Watercolor perfectly captures feel of Bethlehem Steel
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Recently I visited the Burchfield Penney Art Center. I had a “eureka moment” as I stood in front of Buffalo artist Robert Noel Blair’s watercolor with pencil sketch of a place where I had spent part of eight years of my life. The title of the work was “Bethlehem Steel, Open Hearth, Lackawanna, circa 1946-47.”
Blair (1912-2003), who died in the Town of Holland, was a prolific painter of rural life and World War II scenes. His work, according to “Ask/Art, the Artist’s Bluebook,” was noted for its color, fluidity and movement.
As I examined Blair’s watercolor, my imagination took me back to 1955, to No. 2 open hearth, at the Bethlehem Steel Lackawanna Plant. That was the year I began working there, mostly on the 11-to-7 night shifts, while going to Canisius College in the daytime.
Norm Fennie was the No. 2 shop superintendent — a friend of my parents, who got me the job. “Just don’t get killed, kid,” he told me in a momentary interruption of his pacing in front of furnaces 21 to 30. This was the distance of five football fields.
Mike Dolan, later a groomsman in our wedding, was the regular labor foreman. He made sure that I had shifts that worked around my school schedule, mostly 3 to 11 and nights.
I did what needed to be done: I operated a bulldozer, worked as a third helper on heats (the processing of steel in furnaces), was in charge of the “bull-gang,” a bunch of guys that included teachers Jack Foster and Don Miller as well as students Ken Seifert and Bill Orrange, who loaded stock, phosphorus, low-carbon chrome, nickel, aluminum, spar, coal, molybdenum, dolomite and various ores for the charging machines to put into the furnaces’ engorged mouths.
Huge metal doors lined with kiln brick were raised from a panel on the front of each furnace by the first helper, so that the charging machines and overhead cranes could drop into the bath of the furnace 350 tons or so of materials that would soon melt and be transformed into various grades of steel.
This detail is background to Blair’s watercolor. His rendering shows the pit side of an open hearth, that is, the back side of the open hearth floor, about 100 feet below the front of the furnaces, eight years before my working there.
In truth, if you started working in the open hearth in 1905 or 1955, there wouldn’t be much difference. Nothing changed materially during those years. I remember doing “special heats” with Jim McLaughlin, three-to eight-hour shifts, each requiring 3,500 pounds of material to be lifted, ground, shoveled, wheeled and dumped in boxes behind the furnaces.
For example, two workers would grind up huge 75-pound pieces of low-carbon chrome into shards that could be put onto a pneumatic tire wheelbarrow that weighed more than 1,000 pounds to be wheeled. The patent on the machine used to do the grinding in 1955 was 1900. (In the late 1950s, the introduction of oxygen furnaces changed the basic open hearth operation, cutting “heat times” from eight to nine hours to three to four hours.)
I suppose if someone viewed Blair’s watercolor without ever having worked in the open hearth, what would be pleasing about it would be its balance and visual acuity, the swirl of colors, orange, yellow and darker hues. The rest would be mysterious.
But for those who have worked in the open hearth, sweat, smoke, sulfur fumes and graphite dust permeate the scene. In those days, one took work clothes home once a week in a big paper bag. That meant shirts, trousers and heavy underwear (worn to avoid slag burns), were encrusted with white “Burma-road” zigzags of salt, for wife or mother to throw into the washing machine.
Heavy work shoes, gloves, a Bethlehem Steel dark blue wool jacket, helmet or cap and dark glasses for peering into furnaces were left in what were called “overhead lockers.” Think of a chain fall with a metal basket and hooks, which raised your clothes 20 feet in the air in a locker room with four showers, used 24 hours a day by 800 men.
Now to the watercolor: What is it that attracts the eye?
This will differ with the beholder. For me, the pit side crane is carrying a ladle of 350 tons of molten steel, to be poured from the left side of the painting, the platform used by the pourers, to measure out the heat into 26-by-28-inch, 28-by- 35-inch or many other variations depending upon use, open-faced molds that were 15 feet tall. They might hold two or three tons of popsicle orange bright steel after it hardened and was removed by cranes overseen by the stripper foreman (another of my jobs), 10 football fields away from the pouring.
In the painting, other heats are being tapped, slag pots are fuming, railroad tracks are glistening and a lone worker is inching toward the lower level of the watercolor, perhaps to tell Al, the ladle liner, that he needs a newly lined ladle for #24 furnace before 4 a. m.
The painting shows the stark beauty of the tableau, but also the danger. It was not child’s play. I stayed alive, but others didn’t.
Men like brothers Jim and Bob McCann, a melter and pit foreman respectively in those years, or melters like Dave Kemp or Cy Koons, could tame that cavernous disorder with a verbal order, or a deft touch on instruments in front of a furnace, recalculating figures to make the specifications of a heat of steel come out “right on the button.”
Blair has done a meticulous job of intuiting what it meant to be “in media res” on the pit side of an open hearth. If only one could purchase a copy of the painting! At present, it is not available. Alumni of Bethlehem Steel, take note. When Blair’s watercolor can be purchased, it will be an immediate best seller at the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
Michael D. Langan has served in both the Treasury and Labor Departments in Washington. He is a former headmaster at Nardin Academy and former vice president at Canisius College.
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