Midnight doesn’t cool the graveyard shift. It’s another fucking hot night at Kansas City Structural Steel, here in Argentine on the Kaw river bottom. These last days of August miserable heat and humidity haunt the men, me too almost a man among them. Summer of 1968 I’m 19.
This cavernous half ruined factory swallows the noise of the men at work. The building is more than ten city blocks long, a one-time cathedral of steel and glass. Its size dissipates the clunk, grind and growl of the various superannuated machines running on the plant floor in their senile cacophony.
750 men work at Kansas City Structural Steel but of those not more than 75 or so after midnight. We’re mostly a quiet crew. Only the few young ones are loud.
But sometimes something crude and raw as the steel makes a ripple of laughter run through the men, a momentary easing of their discomfort. This happens more so on a Friday night, one such as this, when the men feel they’re missing the party going on outside in the bars along Strong Avenue. Women and booze.
Summer of 1968 and I’d already worked on the angle shears at Kansas City Structural Steel for two and a half months. This is the night when I get injured.
I knew Kansas City Structural Steel could bite. I learned that my very first week. It was the night a scream dropped out of the darkness overhead. The scream hit like a thunder bomb thrown on my head from on high. An unbelievable sound it stopped everyone still. The plant was showing its teeth in a steel rage.
It was the first real scream I’d ever heard. A screech that’s still in my head now rising high in dismay and astonishment. It’s a lingering agony.
Soon the gossip ran between the machines. The young spic had been crushed by a sheet of steel. He’d been moving her through factory as part of her bull gang—the steel became personalized to the men, always a woman. “She got him.”
Then came the ambulance siren, another kind of dismay. After that more gossip. The men buzzing. The ‘she’ had floated into something up there. Maybe a pigeon. A lot of glass has been broken out of the ceiling through the years and the pigeons dart about like intent cherubs.
They say one pigeon is enough to send a giant slab sailing ponderously off course. Like a Macy’s parade blimp on the loose. A man in the way of 100 tons of steel, a stretch of it could be 60 feet long, 15 feet wide, was but the fly to wanton boys all over again.
The angle shears is a monster of a machine, ’made in Dayton’ and antediluvian although it looks to me like it could also have been dreamed up right here in Kansas City Kansas, at Structural Steel, by Charles Dickens. It cuts herculean bespoke girders.
This old factory sprawls out over 22 acres. Baby Leroy had told me that. The plant was built on the Kaw, a wide flowing river, just at the point before it surges into the Missouri making the Mighty Mo even mightier.
We are also directly on the main line of the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe, in the line’s Argentine Yards, one of the largest rail yards in the country. Steel comes here from mills back East either by barge or on train flatbeds.
Incredible how this wreck that flouts almost every labor law is the largest steel factory west of the Mississippi.
We have no protective gear. Even the welders must supply their own shields and gloves.
Yet according to Baby, Kansas City Structural Steel built 500 landing craft for D-Day. It’s at least patriotic.
I’m feeling it creepy, not for the first time here, as a midnight shadow crawls down from the inscrutable black above that hangs over everything. The shadow moves languidly across my head. It tingles burrowing down my nape.
It’s a sheet being moved along the factory aisle high up on the wings of one of the three ceiling cranes. As the plate goes over it sways. It also buckles giving a high steel whine like someone up there playing the saw.
Control of sway and buckle, of our lives too below those swinging death traps, is up to the crane operator. It makes them our resident celebrities.
Cultural anthropology: radio plays Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Born To Be Wild, and Hello I Love You. Best sellers are Couples and Myra Breckinridge. Everybody goes to see 2001 Space Odyssey and Planets of the Apes—primates are very very popular.
All lonely pleasures for me, I have no friends in Kansas City, no girl friend. After my shift at 2 am I sit alone in the heat in my car in the driveway of my parent’s parsonage. I drink a six pack of Pabst beer, or more, sometimes until I am quite drunk. Then I crawl up to my dormer room as dawn begins to dream of what else on earth I could be doing.
This is the Argentine, a neighborhood in Kansas City Kansas. It’s not well regarded because in part it’s not scenic—the steel plant dwarfs it. it has a few blacks living up on the hill and many Chicanos below who’ve opened Mexican bean and cheese hole -in -the –wall joints.
Argentine is a neighborhood of about 6,000 in 1968, sitting alongside others that still give KCK its own sense of place—Armourdale, Rosedale, Strawberry Hill. Almost all of the workers at Kansas City Structural Steel come from these neighborhoods.
The majority actually drive only 15 minutes from Strawberry Hill, directly adjacent to Argentine, from the various Slavic tribes living there who came at first to work the Silver Smelter in Argentine (hence its name), and then the Santa Fe rail yard, and in turn to Kansas City Structural Steel.
We are here because my father was moved from his high church in Wichita, to the low brow one here, Metropolitan Avenue. Low brow and troubled by encroaching demographics.
Summer my dad arrived there was an ice cream social to raise money for some cause. Mid afternoon someone squealed to him that the ladies running the social were refusing to sell ice cream to the black children coming down from the hill.
To his credit in my eyes, my father went in a rage to correct the situation, “All of God’s children deserve ice cream!”
Martin Luther King had been assassinated only a few weeks prior to this hot night in August. Kansas City still stinks of its burning. Robert Kennedy had also just been assassinated, joining our elite band of murdered saints.
It’s Friday night after lunch break. If you look out the nearest broken window the night’s changing from gloom to dark. Inside the plant I’m all lit up in a glaring beam of light.
A knot of men are crowding in to guffaw and gawk. They’re standing by the angle shears, crowding me. They’ve come as gossip has spread about what’s going on here.
Perched on the machine is a kid about my age, I don’t know him. He’s got his pants and underwear down around his ankles. Kid’s pathetic pale dick and balls are clearly lit up like a one ring circus act. Light comes from the spot on one of the ceiling cranes. It’s been parked three stories above, like a turd in the ether.
That kid is drunk as are a few other workers since it’s Friday night, get drunk night for some. Men sneak out to the liquor store over their break. Workers are forbidden to leave the plant during their shift but there’s a hole in the wire mesh fence that everyone knows about.
Someone has a radio on loud, another machine noise. This is a Kansas City Structural Steel party. Kid sits on top of the angle shears picking his exposed parts for crabs, “Girl give me ‘em,” he explains in slurred recitative.
When he gets one between thumb and forefinger he squints at it, holds it up although invisible to the rest of us. “You dead,” he pinches in mock heroism.
Party is over when the floor boss appears always with a clip board in hand pen dangling by a string. Kid grabs up his pants. Crowd disappears, big guys slinking fast like the rats in the men’s room. Crane lamp flicks off. The crane slips silently away. I slide another slice of new girder in the maw of a wrench.
“Bell, come. You’re working the bull gang tonight.”
Never done that before. Not what I want to do. Not at all. I’ve been dreading the possibility of it. So far I was hoping I’d be exempt from the bull gang because I am elect, I wear a coat of many colors, bridge engineer’s nephew which is exactly how I got the job. Maybe this week they didn’t win a bid?
Most of the summer I had night shift lunch with Baby. He was a hunk of a fellow, taller than me and built like a brick shit house. Nothing baby-like about him. We were outcasts, he because the others thought him retarded; me because they thought me too smart, a college kid with a high draft lottery number.
Baby was not at all retarded. He was my source for local folklore, especially about Argentine and the plant. Baby was 70 and this was the only place he’d ever worked.
That’s how he knew it had been built in 1901 on the site of the old Argentine silver smelter—largest silver smelter in the US. From him I learned there had been two US Supreme Court decisions—both ‘US versus Kansas City Structural Steel’—that were famous labor law cases.
It had never been a considerate employer. “We ain’t got no union, we ain’t never been on strike not one single day.”
“Ain’t no company around with more labor infractions,” he remarked between open-mouth chews of Wonder Bread.. “They get by with bribes and muscle.”
He didn’t drive. Walked to work, took buses to shop. He’d never married.
He grew his own tomatoes, big and squat, called them box car willies. He ate one each night after carefully peeling and salting it. When he saw I liked them he never forgot to bring me one too.
He chose them a day short of first ripeness, firm, red and with yellow streaks. I can see his pocket knife twirling off the finest curl of tomato skin.
Every shift he wore a pair of clean bib overalls. A white undershirt showed at his neck above a long sleeved flannel shirt, no matter how hot.
Baby apparently listened a lot to the radio. Once Baby recited a report he’d heard perhaps verbatim about the great Shawnee prophet and seer Tensquatawa, brother of Tecumseh. Tensquatawa had been vanquished at the Battle of Tippecanoe along with his vision of a pan-Indian confederacy to counter the white man. Turned out Tensquatawa came to be buried in an obscure cemetery in Argentine.
Baby had been born down in the Missouri Ozarks but lived his entire life in Argentine. Four younger sisters had strayed away. Baby had lived alone with his mother until she died.
I asked about his name. He was pleased that I asked.
“Ma couldn’t read or write, just like me.” That was when I finally understood that Baby was illiterate, and why the men thought he was simple.
“When I was born they brought ma the birth certificate to fill out. She asked ‘em to read it to her. For ‘father’s name’ she had them write in ’Leroy’ since that were her doc’s last name. Then she saw something written where they asked for a first name. “What they say,” asked ma.
“’Baby,’ she got told. That’s a good one, said ma.”
There were four men to a bull gang. Where I was assigned I was the youngest and the one without any experience. Except when the crane operator used his spots we worked mostly in what was only a shade from darkness.
Good, we aren’t to be moving those monster sheets. Of them I definitely had a case of steel fear. Instead we are to bring in shorter slabs, 20 feet lengths, and pile them in two stacks each about 15 feet high.
Out in the yard the steel has a shimmer under stars and moon. It’s been off loaded and left piled in the open, a thousand tons of it stocked in a mountain range as far as one can see.
I’m told to keep my gloves on, or else chance getting ‘steel burn.’ But sometimes to get purchase on the grappling hooks the gloves must come off and then to the touch the steel takes on another dimension. Its is an alien skin to go with the steel’s look of deep frozen water, a still and stagnant surface. Or, when the crane lights sparkle over it like you’re peering into the universe.
Steel stinks. It smells of a Pennsylvania steel mill. Also of a Vulcan thing from far inside the earth. The Steel for me smells of the Kaw river, of small dead mammals, of the AT&SF freight yard. It smells more whimsically like Baby Leroy’s clean overalls, and a dentist’s office.
The bull gang’s job is to place the grappling hooks under the edges of the slabs. Nothing but the weight of the steel holds them in place. Then the gang boss checks each one. At signal the crane then lifts and slowly ever so carefully raises it and slings it away.
We follow its progress in a slow cortege escorting the steel with ridiculously pitiful guide lines in hand, heads thrown back so to watch it moving above us. It’s the belly of a whale.
We proceed from the yard to inside the plant to whatever island of machines the engineer-Gods have designated. There to begin their fabrication of some steel reality out of thin air.
We place wooden wedges to separate the slabs, the grappling hooks swing free, the crane raises them and begins its flight back to the yard. Then we move in the heat and humidity slow as slugs back to fetch another.
Job’s done. In the end I find myself marooned about 15 up on top of one pile of 20 sheets. I’m told to jump to its twin. The stacks are only five feet apart. I go for it without hesitation cocky in my 19 years.
I don’t quite make that particular leap of faith. Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
Pain is a tearing nightmare, blotting out everything. Feels like my left leg’s been clamped in the angle shears and snipped off.
At the emergency room they tell me that at ankle and knee the ligaments and tendons are torn. They wrap the leg in a cast from thigh to toes.
Soon someone from management is by my side. He is very solicitous. Maybe a lawyer? He has me sign papers. I do. He says I should get workman’s compensation. I will. He’s very pleased to say I’ll get $500 from the company for distress. He even tells me I can have my job back next summer.
I wear the cast five months. It’s a reminder every day of Kansas City Structural Steel.