Chapter 1

The Old Iron Foundry

My first experience working at the Rouge was in 1965, as a nineteen-year-old, green-horned, Northern Michigan kid who had absolutely no idea what to expect from this huge complex.

Newly hired people usually got the afternoon shift, and I was no exception. My job was to work in what was known as the “knockout room,” on the third floor of the old iron foundry.

On my first day on the job, the temperature outside was around ninety degrees or better. I was already beginning to question my sanity for agreeing to take this job, not that I actually had any say in the matter, as I climbed what appeared to be a never- ending set of steps that led up to the third floor.

“Oh, my God!” I thought to myself as my boss, a pleasant black man of average size, introduced himself as Pryor, took me around the work area and explained what was happening and what my responsibilities would be. “This doesn’t look good.” I thought. And I was so right.

The knockout room was where hot scrap iron parts from the motor castings would come down a very long conveyor belt. Our job was to knock off and break up all of the differently shaped “arms” or extensions that were left on the parts from the casting process. This was done so the parts could continue on to other conveyors without getting hung up on them. If any of the parts got caught or stuck on the conveyor line, it would cause the whole line to shut down. If parts were defective, they would be pushed off the conveyors into a chute that would send them to an area underneath where a large scrap bin was waiting to be filled up. The bins were then hauled off to one of the furnaces to be melted down again.

So, here I was a 5-foot 7-inch, 145-pound white kid from a little town up north, working with all of these big, muscular black guys. We were all swinging a slightly smaller version of a sledge hammer in an effort to break off all of these pieces of sharp metal. When the hammer wouldn’t do the job, we would have to pick the part up and slam it down hard against the tough conveyor belt in an effort to break the brittle excess parts off of it. Some of these extraneous pieces were 15 inches or so long. We protected ourselves with long leather-faced gloves and special fire-proof sleeves that slid over our forearms. These weren’t always enough to protect our hands and arms from hot, flying, pieces of metal.

The conveyors were moving along at a pretty good pace so there wasn’t a lot of time to break off the unwanted metal. If we had trouble breaking one up, we would toss it off the belt into a pile in a corner of the room. Later on, whenever we had a bit of a slow-down, we would go back and finish removing the excess m