Men of Steel

PREFACE

Lockport, New York. It’s not what you would have called a steel town, at least not like those scattered along the Monongahela north and south of Pittsburgh or in Lackawanna, N.Y., where the steel mill was the major or only employer; but Lockport has a metals history dating to the nineteenth century. In the 1940s and 1950s, manufacturing and business in Lockport thrived around a vibrant urban core. Simonds Saw and Steel was the town’s second largest employer, its workers dwarfed in number by a factor of six to one to the leading employer, Harrison Radiator Division of General Motors. However, Simonds counted for something, because even though it didn’t dominate the industrial or city landscape, steelmaking then was at the heart of American industry and the soul of labor.

People moved away for careers, but not so much that you would notice. In my case, I had a fondness for the place I called home, and I had never given any serious thought to leaving Lockport, or Western New York, for that matter. Absorbed in my post high school education, however, it seemed each step I took to fulfill my career goal took me farther and farther away, at first only twenty miles to the University of Buffalo, but eventually more than 2,200 miles to Arizona in the 1970s.

From afar, I began to sense a decline in the community of my youth and the factory where my father and grandfathers had labored to support their families, and where I had spent a season as a third-generation steelworker. Cherished memories of that time and place, where the steam hammer sounded a three-note chord that lulled me to sleep at night, became an inducement to record that intersection of personal and family labor history with a blend of steelworkers’ recollections in this story, which is dedicated to them.

The Simonds Saw and Steel Company has passed into history, the buildings on Ohio Street remain fenced off, abandoned to the elements, rusting away with broken windows and missing roof tiles. Inside and out, weeds rise where workers once turned scrap metal into high-quality alloy steel. My wish to document what the place had been like earlier was a motivating factor in my decision to join my son with his camera in a journey through the abandoned plant.

This book is a tale of that journey. It weaves my story with that of many other steelworkers who spent time under the roofs that the Simonds family built. Some like me, if only briefly, were third-generation steel men who followed their father’s and grandfather’s footsteps across the cinder parking lot or down the Ohio Street sidewalk and through the gates of the mill. Indeed, while I began to write out of personal interest, I found that listening to steelworkers’ experiences compelled me to preserve a record of labor that might otherwise be lost to the community.

This is a work of historical non-fiction with memoir thrown in: a creative journey, not a single saunter through the mill, but a composite of several visits, each taking a different route in different seasons with my participation highly imagined. The feasibility of this approach to the narrative came to me when I read Jonathon Waldman’s story of photographer Eva Csuk’s trip through the Bethlehem Steel Works in his book on corrosion, Rust. The Longest War.

We tend to understand history in terms of the written word, but meaningful history can be recorded in images. The narrative and companion photographs are meant not only to transport the reader back in time, but in adding vintage images of men at work to those of contemporary industrial decay, I hoped to draw visual attention to the impact that the abandonment of steel mills has had on workers and communities across our national landscape. Each steel community has its own story to tell, and Lockport is no exception.

This book focuses on the craft of specialty steel as Simonds made it, but will compare and contrast the manufacture of standard carbon steel in the large integrated steel mills such as Bethlehem in the context of the history behind it all. Steelmaking, particularly its technical, chemical, and metallurgical aspects, can be daunting for the general reader. I’ve tried to keep it simple. For those who desire more, I have included a selective bibliography, a supplementary appendix with a glossary of terms, and a list of the most common metals with their basic characteristics that Simonds used to make steel in Lockport.

Today, nearly forty years after the closure and abandonment of steel mills across the country, the subject continues to draw interest. Scarcely a week goes by without the print or broadcast media serving up a piece on the deindustrialization of America with its loss of manufacturing jobs and the plight of the blue-collar worker.

I hope this book achieves my aims, and does justice to the recollections of the men of steel. I appreciate the opportunity to share this story about the nature of work at a time and place at the heart of American industry.

        —Louis A. Rosati

Mesa, Arizona

Original sketch of Simonds Saw and Steel by Joe Whalen, courtesy of John Coleman.

1

SCYTHEMAKERS

Perhaps it was my career as a pathologist that had me feeling like I was on my way to an autopsy. I thought I was prepared for this, but a nostalgic hankering to relive my steelworker days, working alongside men I’d known and respected as a kid, stirred my emotions. Nineteen fifty-nine held another halcyon summer. I was home from college, in love, playing ball with my high school pals, and making steel. Life couldn’t have been sweeter. I’d read that nostalgia is a fantasy that maintains itself because it can’t be fulfilled. Nevertheless, here I was, trying to recapture it more than fifty years later.

The steel industry had been a shell of itself for a good half-century. It was less competitive and less central to the US economy. That wasn’t news to me, but I guess the fact that I was coming face-to-face with an indelible time and place had me wondering about a lot of things, not the least of which was coming to terms with my past.

Simonds Saw and Steel helped fashion the American dream for me and countless others. Among its employees were dozens of immigrants, such as my father and grandfathers who came to this country to work. In their labor and frugal lifestyle they became part of a strong middle class, the likes of which we may never see again.

Somehow, I couldn’t stop feeling wistful. It all led to a question I had: how did Simonds die? And because the demand for the type of steel it made never abated, there was another question: why?

It’s in a pathologist’s job description to seek answers in their postmortem examinations. That’s part of what we do. The Simonds postmortem nagged at me as I drove over the Erie Canal on the Summit Street Bridge and saw the old mill silhouetted against the morning twilight.

Well, here we are, I said to my son, Michael, pulling the car to a crunching stop on the cinder-packed shoulder of Ohio Street. I rolled down my window and looked out through the wild shrubs and spindly trees that filled the foreground of the fenced-in materials yard. The vegetation obscured the rail spur and lower frame of the crane trestle in the foreground of the shuttered and abandoned plant.

Michael whistled one low plaintive note while he adjusted the settings on his Nikon. I sat there downcast. God, what happened to this place? Finally, I got out of the car and pulled a cell phone from my pocket. Michael opened the passenger door, stepped out with his camera and reached for his backpack and tripod on the rear seat. The doors slammed in rapid succession, breaking the dawn’s stillness in the gray light of the eastern sky. I leaned against the hood of the car, raised the cell phone camera and focused on a rusting corrugated-metal building with a gabled roof surmounted by a peaked superstructure. Chimneys that once belched smoke from furnaces were now silent sentinels. The chain-link fence precluded a good shot. So I stepped onto a grassy, tendril-covered sidewalk next to the fence and positioned the camera lens between the links. I zoomed in between the trees and a portion of a trestle and overhead crane to frame the buildings which, like the vegetation around it, had gone to seed. While Michael set up his equipment, I pressed the photo button. In the glow of the morning’s half-light, I heard its soft click capture the starkness of what was left of a once-bustling producer of specialty steel products in Lockport, New York, the original Simonds Saw and Steel Company.

What are you thinking about, Pop?

My arms outstretched against the fence, my fingers enfolded in the links, I had begun the physical external examination as I flipped through pages in my memory for an old image I could not quite grasp. A sign attached to the fence to the right of my hand displayed the trefoil radioactive hazard symbol. No trespassing. I turned to Michael, who was adjusting his camera mount. That was the first building they put up. It looks pretty awful now. That was not how I remembered it when I worked there. It seems like everyone I knew growing up worked in there, both of my grandfathers and their brothers, my godfather, my confirmation sponsor, most of the men in the West End. I turned to Michael. If you had gotten a job here, you would have been the fourth generation to step under that roof.

Yeah, interesting, he said, adjusting his lens setting. So when did they start working here? he asked, squinting through the viewfinder.

His question jogged my memory of my tadone, my grandfather, Antonio, and his time at Simonds. Both of my grandfathers had worked at Simonds, as did their brothers. I don’t know exactly, sometime after World War I. Grandpa DiPaolo started there around 1920, I think. It was about a decade or so after Simonds put up this building. My relatives told me stories about this place when I was a kid, but unfortunately I didn’t pay much attention. Too busy playing in the neighborhood and fishing in the canal, I guess. It was just a summer job when I worked there in 1959, a way to make some money before going back to college for my sophomore year. I never gave the history of the place or how they made steel much thought. It was only after I started looking into the plant’s history that I learned some things about the mill that they probably didn’t even know. They were content to have good jobs. I don’t think they were any more interested than I was about how those jobs came about. I thought about the earlier images of the plant and how different it looked now; and as Michael moved his tripod for another angle to capture the bleak landscape, I mentally wrapped text around those images.

Michael framed his view and rapidly fired off a sequence of images. Hold it a minute, Pop, he said. I’m going to move up the sidewalk and shoot another angle. Tell me the rest of the story when I get back. I want to know how it all started, he said as he lifted his tripod and walked off.

Our curiosities are drawn to the beginnings of things. So while I leaned back against the car and waited for Michael to finish his shots, I thought about the plant’s history. I had acquired a 1921 Simonds catalog with grainy photos and descriptions of the early steelmaking process. When I first read that catalog, almost one hundred years after it was printed, I was struck by the first page, which was titled "How to Reach Lockport. Below it was a map drawn of Western New York with the Erie Canal, Niagara River, Lake Ontario, and the towns of Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Tonawanda, Lewiston and Lockport. The brochure read, the best way was to take the Lockport electric car from Court and Main Street in Buffalo and get off at the mill office in one hour and ten minutes. Ask the conductor to stop at Simonds Station . . ."

The railway and electric car system from Buffalo that stopped at Simonds before entering Lockport’s city center, and then exited the city north to Olcott Beach on Lake Ontario, was gone long before I was born at the outset of World War II; but I remember the old rails embedded in the red-brick streets when I rode my bike over them as a boy. The streets were paved over in the early fifties. Written today, the brochure would likely provide directions from the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport or the New York State Thruway. That Buffalo and Lockport were once connected by rail, and that a Simonds station had been specifically created for the plant before the train entered the city, signaled the expectation the mill would have on the local economy.

The beginning of things had to precede that catalog, but origins can be fuzzy. The family patriarch, Samuel Simonds, sailed from England in the mid-1600s before settling in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He was listed as a gentleman in the early records and was one of the Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, becoming Deputy Governor of Massachusetts in 1673. Eight generations later, Samuel’s descendent, Abel, was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in 1804. It was with him that the family steel business began. During his teenage years, Abel apprenticed with a scythe and knife maker. He and his brother-in-law, John Thurston Farwell, set up shop in 1832 on the banks of the Nashua River in West Fitchburg to manufacture scythes from purchased English steel. Because Farwell was better known and experienced, the company was originally named JT Farwell and Company.

Scythes and cycles were among the most historic and simplest farming implements. Scythes became a cottage industry in Fitchburg. Literally, the factory was a cottage, and haymaking using scythes in the nineteenth century kept the little factory busy and profitable.

My father brought an old scythe home one day to cut the tall grass in a rock-strewn, empty lot beside our house on Niagara Street and Case Court where my neighborhood friends played baseball. The scythe was a relic, an instrument that had long ago been replaced by mechanized agriculture. This one had a wooden weather-beaten handle, but my father had sanded and honed the blade with a Simonds file so that the edge was relatively sharp. He showed me how to use it, but I found it difficult to swing effectively. I never did develop the knack of those early haymakers, but I nicked a lot of unseen rocks. Eventually the weeds won out and the baseball took a lot of bad hops.

In 1851 the Farwell-Simonds partnership was dissolved, but Abel continued the operation as a family business, A. Simonds and Company. Abel’s eight sons worked alongside him, and the family provided nearly everything that a business and its employees required: labor, income, health and sickness benefits, paid leave, and support in retirement—ideally what every industrial worker would want today.

Abel retired in 1864 and his sons, George and Alvin, along with another investor, Benjamin Snow, formed a new business, Simonds Brothers and Company. They added machine knives, mowers and reapers to their product line. The cottage was no longer adequate to house the business, and a new facility was established in the center of town. Snow left at some point, leaving the business to be run by the Simonds brothers.

Four of Abel’s eight sons left to serve with a Massachusetts regiment during the Civil War. After the war, they returned to the company, which was incorporated in 1868 as the Simonds Manufacturing Company. Five of the Simonds brothers, George, Alvin, Thomas, Edwin, and Dan, were charter members.

The brothers sold off the mower and reaper business in 1878, concentrating on saw blades and planer knives. Their products became widely known for their quality as they discovered new ways of tempering and straightening their blades. As the business grew, they opened branch offices in Chicago and San Francisco. In 1887, the company had about 200 employees; and Daniel Simonds, who began working for his father at age sixteen, became its president. He knew he could make even better saws and knives if he could find better-quality steel. The late nineteenth-century foreign steel that was bought on the open market was not always optimal. So with the idea of best quality, Dan Simonds built a mill in Chicago in 1900 and began to manufacture his own steel. With the new mill, the Chicago operation became larger than the Fitchburg parent. Simonds acquired the Canada Saw Company in 1906 and built a steel mill in Montreal, where its Canadian interests were headquartered as the Simonds Canada Saw Company. By then, the company had nine distributing branches across American and Canadian cities, and three factories in Fitchburg, Chicago and Montreal. The company had become nationally known for its fine tool steel and saw blades, having won a gold medal and Grand Prix awards at the Paris exhibition. It had thousands of employees and million-dollar assets. Growing demands of the lumber industry for Simonds saws led to expansions of the Chicago plant, where more men were employed than in Fitchburg.

By the time that the Simonds Company celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 1907, Dan Simonds understood that making steel required considerable energy. Electricity was one of his greatest expenses. Finding cheaper electricity was one way to increase profitability, so he searched and found a potential steelmaking site in Western New York, a region that was emerging in the metals and steelmaking industry. Lackawanna Steel was already there (it would be purchased by Bethlehem in 1922), as were Tonawanda Iron and Wickwire Steel. Lackawanna Steel had relocated from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to the shores of Lake Erie largely through the efforts of a partnership headed by Buffalo business magnate John Albright, remembered today primarily for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. He was a major shareholder in the Lackawanna mill and served as its director until it was purchased by Bethlehem. His syndicate acquired the Niagara, Lockport and Ontario Power Company in 1905, which had developed the hydroelectric plant and transmission facilities at the base of Niagara Falls. As president of the International Power Commission, Albright had overseen the awarding of the electrical transmission contract to George Westinghouse and General Electric, the winners of the current war between Thomas Edison’s direct current and Westinghouse and Tesla’s alternating current systems.

In 1910, benefiting from Albright’s groundwork, Dan Simonds moved his Chicago operation to Lockport, New York, taking advantage of the hydroelectric power supplied along transmission lines from Niagara Falls to Lockport and beyond to Rochester and Syracuse. The availability of seventy wooded acres that included two farms, easy access to shipping to eastern and western markets on the New York Central and Erie Railroads, and the proximity to the expanding Erie Canal were other factors that caused Lockport to win out over several other cities that wanted the mill. In the early twentieth century, the city of 25,000 had become a good labor market with the steady arrival of European immigrants. Simonds became one of the largest mill sites in Western New York.

The harnessing of electricity and the internal combustion engine toward the end of the nineteenth century heralded one of the great rises in human productivity in the first decades of the twentieth century. It occurred during the Progressive Era when responses to Gilded Age problems associated with rapid industrialization included wide-ranging social and political reforms. Progressives supported scientific methods to reform and transform such diverse areas of human endeavor as education, economics, government, medicine, and industry. Abraham Flexner’s 1910 report on the deplorable state of medical education in the United States and Canada serves as an example: diploma mills, he called them. It was a watershed document that revolutionized how medical students were taught. Efficiency was an important theme; a key aspect of that efficiency was the new scientific management introduced in 1911 by Bethlehem’s Fredrick Taylor (Taylorism) that would find application in Western New York steel manufacture.

The Simonds’ buildings went up amazingly fast in 1910, and when the first steel rolled out of the mills, it helped spur an economic boom in Lockport, New York. Fifty years after the first semblance of a village took shape from the impetus given to it by the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, it began to blossom—eventually it was incorporated as a city in 1865. Several metal industries had been established there in the 1800s. Iron manufacture preceded steel when the Hall Iron Works and the Westerman Company were built in 1880 on Market and Jackson Streets, hovering around the Erie Canal and Eighteen Mile Creek. The aluminum industry that ultimately became Alcoa in Pittsburgh also got its start in Lockport. But 1910 was an especially auspicious year. Halley’s Comet reappeared as Lockport not only landed Simonds, but two local citizens, Herbert Champion Harrison and Charles A. Upson, established important businesses, becoming community leaders in the process. Harrison began to manufacture a hexagonal cored, ribbon-type radiator for automobiles. His company became a division of General Motors eight years later and would become Lockport’s largest industrial firm, manufacturing heating and cooling devices for all General Motors vehicles. It remains the city’s largest employer. That year also saw Upson set up shop to manufacture the first easily installed 4-ply fiberboards, which became a much sought-after building material for housing, military and commercial facilities. Dan Simonds was not a local, and gets much less press in Lockport historical records; but his steel mill became a magnet in Western New York for good-paying blue-collar jobs following the erection of the new quarter-million-dollar plant on the southwestern edge of the city on the western bank of the Erie Canal. Of course, good-paying is a relative term that has to be adjusted for inflation. The average U.S. wage in 1910 was 22 cents an hour, the average factory worker made around $500 per year, while an engineer averaged about $5,000 per year.

That was then. In the years that followed, Simonds workers’ income steadily increased as the company became a niche player in the low-carbon specialty American steel industry that was otherwise dominated by high-carbon steel producers, such as the U.S. Steel Corporation and Bethlehem. They existed on different scales in terms of product and volume. The big steel companies, the so-called integrated mills—behemoths that turned iron ore into structural steel (standard carbon steel), rails and beams in the millions of tons; and Simonds, a specialty mill, started with scrap metal and produced alloys (low-carbon, alloy steel), stainless and tool steel in the thousands of tons, or even in pounds for some customers. But they shared similar stories of rise and ruin that impacted not only the workers and their families, but the communities as well. The steelworkers in Lockport and Lackawanna both experienced the same emotional fallout of plant closures and abandonment, sharing in the grief, the anxiety and anger of lost livelihoods.

2

TAINTED DIRT

I’m done here, Pop, Michael said, snapping me out of my reverie as he walked back down the sidewalk. The eastern horizon had begun to manifest a soft yellow glow. Let’s go in. The sun will be up and light should be good.

We knew we just couldn’t