Swept out the door

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 9

By Scott Beveridge

U.S. Steel Corp. delivered the news on a muggy July 1962 morning that its Donora works was shutting down forever, leaving the borough’s fate in the hands of its citizens. The company was sweeping its nearly 3,000 Pennsylvania workers out the door as if they were dust bunnies that had been allowed to collect for too many years in the corners and under the beds of an unkempt house. In keeping with tradition, the Donora Herald-American newspaper showed itself as a mouthpiece for the corporation and took sides with management. Never was it more evident than in the lines of an editorial that was printed in bold letters under the front-page story about the mill closing that July 24:

AN EDITORIAL

A Time for
United Decision

American Steel and Wire Division’s announcement today that the steel making and the obsolete Number Three Rod Mill operations will be discontinued permanently in Donora is not, or should not have been, a surprise to Donora and the Monongahela Valley.

Those who have read carefully the annual report of United States Steel Corporation who have followed the development of technological changes in steel-making in this country and abroad, and who, indeed, watched only yesterday the European television networks showing steelmaking operations in the industrial Ruhr Valley of Germany know what has happened.

As a woman housecleans her home and discards articles which have outlived their usefulness, so steel companies, or any other industry for that matter, must also houseclean for efficiency of operation.

Donora has been without these operations for more than two years now, and has continued to survive, as already has been proved, but it also can and must go forward. Progress, however, will depend more than ever before on an intangible commodity which Donora has in abundance – good people, working together toward a common goal.

The Telstar broadcast yesterday pointed out that the world is becoming more highly competitive daily. Today’s worker produces products which must compete, not only with products of immediately surrounding industries and the country, but also with products on the common world market. No longer may he be satisfied with “good enough.” He must produce highest quality goods or see the goods he has produced unsold in a highly competitive market.

He also must compete to keep the very industries for which he produces these products. No longer may he be complacent and content to let his community remain a one-industry town.

Donora, therefore, would be wise to heed the ancient Biblical handwriting on the wall, “Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.” Translated freely it reads, “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” It is time now for Donora’s people to weigh the situation in balance and determine that Donora shall not be found wanting, and that its united people are ready to begin rebuilding for the future – starting today.

Strangely, the folks in Donora didn’t believe the company was telling the truth, said John Lignelli, who was a grievance man in the blooming mill and would go on to serve as mayor of Donora three decades later.

“We all thought it was nothing but a threat,” Lignelli said last week.

U.S Steel, he said, had just overhauled the blast furnace at great expense. Nearly everyone was praying that the announcement was a ploy to sucker the union into giving back benefits or wages. But the company wasn’t attempting, that time, to manipulate anyone in Donora.



Introduction

Chapter 10


(The photograph and editorial were published with permission of the Observer-Reporter, Washington, Pa., which owns the rights to the old Donora newspaper.)

A railroad to disaster

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 6

By Scott Beveridge

U.S. Steel Corp. picked the wrong time to load a train in September 1960 with machinery to modernize its mill in Donora, which was employing decades-old technology in deplorable condition. Before the haul could reach the town 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, trainmen walked off their jobs at the 111-year-old Pennsylvania Railroad, crippling the nation’s transport industry for three weeks. Commuters in New York and Philadelphia were left stranded by the labor dispute that affected some 30 million people. To add insult to injury, members of the union representing workers on the Donora Southern Railroad - a U.S. Steel subsidiary that moved goods and refuse in and out of Donora - joined with 1,300 others at the company’s rail lines in Pittsburgh in a work stoppage over wages and benefits. Steel production then came to an abrupt halt in Donora, Duquesne, Clairton and Homestead because union steelworkers refused to cross the picket lines that were set up by the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen union. So the flames at blast furnaces and open-hearth furnaces were dimmed to prevent equipment damage during the strike that put 30,000 U.S. Steel employees on unpaid vacations.

Temperatures flared, however, outside the gate to the Donora mill when the company began moving goods onto the property by truck. The trainmen caused a ruckus that sent the steel-maker to Washington County Court for an injunction to prevent the striking workers from blocking the flow of traffic into the mill. The company won that battle, but, it eventually caved and gave its railroad crews raises of 14 cents an hour over two years, better pensions and vacation and holiday pay to get back to the business of making steel. Donora and its 380 acres of steel factories were another matter.

The company had seen more than its share of bad times in the borough. Its laborers there had rioted during a strike in 1919 that drew gunfire. Dynamite had been set off at the houses of scab workers the company hired during that labor dispute.
Meanwhile, nearly every house in town was held together with nails that the steelworkers smuggled in their lunch buckets out the doors of the nail factory. And then, there was the smog of October 1948 that hovered over Donora and its neighboring town of Webster for three days that killed at least 20 people, and for the first time, caused physicians to link ill health to pollution. Everyone pointed fingers at the zinc works as the cause of the disaster, a top-secret plant that produced alloys to armor American soldiers in World Wars I and II. The company finally closed that toxic plant in 1957, putting 1,000 workers on the unemployment lines. It immediately toppled the row of smokestacks at the smelters while a crowd watched from behind the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire that separated the town from the mill and Monongahela River. Some applauded when the chimneys were reduced to rubble while others mourned the loss of jobs in a town that depended solely on steel for its wealth.

The Donora Southern strike sent U.S. Steel officials over the edge. Without question, they decided that Donora was not going to receive its new technology after the Pennsylvania Railroad strike ended on Sept. 12, 1960, one whole week before the Donora Southern trainmen went back to work. Little did the Donora railroad union know that the trucks its members had prevented from crossing their picket line contained some of the new equipment that was meant to upgrade the mill. The company threw up its hands and rerouted that investment to its Cuyahoga Steel and Wire Works near Cleveland. By that time, 1,200 men had already been laid off in Donora because of a downturn in the market and the growing cost of forging steel at an obsolete mill. The company made up its mind; steel production would never resume at the two, barely smoking blast furnaces that had pumped gold for 60 years into the fancy stores lining three blocks of the borough’s downtown. U.S. Steel executives began to walk away from the boom town the company had built from a patch of farms in 1901. The borough was set firmly on a course to whither without the strong, fatherly guiding hands of the industry. But no one would know that for sure for at least another two years.



Introduction

Part 2: Bad Boys of Webster Chapter 7

(Caption: What little remains today of the Donora Southern Railroad near the 99-year-old Donora-Webster Bridge)

The warnings signs were there

Introduction: Welcome to nowhere

By Scott Beveridge

A sprawling junkyard greeted motorists when they drove into Webster from the south end of town in the early 1960s. The rusting 1957 Chevys piled atop beat up 1948 Fords should have warned anyone who was planning to move there to turn around and drive off at top speed to a nicer landscape

There should have been sign that read, BEWARE, because a good many of the people who lived around the bend had earned their reputation of coming from the wrong side of the tracks.

Ahead laid a tough-as-nails village in Southwestern Pennsylvania steel country where differences were often settled with fists and blood after its men downed shots of whiskey chased with union-brewed beer.

Although most Webster folks were dirt poor, everyone within its tiny borders was white and everyone there wanted it to stay that way. Many parents were satisfied when their sons obtained a 10th-grade education, and enlisted in the military or found work in the mills. Their daughters often got pregnant at 15, had shotgun weddings and immediately lost much hope for a better future.

Webster’s forefathers surely had bigger dreams for the town they nestled along a sharp curve in the Monongahela River.


The God-fearing Christians included a German, Andrew Beazell, who was among the first to farm the fertile soil in 1773 before the United States made peace with the Indian Nation. Beazell’s son Benjamin would incorporate the town in 1833, naming it after orator Daniel Webster. Like Webster, the villagers were staunch nationalists. Its families had also supported President George Washington’s troops who camped in town to settle the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s.

Neighbors boasted about their boatyard and its employee, Samuel Walker, who 20 years later built the first steamboat to chart the river. By then, the streets and houses had been laid out in Biblical fashion. The sun rose due east above every back door and set facing the front porches. Yards were separated by white picket fences, and most contained lush orchards and flower and vegetable gardens. Riverboat pilots dried their sea legs inside their mansions that were built with ornate trimmings to match the finest paddle boats of the day. City dwellers in smoky Pittsburgh, 30 miles to the north, even traveled by boat to picnic and sunbathe along Webster’s shoreline and later rest up the road in one of four fancy hotels.


There were even plans for an opera house when Webster, with more than 2,000 residents, had become one of the largest settlements for miles. This utopia, however, was shattered after U.S. Steel Corp. began in 1901 to build a giant mill directly across the river and establish the Borough of Donora. Webster already had the coke ovens and a mill to supply its boatyards with iron. But, that operation was too small to compete with Pittsburgh coke and steel barons Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie when they came to Donora. So, the village began to dig deeper into its hillsides to find the coal to supply the new furnaces across the Mon.


Webster’s riverboat captains, having witnessed how these giant mills had damaged other farms along their travels, immediately put their estates on the market. Anyone else with enough money soon followed their lead. In no time, Donora’s smokestacks were spewing the dirtiest air in the nation and would contribute to the infamous fluoride fog of October 1948 that killed 20 people and sickened hundreds of others. Poor Webster sat directly downwind of the fumes, which had eaten the paint off the houses and stripped the ground of its vegetation. That deadly smoggy weekend became known as America’s worst air pollution disaster, one that led to the nation’s first clear air legislation.

My parents, two brothers and I pulled into Webster to stay in the fall of 1960, a few years before Donora entered the history books again for becoming home to the first major steel mill to permanently shut down in the United States. This was not going to be a walk in the park.

Chapter 2

(Captions: The Route 906 entrance at the south end of Webster in the 1950s; a map of the village from the "Atlas of Westmoreland County Atlas" published in 1867;" The restaurant inside a Webster hotel near the intersection of Webster Hollow Road and Second Street in the late 1800s; and U.S. Steel Corp. in 1909 laid the groundwork for its infamous zinc works in Donora on the north side of the Donora-Webster Bridge. Another source: "Early Days in Rostraver," by Mary E. Piersol, Bess Dailey Winchell and Ernest Frank Carter, "The Times-Sun," West Newton, Pa., 1949)