The Insatiable Maw

by Mick Lowe

  Foley realized he was still hyperventilating slightly. The result of the recent chase, yes, but also, the newspaperman was coming to understand, due to the revelations of that morning; he was on to a major story here. He did his best to conceal his excitement, and he was more than a little curious whether Mr. Flatfoot fully grasped the significance of his presence. Gilpin cleared his throat. “I’m Foley Gilpin, a freelance reporter for the Globe and Mail. I’m here on assignment from my editor, Mike O’Neill.”

  O’Hanlon regarded Gilpin with studied nonchalance for a few beats before reaching for the telephone on his desk.

  Mike O’Neill was still in the morning budget meeting with Frank Blaney when the call came in, in the form of a gentle but unmistakable tap on the conference room door. “Yes?” The voice was Blaney’s, in here, as everywhere in the Globe’s Front Street West editorial offices, master of all he surveyed. Irritation at the interruption was clearly audible in the voice of the Managing Editor.

  A copy clerk, tethered to an unseen telephone by an impossibly long coiled extension cord, popped his head through the door and looked straight at O’Neill.

  He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone handset. “Do we have a stringer up in Sudbury named Foley Gilpin?”

  “Yeah, he works for me,” replied O’Neill.

  “’Cause he’s been caught trespassing on Inco property, and he says you sent him there. It’s Inco security on the line.”

  “Yeah, it was my assignment,” O’Neill affirmed once again. But Jesus Christ! He wasn’t supposed to get caught in there! Of all the times to have this blow up. . . and in front of Blaney yet!

  Blaney was notorious for his encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Canadian east of the Red River, his stratospheric IQ, his razor-sharp wit, and his explosive temper. But now he only regarded his Ontario Editor with a slightly arched eyebrow and with what seemed, outwardly at least, mild interest.

  “The Inco smelter? Didn’t see that slugged anywhere. . .”

  O’Neill only shrugged. “Yeah, well, it’s only a stand-up piece.”

  Blaney nodded, apparently mollified at the explanation that Gilpin’s assignment was nothing more than a “stand-up, anytime story,” a low-priority news feature that would stand up indefinitely and that might make the paper only on a slow news day.

  Or so it seemed to O’Neill at the time.

  Though he couldn’t hear it, Foley Gilpin could sense that the Inco security chief’s conversation with the Globe had confirmed his earlier explanation regarding his presence in the smelter. As he hung up, O’Hanlon turned his stolid attention to Gilpin.

  “You know Mr.-ah, Mr. Gilpin these premises are private property and that you were here without the owner’s knowledge or permission, which means that you are guilty, at the very least, of trespass.”

  Gilpin nodded meekly. Time to tug the forelock and get the hell out of there. He’d had enough experience with cops the world over to know better than to argue with them. Never, ever argue with a man carrying a gun. He couldn’t see for sure that O’Hanlon was packing, but he struck Foley as a man well acquainted with what in the States was known as Legal Concealed Carry . . .

  O’Hanlon droned on, “. . . if, as your editors have just attested, you believe you have any business inside our plants at any time you are always welcome to contact our Public Affairs Department to pre-arrange a press tour. . .”

  The upshot, in O’Hanlon’s tone and demeanour, was that Gilpin was a minor irritant, a nuisance bug. Nothing more. At worst a mere gadfly, to be shooed away, and, if the time ever came, to be crushed summarily underfoot.

  “And so, today, Mr. Gilpin, even though I would be well within my rights to do so, I will not charge you with trespassing on Company property. But I must caution you that if you are ever again apprehended on our property without authorization, then you most certainly will be charged, is that clear?”

  Gilpin, breathing more easily now, merely nodded again, and he was almost beginning to speak, to stammer out—what? his obsequious gratitude?—when he thought better of it, and closed his mouth abruptly. There was no need for further self-abasement. This interview was drawing to a close, and Gilpin, for one, was glad of it.

  And so, it appeared, was the security man, who had seemed weary of the thing—and of Gilpin—before it had even started.

  O’Hanlon’s minions, summoned by some unseen force, reappeared to escort Gilpin off the property. They accompanied him as far as the Number One Gate, where he was turned over to the security guard, a beefy, semi-comatose individual whose heavy-lidded eyes suggested to Foley that his breach of security was the biggest thing to happen on his watch in months, if not years. And with that Foley Gilpin found himself wandering alone through the vast expanse of the smelter parking lot. It would be hours now before Jake would finish his shift, and Gilpin, preferring not to wait, wondered how he would get back to town. He set out on his own, to walk out to Balsam Street and, eventually, to the main highway where he hoped to thumb a ride. He was well on his way before he realized he was still carrying his lunch pail, swinging it rather jauntily through the warming air of mid-morning. Time to doff the coveralls, which he did hopping awkwardly on one foot, curbside on Balsam Street. But the lunch pail, which he had set carefully on the curb while he changed, the newspaperman was careful to pick up. Gilpin would keep that lunch pail for years, as a memento of his industrial-strength industrial adventure, and of the long train of events—little expected at the time—that would flow from it.

  Foley knew better than to start writing immediately, much as he wanted to. For all that he had seen and experienced, he still didn’t quite have his story, and he knew it. The constraints of “objective journalism” ruled out any reference to his brush with Inco security—the Globe’s absolute strictures forebade any sort of first-person reference in a news story. Nor could he baldly assert what he knew as fact; every detail about conditions inside the smelter would have to be attributed to someone else, preferably the most credible source possible. And so, after a few anxious days of waiting for the stars to align, Gilpin found himself once again in the Safety and Health office on the first floor of the Steelworkers’ Hall. Crammed into the cramped space—made all the more stuffy by their very presence—were Jake McCool, Haywire d’Aguire, Randall McIvor, and several other union safety and health activists.

  Out of a sense of deference and because he needed to be able to take notes, the chair behind the desk that was still the central feature of the tiny room was reserved for Gilpin, while Haywire and Jake kicked back on the old truck seat. One by one in a breathless rush each of the union men took turns explaining his workplace within the smelter complex, describing in almost loving detail what the newsman had viewed during his recent “tour”—details that had been lost on Foley in the heat, confusion and paranoia of the moment. Gilpin, in turn, questioned each of them about his individual job description, rarely looking up from his notepad as he furiously scribbled note after note. Once he felt he’d mastered the big picture—the daunting nuances of one of the world’s largest integrated metallurgical complexes—Foley began zeroing in on the heart of the matter: specific monitored emission levels within different parts of the plant, exactly where and when the measurements were taken, and by whom, and how those readings compared to maximum emission levels mandated by provincial law, or, where no such laws existed—which was more often—“suggested threshold values,” weasel words that stank to Foley nearly as much as the crudely lettered files before him, on which he could still detect the faint reek of sulphur from the plants. He might be a stranger, but each of the union activists was gradually won over by the bespectacled little man at the desk, whose sincere interest in a subject so vital to each of them was abundantly clear. They took turns solemnly opening drawers in the battered filing cabinets that lined the walls of the little room, pulling out files, and laying them on the desktop beside Gilpin’s notebook. Even though it was Saturday, and only Gilpin was being paid f
or his time, there was no place else on earth they would rather be, no issue closer to life and death.

  After a few hours, Foley Gilpin found himself developing a severe case of writer’s cramp, along with a sense of sheer exhaustion at the intensity of the session. Finally he drew a deep breath, flipped his notebook closed, and sat up straight to establish eye contact with the eager, earnest men who surrounded him.

  “Oh, and one other last thing,” one of them insisted. “The company opens up the vents at night, when they figure nobody’s watching. I bet the sulphur levels downtown go through the roof.” The others around him nodded, as if to confirm that this practice was almost as well known and routine as it was illicit.

  “Well fellas, okay, I think that’s it for now,” Foley concluded, eager now to wrap up the whirlwind session and to get home to begin organizing his hectic notes and impressions into the cool, dispassionate prose style that would pass muster with his editors at the Globe and Mail.

  It took Gilpin about two days to order his notes and firsthand observations into acceptable Globe style. He had long ago concluded that interviewers and members of the public-at-large, though well meaning, widely misunderstood the writing process. They tended to get hung up on the physical act of writing (where? when? how many days a week? hours per day?) rather than the more abstract and less measurable and visible process that, perforce, had to precede the actual act of writing. Organizing the raw material into serviceable narrative shape, formulating a compelling lede (arguably the single most important part of the entire process) and, inevitably, what research material to leave out.

  The resulting effort, though filed in early July, did not appear until September, after the Ontario Legislature had resumed sitting following its annual summer hiatus. Gilpin had all but given up hope of ever seeing his smelter story in print when he received a call from O’Neill in Toronto.

  “Listen Foley, you remember that stand-up you did on the smelter up there?”

  Gilpin tried to mask his surprise at the question, even though his heart skipped a beat. Maybe his story wasn’t on the spike, after all. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Yeah, well, we’d like you to do a sidebar to kind of personalize the main: how does all this affect the life of the average smelter worker, just some typical guy. Got anybody you could build this around?”

  Foley thought instantly of Jake. “Yeah, sure, Mike, I can do that. How many words and when you want it by?”

  O’Neill paused to do a quick mental calculation. “How ‘bout next Friday in time for the Saturday bulldog?”

  As he’d more than half expected, Jake balked at the idea of becoming the subject of a newspaper story.

  “But why me? I’ve only been in the smelter a short time. You should do Haywire, or one of the guys who’ve been fighting for years to clean up that smelter.”

  “Aw, c’mon, man. I already know you—hell, I know your family—your dad, and even your uncles. C’mon, Jake, cut me some slack, here. Most of my research for this is almost done. All’s I need is fifteen minutes of your time—twenty minutes, tops.”

  The discussion took place at the dining room table the next night, Jo Ann sitting next to Jake following every word with close attention. If Foley knew her—and by now he knew both members of the young couple quite well after having lived with them both on and off for the better part of five years—Jo Ann would have something to say to Jake on the matter later, behind closed doors.

  And indeed it was a seemingly chastened, even hang-dog Jake who approached Foley at the coffee maker the next morning.

  “Look. I’m still not crazy about this, but how ’bout we get it over with, and sit down tomorrow night?”

  Foley agreed with alacrity, and evening found the two of them sitting face to face at the dining room table, Jo Ann, at Jake’s side, also facing Foley.

  Gilpin drew Jake out about his experiences working in the smelter generally, his overall work history at Inco, and the fact he was a second generation Inco worker, before prompting him to recount the story of his rescue of the injured co-worker who’d attempted the fatal short cut on the smelter floor. (Gilpin figured he could use the news release the company had issued praising Jake after the incident to bolster Jake’s credibility in his story.)

  Vast smelter complex skirts, often flouts, provincial regulations, workers say

  By FOLEY GILPIN

  Special to the Globe and Mail

  SUDBURY—The huge Copper Cliff nickel smelter located just four miles west of this city often violates Ontario atmospheric emission standards while government inspectors quietly turn a blind eye, veteran workers at Inco’s Copper Cliff smelter charged here yesterday.

  The Inco employees, all seasoned health and safety advocates and members of United Steelworkers Local 6500, which represents the company’s 11,700-strong hourly-rated workforce, charge that inspectors responsible for enforcing provincial regulations governing air pollution both inside and outside the sprawling industrial complex often call ahead to warn company officials of impending inspections.

  “It’s a pattern we’ve seen again and again,” said Richard d’Aguire, a veteran overhead crane operator in the converter building, where the air and dust pollution is often so intense that Mr. d’Aguire’s crane, which moves huge ladles of molten metal from one end of the building to the other, cannot be seen from the floor of the building, an area known as the converter aisles.

  Mr. d’Aguire contends that Ministry inspectors routinely collude with the smelter’s management to cover up violations of workplace health and safety and environmental regulations, a charge the company denied in a news release issued yesterday. “As has always been our practice, we operate the Copper Cliff smelter in a safe and responsible manner that conforms with, and often exceeds, provincial air quality standards.”

  But the company’s own safety statistics, which reveal there were more than 5,000 lost time accidents at its Sudbury operation in 1967 alone, lend credence to the allegations of the union health and safety activists. Particularly disturbing to many was a fatal accident that occurred in the smelter’s furnace building last June.

  see “Sudbury” page two

  O’Neill was true to his word, and the piece ran page one of the Saturday edition, the paper’s largest circulation day.

  Besides earning Foley his first front page by-line, his sensational take-out on the smelter also triggered a spate of local Sudbury media follow-ups or “matchers” throughout the following week. Although normally loathe to feature any news coverage even remotely critical of the huge nickel company—which had long since become the city’s leading advertiser—even Sudbury’s news editors were hard pressed to ignore a breaking national news story in their own backyard.

  Foley’s Globe story also featured a generous sidebar profile on Jake McCool, wrapped around the photo that Gilpin had managed to persuade a reluctant Jake to pose for outside the smelter plant gate, the smelter stacks looming, belching ominous smoke, in the background.

  Because Sudbury newsrooms normally shied away from any sort of substantive coverage of Inco, their reporters had neglected to cultivate any sources of their own on the labour beat, and so when the time finally came to cover the smelter situation they defaulted to the one easily identifiable source who was already known on the story—Jake McCool. His youth, telegenic good looks, and strong local roots made him a natural go-to source for Sudbury reporters scrambling to match Foley’s scoop.

  Jo Ann was absolutely stunned at the reaction to Foley’s story in the week that followed. Wherever she went—the hairdresser’s, grocers, even the public library—the same conversation repeated itself over and over: “Wasn’t that your boyfriend I seen in the news?” “I thought so!” “Oooh, he’s kinda cute! Better keep an eye on him, honey!”

  She was struck by how often the kibitzers expressed support for what Jake was saying and doing about conditions in the smelter. But then, who among them hadn’t complained about the thick, gaseous palls of sulphur smo
ke that often descended without warning over Durham and Elm, at the heart of the city’s downtown shopping district?

  At first Jo Ann ascribed this to the tenor of the times—her Jake, with his shaggy, boyish good looks and burgeoning moustache, was Sudbury’s own answer to the hippie movement, with its emphasis on peace, love, and good vibes toward all living things, Mother Earth, above all—but as her friends’ reactions continued to unfold, it gradually dawned on her that the issue was shifting subtly, that a kind of tipping point had been reached, unexpected and therefore unheralded: what had begun as a workplace movement had struck a raw nerve in the entire community. Wherever you went, after all, in the barbershops, hockey rinks, or beer parlours, everyone knew someone who knew someone who had a brother, father or uncle who had endured a shift inside the smelting complex. Sudbury was a close enough knit community that such word—spoken or unspoken—travelled fast, and that what was perceived as an affront to the basic human dignity of one family was, at the speed of light, understood as an insult to all.

  10

  A Luncheon At the Albany

  Charles Atlas Kemper III emerged from his shiny black limo and took the worn granite steps of the Albany Club two at a time. He entered the heavy, ornately scrolled, double hung bronze doors into a world of rich brown leather, discreet, indirect lighting, and muted conversations that decided the fates of huge corporations and swarms of working men in only the most hushed of tones. He looked up the magnificent entrance staircase—each step limned with a gleaming brass nosing, burnished daily—and there, at the top of the stairs, he found his host, smiling warmly.