Fantasy (photo by Jennifer inspired by Jill's word)

 

Fantasy (word prompt given May 28, 2021)

I was tremendously excited to have composed a story about my 6th grade school teacher who had worked in the steel mill in myhometown. I spent a long time interviewing her and composing it. I’m not the most proficient public speaker, but I don’t mind it, as long as I have something written down to read. I picked out my dress and accessories ahead of time and fantasized about everything going well. I knew that that would encourage me to be less nervous. The weather for the evening was pleasant, and the sun was warm and radiant and I think I did pretty well.

—Jennifer

 

A City of Duquesne teacher recalls lessons she learned as a steelworker

 

By Jennifer McCalla

 

A child from a mill town, Sue Lucas knew that teaching was a respectable woman’s career path, but never expected to have a face full of soot one day at the U.S. Steel Duquesne Works.

“I loved it down there,” said Lucas, now 64, from her living room in West Mifflin, who worked at the blast furnace plant along the Monongahela River from 1978 to 1980. “It was such a good learning experience. When you first go there, it’s like you’re in awe. You don’t realize how big everything is until you’re down there.”

 

The Carnegie-Illinois Steel Company operated the 250-acre plant from 1886 to 1984. A portion of the workers were women, who felt empowered working alongside men in these dangerous jobs, despite men’s jobs paying more than women’s “pink collar” jobs.

 

Born and raised in working class Duquesne, when Lucas was 15 years old, she started teaching arts and crafts and supervising the playground on Hudson Street. In the 1970s, plenty of kids swarmed all of the playgrounds in Duquesne. She piled as many children as she could fit in her car, and they drove to the playground. In addition to teaching lessons, she watched them play with bats and balls, perform skits, and helped them with arts and crafts. She still keeps in touch today with a few of her “playground kids.”

 

As much as she liked her work there, Lucas wanted her pay to better reflect her ambition. So when the opportunity came up to work at the Duquesne Works steel mill, she went for it. 

 

The hard work and long hours weren’t intimidating: Her parents first met while both working there. Her two brothers became steelworkers in Duquesne while her sister worked at National Steel in McKeesport and Later Latrobe Steel.

 

“My dad didn't say anything about me working down there, because a lot of the guys worked down there after high school unless you went to college. It was kinda where everyone worked.” 

 

Lucas started as a knock-out clerk in the office for the blast furnace. At first, another woman got the job, chosen by her birthday, but she couldn’t round numbers, so after only a week Lucas took over.

 

“I learned a lot down there,” she said. “Some of the bosses knew I was a teacher and they were willing to explain things to me and they were helpful. When I went into teaching I was able to explain the whole steel-making process to everyone. So I carried over my experiences from down there.”

 

Lucas answered the telephone and she had to get the metallurgical data to her boss so they knew what was going on with the furnaces. She was part of the day labor gang in the blast furnace. The men took bets on how long she was going to last. 

 

“The male workers treated you depending on how you acted, if you acted like one of the guys they treated you like one of the guys,” she said.

 

Some men, though, weren’t very friendly and didn’t want women there in the first place and their attitudes ran the gamut. One male co-worker who didn’t want anything to do with her often ignored Lucas for an entire eight-hour shift.

 

Her friend, Helen Jacobson, was “just one of the guys” with her. Once, when they walked in the room all the men were swearing. They stopped and apologized to her, but not Jacobson, who got annoyed.

 

Jacobson volunteered for her and Lucas to bid on various jobs. One of these was throwing bags into the gunite machine or car-dumper. Each worker had to throw very heavy bags full of powder up onto a grate inside the machine with a jagged edge. Then, it would break open and the powder would fall down through. The bags needed to be thrown high up above their heads. 

 

“After a couple, I couldn’t get it up there hard enough to break them,” she said, adding that the men didn’t mind helping the female steelworkers on occasion. “If they saw you trying, they were OK. I didn’t have a lot of problems down there, I enjoyed it.”

 

Lucas learned how to read blueprints and handle gases safely after taking U.S. Steel classes at the Homestead mill. She took on all kinds of other tasks: cleaning bathrooms, flagging at the basic oxygen furnace, removing debris from iron poured onto railroad cars, and hosing down wall track. Lucas even built things like frames and scaffolding in the carpenter’s shop, the first woman to hold the job.

 

One day, Sue had just left the furnace, and one of the bosses told her to go look in the mirror. She took off her glasses and the only things that weren’t black were her blue eyes because of all of the soot.

 

Another time, while Lucas was riding an elevator with a supervisor from American Bridge Company, there was a power outage at one of the furnaces. To escape, they had to open the trap door in the top of the elevator, climb out of the shaft and climb up the ladder. After that, Lucas said she never wanted to get back into the elevator again, but she did the next day.

 

“It was a dangerous place,” Lucas said. “You had to really be on your toes — you couldn’t clown around down there, especially when casting was going on and you couldn’t be too close to the tracks. The hot iron did splatter, so you had to watch where you were. You couldn’t be there without the asbestos suit because you could lose a foot if it splattered on your foot, for example.” 

 

By the time she started working at Duquesne Works, her dad had already retired. So when her steel-toed boots caused big, swollen blisters to form on her feet, she dusted his off and wore them back into the hot, dirty plant once again until her feet healed.

 

“Growing up I never realized what he did there. He didn't talk much about it. He worked in the Bar Mill. I never got to see that part, so I really never experienced what he actually did.”

 

At the time, Lucas earned big muscular arms from doing lots of shoveling, whether it was on and off conveyor belts or into the furnaces. Decades later, she may have lost her muscle, but she still has her Dorothy 6 belt buckle, given by the mill bosses as awards. She said Dorothy, the sixth furnace, broke all kinds of records for the Duquesne Works site, and — seemingly all of a sudden — U.S. Steel shut it down.

 

Lucas only worked at the mill for a couple of years from 1978 to 1980 before she was laid off. By 1984, the Duquesne Works steel mill was shut down completely.

 

Also let go from their steel-working jobs, her siblings moved to California for a while with their uncle to look for work. She considered joining them, she really didn’t want to leave Duquesne.

 

“Everything just fell into place,”  she said, “I just never left the area … I had no desire to go anywhere else.” 

 

Right after she got laid off from the steel mill, first she went back to substitute teaching, then spent the next 15 years at Duquesne Catholic. As the jobs and financial stability left Duquesne with the steel industry, the whole community felt its impact. When the Catholic school closed, she went on to teach for 20 years at Duquesne High School, the same one where she herself attended as a student. Eventually, Lucas also saw the high school shut down before she retired in 2018.

 

Had the mill not closed in 1984, Lucas would have considered staying there as long as she could.

 

“No one ever believed that it ever would have shut down,” she said. “You went to high school and then you worked in the mill.”