 20-pound ingots were shaped in a trapezoidal cross section such that they could be stacked in rows of 8, every other one upside down. The first row would lay north-south, the second east-west, and so on up to 10 or 12 rows. I finished my stack and Harbaugh hollered “Towmotor!” - his south central Pennsylvania take on what to call a forklift came out more like “towmoor”. The normal pavlovian response was for Davey, the co-owner’s lazy slug of an offspring, to amble on out from the break room, fire up the forklift and haul the stack away. If Davey was on break or making the scene with a magazine somewhere, it would be up to us. Timing was critical, since the conveyor relentlessly kept serving up ingots on the rack. Harbaugh said “fucker ain’t coming” and hopped up in the seat and put the forklift in gear. Davey rounded the corner and said “the fuck offa there” – always trying to join in the standard blue collar repartee, thinking he was “one of the guys” and always falling just a couple light years short. Harbaugh laid a big hocker on the seat as he hopped down and Davey, oblivious, hunkered down into the seat. I said, “think it’s OK to get these things out of our way, for crying the fuck out loud?” and Davey flipped me off. Then it was my turn to pry and Harbaugh’s to stack. 6 stacks later (about 4 tons) we finished out our 3 man stacking rotation and D-furnace was tapped out. The bigger furnaces held up to 48,000 pounds of metal, taking 2 – 3 shifts to fill and almost an entire shift to tap. Froggy slowed the conveyor and Clarence plugged the taphole with a sandcore to stop the last trickle of aluminum.
Back up in the break room Roy, Sammy, and Pap Crites sat smoking or chewing. Siebolt, a walking zombie, had left for an 8-hour shift driving a truck at a “grit mill”, which I think was a quarry. Harbaugh was off somewhere making Davey’s life even more miserable than his maker had conspired for him. Pap Crites was more of an honorary employee than anything else, his useful years well behind him. He generally held forth as the keeper of foundryman’s lore in the breakroom, and liked to propound on the state of the planet and pretty much let everyone know exactly where they were full of shit, regardless of the topic at hand. He had years before somehow gotten his legs pinned and crushed under the starwheel on the ingot mold conveyor. A year later he returned to the breakroom but rarely to work. The owner and manager no doubt figured paying for his presence was cheaper than a workers comp settlement; and he much would rather have been with his people than laying around at home.
Roy and Sammy were the ones who had conspired to give me my nickname. Roy was an aging country feller with a gigantic pot gut, stringy short little legs which could only muster a shuffling gait on good days, and a huge appetite for beer. He had big bassett hound eyes and always wore a grimy ball cap tilted way back on his head. He always had trouble remembering names, and started calling me “Slim”. Sam was a 6′5″ Jamaican with a constant and brilliant smile – made even more so on bonus week when he got his large gold front tooth out of hock – who had been a migrant worker and ended up here as he worked on his GED, or as he called it in that syncopated reggae lilt, “my graddiat deploomer from high school”. My nickname was something that I can’t quite phonetically spell, but imagine a giant smiley Jamaican imitating a boozy hilljack saying the word “Slim” and you’re close: slee-um.
Roy blew up A-furnace one evening. It was a recycling foundry, and the furnaces were stocked with all kinds of raw materials: building siding, military plate armor, lathe turnings, 2000-pound bales of crushed beer cans or used license plates, industrial cast aluminum engine blocks or cylinders… anything that was aluminum would go in the well of the furnace. Oilburners would heat it to melting back in the enclosed heel. The furnacetender would throw shovelfulls of flux (like sand) or mag flux (like flour) and work it back and forth with long iron hoes. Compressed air blown through iron tubes would roil and stir the mixture and the flux would float the dirt and slag in a glowing mess to the top. We used longhandled iron skimmers to scoop the lava-like slag into small hoppers, using the edge of the furnace well as a fulcrum. Once the surface of the silver-orange pond of molten slop was clean we would lean over it with long iron rakes and dredge the bottom, pulling up baling wire, piston rings, and assorted other iron or steel or stainless steel flotsam that was unacceptable over certain tolerances, depending on the alloy. This debris would later be weighed, dumped into wood-slatted crates usually labelled “staynels stell” or “irne”, and shipped off to other foundries that dealt with those kinds of metal. Anyway, about Roy and his big explosion: His job was to drive a forklift carrying big hoppers of raw materials up to the well of the furnace and dump them in, making sure he did it slowly enough so as not to splash hot liquid metal out of the well and not to freeze up the furnace. One winter evening the hefty little jackpine savage took his forklift and picked up a hopper that had been sitting outside. The drainholes in the bottom had clogged and unknown to Roy or anybody else, there was a 1 by 3 by 3 foot chunk of solid ice in the bottom, under the ton of lathe turnings. Lathe turnings didn’t freeze up the furnace or splash, so usually Roy just dumped them right in. This time though, the iceberg hit the molten metal and pretty much vaporized in that single instant, creating the loudest percussive sound I have ever heard. Ka-WHUMPH!!! accompanied a burst of steam, followed immediately by an immense explosion. The ice made a splash like the one real husky kid at the swimming pool that can always soak the lifeguard with his cannonball, only the mist that hung in the air from this splash was a hellish concoction of molten metal, slag, steam and smoke. Years of accumulated dust and grit were jarred loose from every surface in the room, and hung in the air like a dark viscous cloud. The redhot glow of the furnaces through this miasma made me think of Mt. St. Helens or Pompeii, or Hell. At first I couldn’t hear anything exept my ears ringing and could only take in the scene in a spooky silence. The hood and ductwork over the furnace that led to the filter room were torn apart; a gaping jagged hole was blown in the corrugated ceiling 25 feet above; dust, cardboard and anything else flammable in a 30 foot radius around the furnace was burning; and a 2100-degree aluminum slick spread out from the well. Then noticed Sam, outside the back bay door, helplessly leaning against the wall, clutching his gut.
I ran over to Sam first, and saw that he was shaking. He wasn’t hurt though, he was just laughing his ass off. “Dot fucker, he ron like Jesse Owen”, pronouncing it “Ho-wen”, he giggled, pointing to Roy, who with his stumpy little legs and hyperdeveloped beer muscles, had indeed cleared the large bay door and staging yard, crossed the parking lot and was quickly attaining the fence. By the time the rest of the shift made the run from the breakroom to the furnaceroom, every one of those old boys on the furnaces was standing with his back to the holocaust and was facing Roy, who backed up against the fence and stared wide-eyed at the mess he had narrowly avoided, muttering “ohhh shee-it…gawdawful dammit!” Clarence glowered from under the wide brim of his crusher, and then shifted the soggy cheroot, Clint Eastwood-style, to the other side of his mouf without touching it. “You boys clean this shit up. Roy, you been trainin for the ‘lympics? Haw, haw…” “No, just havin a god damn heart attack is all.”
Froggy, in the background, was recapping the situation for the latecomers, gesturing wildly. “Well the luminum went up like that there, and we knowed she was gonna blow, and sure nough the furnace hood buckled like that there, an Roy lit out like that there, an’…” Harbaugh interrupted, his arm around Froggy’s shoulder, “Froggy, why don’t you just try shettin the fuck up a while?”
The sirens got louder. The volunteer fire station 3/4 of a mile down the road had not been called but they had heard the blast. After they checked out the damage they left, and on their way out I heard one of them mutter, “these fuckers screwed up a hell of a pinochle meld”.
…
If you are ever in Gettysburg, PA, head south out of town on Rt. 15. You will drive through a couple of miles of a scenic and haunting stretch of road, right smack through the middle of where Pickett’s charge took place during the Civil War. Just south of the battlefield there is (or was) a conference center on the left; and just south of that there are two gravel drives that are chained and padlocked. These lead to the former site of Gettysburg Foundry Specialties, which was in operation until the mid 1980’s or so. It is now an EPA Superfund cleanup site.
Change of pace the next day… we rented kayaks and paddled on Crystal River, a creek that winds from Glen Lake, through some beautiful and peaceful wetlands, and empties out into Lake Michigan. We covered about 3 miles of it, at a restful pace. Nice.
