“Well, Julie, you’ve asked two questions that will take some time to answer.”
He picked up a chair from across the room, set it down opposite my desk and smiled at me. “Let’s begin by striking a more informal note here. We English tend to be, well, stuffy about our names, I’ve been told. The people I know well here in America call me Rand.”
“I’d like that, Rand.”
“Good. Now about the family motto. I had an ancestor, Lawrance Wilkinson, who was a lieutenant in the King’s army during our Civil War back in 1640. Lawrance so hated the thought of fighting his own countrymen that he came up with the phrase, ‘Neither for king, nor for people, but for both.’”
“What happened to him?”
Rand leaned back in the chair, crossed his legs and related how Lawrance’s side, the Royalists, had been soundly trounced by the Scottish armies led by Oliver Cromwell. “It seemed that Harperley House and its surrounding estates, in the Wilkinson family since 1603, had then been confiscated—sequestered, as they put it.”
“But, Rand, wait a minute. You said last fall that your family, the English Wilkinsons, still live in Harperley House. Is this the same house? And when did you get it back?”
Rand laughed. “You don’t miss much, do you? We still live in the original Harperley House—what we called a manor house. It was returned to our family by the government years after the Civil War was over.”
Now a faraway look came into Rand’s blue eyes. “I get homesick every time I think of the view from the terrace of Harperley—the rolling green pasturage, with the misty-blue Pennine hills on the horizon. As a boy, I played on the stairs of the great hall under the skylight. We children slid down the curved balustrades, with the portraits of our ancestors frowning upon us.”
Suddenly Rand shook his head as if coming out of a reverie and jumped up to leave.
“But, Rand, wait a minute. You still haven’t told me what the three unicorns in your family crest stand for.”
He looked at his watch. “I’ll have to do that another time.” And with a cheerio, he strode out the door.
I sat there working on my smudged proofs in a daze, a girl in a grimy mill town dreaming of a manor house called Harperley. Rand’s parting words at least held the possibility of another time.
That Friday the Editor had a copy of the week’s Sentinel with him when he returned from the office for dinner. About seven o’clock, as Mother and I were clearing off the table after dinner, the telephone rang. Dad answered it.
“That’s a bad mistake, Sam,” we heard him say. “I’m really sorry. I know it’s embarrassing for you. We’ll certainly forget about payment for that ad.”
My father hung up the phone, picked up the Sentinel where he had flung it down, and turned to the back page.
He groaned, “What a beaut!”
“What’s wrong, dear?” Mother was quickly at his side, the rest of us close behind her.
Color had crept up to the roots of my father’s curly brown hair. “The Sentinel has made the most mortifying mistake of the year.”
“Where?” we chorused.
“On the back page. The Gaither shirt ad. Sam just called about it.”
All of us crowded around the newspaper, which was spread flat on his desk. Tim tittered.
Special Clearance Sale!
(as long as they last)
MEN’S SHITS
98¢ each — 3 for $2.69
THE BUY YOU CAN’T
AFFORD TO MISS
Gaither Apparel Store
36 Main Street
Then the truth hit me. The mistake was mine. As proofreader I had not spotted the r missing from shirts. If only a hole would open up in the floor to swallow me!
“Dad, it’s all my fault,” I confessed limply. “I read the proofs for this ad and just didn’t catch the mistake.” I was close to tears. And I could not justify it by explaining that Rand had interrupted me at the very moment I was going over that particular advertisement.
The phone rang again. Dad listened a minute and I saw his face tighten. “No one is blaming you, Emily. Julie has already admitted it was her mistake.”
Another long silence on his end. When he spoke at last, his voice had an edge to it. “Anybody with any intelligence at all will know that there was nothing deliberate here, Emily, just a plain oversight. No, we will not change our procedures because of one mistake in proofreading. Emily, I’ll see you at the office tomorrow. We’ll make an immediate adjustment on Mr. Gaither’s bill.” With that, Dad hung up.
“Dad, I’m really sorry.” Now my eyes were spilling over with tears.
He put his arm around me. “Look, daughter, don’t take it so hard. People will either think it very funny or else be sanctimoniously incensed about it.”
Dad patted me again and settled down to the work on his desk.
My father had been correct about people’s reactions. I dreaded going to school on Monday, but to my amazement it was the big joke of the day. I pretended ignorance at first, but by the afternoon, I had admitted my gaffe and found myself in a near-heroine role.
However, when I entered the Sentinel office after school, I had to face a fiery-eyed Miss Cruley.
“I’ve been in newspaper work for thirty years,” she flung in my face, “and this is the worst mistake I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Cruley,” I answered, determined not to be intimidated.
“Being sorry changes nothing at all,” she snapped. “People are blaming me.”
“Then tell them that I did it. Or do you want me to wear a sign around my neck reading ‘I’m the guilty one’?”
“That’s being insufferably impertinent. You Wallace kids are all too young to be involved in this business. I tried to warn your father. The Sentinel could go under, you know, with this kind of irresponsibility.”
Sudden anger rose in me. “Has anyone called to cancel their ads or subscriptions?”
“Not yet. But just you wait. People won’t put up with that kind of vulgarity.”
“Not vulgarity, Miss Cruley. An innocent mistake. You made it, setting type. I missed it, reading proof.”
“Hrumph!” She glared at me and stomped over to her desk. A thought hit me—I really should go down to the store and apologize to Mr. Gaither himself. Without another word to Miss Cruley, I turned and left the office.
I stopped in front of Gaither’s Apparel Store, stomach churning. Slowly I pushed open the swinging doors and walked inside. Suddenly I saw Mr. Gaither coming directly toward me. His arms were outstretched. He was beaming. Quickly he silenced my apology—“Julie, would you believe it? Today’s the best day this store ever had! Every last shirt on sale is gone. Sold out!”
Mr. Gaither insisted on paying for the advertisement. He also came back two weeks later and asked the Editor to run the same advertisement, misprint and all, upside down. Dad talked him out of it.
I put off to the last minute my choice of a term paper subject for my economics class. It had to be on some aspect of the free enterprise system and would constitute half the semester grade. When the Editor announced one day at breakfast that he had a date later that week to see the younger Tom McKeever at the steel plant, I had an idea: why not choose as my subject the process of steel making? Real-life research would certainly make a more interesting paper than using the encyclopedia.
Perhaps, just perhaps, I could persuade Dad to let me go with him; and maybe Mr. McKeever would allow someone to show me around the plant. I might even get a story out of it for the Sentinel. A lot of perhapses and maybes, for sure.
When I presented my idea to the Editor after school that afternoon, he promised to query Mr. McKeever. A few hours later he reported back, “You’re in luck, Julie. McKeever said he would pick a—let me think—ah, yes, a puddler’s helper, to show you around. Advised wearing old clothes.”
The Yoder Iron and Steel Company occupied considerable acreage north of town on the other side of the Sequanoto River. No so
oner had Dad and I driven across North Bridge than we found ourselves amid the cacophony of noise we had heard day and night in muted form at Bank Place: clanging metal, grinding machinery, detonations, and sirens jarring our eardrums.
High, heavy-wire fencing encircled the grounds. A sign at the entrance read STOP FOR CLEARANCE. From a pillbox guardhouse a very old man stepped forward and directed us to the office. As we drove on into the yard, my first impression was of a sprawling maze of long iron sheds, narrow but tall, the whole area crisscrossed by a network of railroad tracks along which moved small open coal cars.
Dad parked outside the office and we walked into a tiny reception room furnished with only a few straight chairs. The bare floor was gritty underneath my feet. My gosh, I thought in surprise, and I considered the Sentinel office plain and bare!
A receptionist asked us to be seated. Soon young Mr. McKeever came striding into the room. He was wearing a natty tweed suit.
“Tom, I hope it isn’t an imposition bringing Julie.”
“Not a bit of it." His friendly eyes looked me over searchingly, noting with approval that I was wearing serviceable garb and rubber-soled shoes.
As we followed the erect figure down the hall, Mr. McKeever said over his shoulder, “I’ve asked Neal Brinton to show you around. I understand you know him from our church canteen. He’s one our best puddler’s helpers. A young man with ambition.”
“Neal—that’s great!” I enthused.
Young McKeever’s office was more comfortably furnished: a large walnut conference table surrounded by armchairs dominated the large rugless room. A desk piled high with papers and file folders took up one corner. In another corner was a black metal safe with YODER IRON COMPANY in old-fashioned gold lettering on the front.
Mr. McKeever picked up one of the three phones on his desk. “Jim! McKeever here. Tell Neal to hustle on over.” He banged down the receiver.
Once again he studied me. “Young lady, I hope you have a good memory. You’re about to see a lot in a short time.”
“I brought a notebook.”
He shook his head. “Doubt if you’ll be able to take notes.”
“That’s all right. Outside research can fill in holes.”
“I see.” He lit a cigarette. “You’ll find steel making a beautiful spectacle. Are you interested in the Bessemer process or just the open-hearth method we use today?”
“I scarcely know. My paper’s not supposed to be too long.”
“Well, a lot of steel history has been made right here in this plant. Thomas Yoder, my grandfather, started this company in 1852. At first the plant mostly turned out—well, give a guess.”
“Shovels? Picks?”
“Big iron kettles for the New Orleans sugar-cane market.”
A familiar figure appeared in the doorway.
“Ah, Neal, there you are—I think you know both these people.”
Neal grinned at us. “S-sure do. How long a tour, s-sir?”
“Oh, say, thirty minutes.”
Outside Neal and I strode along briskly, our feet crunching a surface that was two to three inches deep in dust mixed with gravel and cinders. I noticed that Neal was carrying a white hard hat and several pairs of goggles. He saw my questioning look.
“When we get inside you’re to put on the s-safety hat and plain goggles,” he told me. “For protection. Later you’ll need blue goggles to s-see molten flames of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The naked eyes can’t s-see heat that white. We’ll begin with s-shed Number Two.”
“How many sheds are there?”
“Twenty-one.”
As Neal talked, I noticed that despite his slight speech impediment, he had a good command of English.
“Neal, what’s the glittery stuff there on the ground? Almost looks like sparkly snow.”
“Particles of graphite. No way to keep them from flaking.” Suddenly, off to our right there was a screeching noise so dreadful that I cried out.
Neal laughed. “They’re cold s-saws biting into s-steel.”
“How do you stand it?”
“You get used to it.” He paused before an open door. “It’ll be too noisy in there for talking. Any other questions?”
“Yes. Where do the workers come from?” The craggy-faced giant smiled. “Plant started off with the S-Scots, Welsh, Irish, S-Swedes, a few Russians. Back in 1910 only about a fourth of all s-steelworkers were Americans. Last few years we’ve gotten mostly Germans, S-Slovaks, Italians and Poles.”
“One more question. Mr. McKeever said something about the Bessemer process and open hearth. What’s the difference?” Neal’s brow furrowed. “Before Bessemer they made just iron. But during the Civil War, iron tracks would get brittle in real cold weather and break. Trains derailed. So they discovered that if you cook iron ore together with coke and limestone to a temperature of about 3,000 degrees, then force a great blast of air into it—well, you get s-steel. That’s the Bessemer process.”
I looked at him, uncomprehending.
“You have to understand chemistry. The lucky guys who get ahead in s-steel are those who dig in on chemistry and metallurgy.” There was a note of wistfulness in his voice. “Perhaps the simplest way to explain the difference is that the Bessemer converters will accept only high-quality pig iron,” he continued. “Open-hearth furnaces, however, will take all kinds of scrap metal in them. That’s why they’re preferred today.”
After I put on the hard hat, we walked into a long shed where the atmosphere was so murky—swirling cinders, smoke, hissing steam, and sulphur-smelling fumes—that the far wall was barely visible. Once inside, I understood why the building had looked so tall from the outside. The blackened walls of the brick furnaces were considerably higher than a two-story building. The toiling, sweating men seemed like pygmies in contrast to the cyclopean size of everything around them. Close to the roof of the shed were heavy steel girders forming narrow walkways like catwalks. At places along the catwalks were small platforms with safety railings. Neal saw me looking upward.
“Galleries,” he shouted.
Here and there I saw salt tablet dispensing machines and continuously running water fountains for the sweating men.
Some of the steelworkers were stripped to the waist, the upper part of their bodies glistening with sweat, but those nearest the furnaces were wearing heavy woven safety clothing and goggles over their eyes. Several stared at me. Their looks were not friendly.
Neal suddenly gripped my arm and I sprang back as a car on railroad tracks bore down on us like an enraged bull. As the machine ground to a halt in front of the furnace nearby, a man Neal later called the boss-melter opened the furnace door and out belched flames—red and orange and white. Fascinated, I watched him as he pushed levers to move a gigantic metal arm forward, thus deftly dumping his entire load into the furnace. As the door slammed shut, the flames in the furnace roared up so loudly I would have thought kerosene had been poured on them.
When the empty car moved away, Neal put his mouth to my ear. “That machine was loading limestone into the furnace. I think Furnace Fifty-Nine is ripe for tapping. Follow me. But s-stick close.”
He need not have worried. How could the anteroom of hell be more dramatic than this! Now I understood what Mr. McKeever had meant about my seeing more than I could take in. So far I had not been able to write a word in my notebook.
The noise of the furnaces was suddenly punctuated by a shrill siren. I jumped. “Where’s the emergency?” I shouted.
Neal laughed at me and roared into my ear, “That’s just the telephone, Julie.”
I looked at him in astonishment. Apparently everything in connection with steel making had to be grossly exaggerated—titan in size, ear-splitting noises, fiercely high temperatures, loads measured in hundreds of tons. What, I wondered, would it do to a man having to live every working day with such extremes?
Neal beckoned me to follow as he led the way to the rear of Furnace 59. A man in a protective suit was probing arou
nd in the furnace with a long steel rod. All at once a burst of flame shot out and the man jumped back out of the way. With our faces burning, Neal and I retreated too.
His mouth close to my ear, my guide answered my question before I could ask it. “That’s called ramming the taphole.” Neal handed me one of the goggles. “Better put the blue ones on here.”
Next we saw a crane sliding a huge ladle full of molten pig iron along an overhead track toward the open furnace door. When the contents of the ladle entered the furnace, it sounded like a cannon going off, flames leaping almost to the roof.
With the cobalt-blue goggles on, there were incredible colors in the liquid steel: indigo, sapphire, violet, mauve, magenta. The swirling ripples and waves, encircling, made it seem like looking into the eye of a cyclone.
One of the helpers near us was wearing a strange device over his face. Despairing of making Neal hear me, I pointed to him.
Neal cupped his hand around his mouth and raised his voice.
“That’s Hans. He’s an optical pyrometer. By looking at the s-steel through those things, he can tell the temperature to the degree.”
Hans signaled with his arm, and the ladle moved under the furnace spout where it received a gush of molten steel throwing off red-white sparks. When the ladle was filled, it eased away, with Hans alongside it.
“He’s testing it now,” came the voice in my ear.
Following another signal from Hans, several men came forward carrying what looked to be giant spoons: each hurled something into the molten mixture.
“They’re adding dolomite,” he shouted.
I yelled back at him, “Looks like a giant pot of soup.”
He grinned. “That’s what they call it—s-soup. A potful of two hundred fifty tons.”
Like cooks tasting a stew, the men kept thrusting elongated soup spoons into the heart of this molten brew. When a sample was poured into a testing mold, then plunged into a container of water, it would solidify enough to be dumped out of the mold and smashed to pieces with a sledgehammer.
I glanced over at Neal with questioning eyes.
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