The steel man who became a Pinkerton

By Scott Beveridge

It's hard to imagine how my father survived 1972.

Big Jim Beveridge had lost his steel mill job as pipefitter that year in the shutdown of Page Steel & Wire Co., one of America's earliest casualties in the decline of the Industrial Revolution. His mother, Madge, by then was entering the critical stages of Alzheimer's disease. It would seem to have been an impossible time for him to also swear off cigarettes and beer, but he did, probably because he didn't have any money for vices the year he turned 50.

The challenges were many because unemployment compensation extensions didn't exist that year, when the unemployment rate hovered around 5.7 percent. The federal government also hadn't yet drafted any employment retraining benefit programs. It was out the door and goodbye for the Page workers.

Our family spiraled out of control with dad, although, I do not remember him taking the time to fall into a depression and moan about his stage in life.  I can only imagine now how close he must have come to losing our home in Webster, Pa., to foreclosure.

There was little time to waste because my father had once again put himself in debt, continuing his pattern of spending far more than he earned. He often gambled on consumer finance companies and always lost the bet. He chose wages over sleeping in every day until mid-afternoon to deal with his problems.

So he took a job as a Pinkerton guard, which paid maybe 10 cents more than the $1.60 minimum wage. It had to be hell for him to put on that uniform bearing a name that represented everything steel labor had hated for 80 long years.

His father, also a steelworker, had often cursed Henry Clay Frick for hiring the detective agency in 1892 and pitting it against striking workers at his Homestead steel mill in what became an historic, bloody defeat for unionization.

Somehow dad appeared proud to button down that uniform, as it gave him purpose. The job was something to put on his resume; experience that helped him become a campus policeman at California University of Pennsylvania and begin to crawl out of the miseries of underemployment.

Donora "Man of Steel" grave was a hoax

DONORA, Pa. – It seems that nearly everyone in this town bought a story about the burial of a “man of steel” who died tragically in a crucible of molten metal.

Until their deaths, even Andrew Posey’s 10 siblings held tight to their belief that U.S. Steel created a special grave in Donora, Pa., beside the open hearth for the steel that instantly devoured him in the 1920 accident.

“I think there was a lot of pressure from the family put on the mill,” said James McKenzie, a retired North Dakota University English professor who grew up in Donora, and, for a time, believed the tale.

But evidence surfaced this week that suggests the burial was nothing more than a hoax at a time when the life of a steelworker meant little to America’s steel barons.

The Mon Valley Progress Council Inc. released a report to the Observer-Reporter on an excavation it conducted in 1995 at the site that revealed nothing more than undisturbed earth in a section 8 feet deep around Posey’s tombstone.

“This completes all work toward (the) memorial site investigation and we conclude that this site is a memorial only and no slab or ingot of steel is located within the area of our investigation,” the engineer, Samuel M. Bitonti, noted in his report.

“We were very interested in finding it,” said Joe Kirk, the council’s executive director, who went in search of the steel while trying to sell the site to a new manufacturer.

“I wonder if it was all graveyard PR theater to make the family feel better,” said McKenzie, who wrote an essay about Posey that was published in Notre Dame Magazine’s winter 2006-07 edition.

Posey, who was born July 4, 1898, had just returned from service in World War I when he was hired as a ladle stopper checker in the open hearth. His job required him to climb down into the 100-ton ladle on Jan. 8, 1920, when an explosion in the back of the furnace covered him with 3,000-degree steel, McKenzie, of St. Paul, Minn., wrote in his essay.

Posey’s brother, Joe, built a low, yellow firebrick wall 20 feet wide and 15 feet long around the “grave” after the family was told the entire fatal 65-ton ingot was buried at the site, McKenzie added. A small concrete cross holding a bronze plate containing the steelworker’s name in raised letters rests on the ground.

Each year, war veterans place an American flag on a medallion beside the cross. Others have been known to decorate the stone with artificial floral arrangements.

The local newspaper, The Valley Independent, had earlier repeated the myth, unquestioned, in a 1968 article that pondered the fate of the memorial after the mill closed.

“After the accident, the entire heat of steel containing the remains of Posey was placed into a grave on a plot of ground on the steel firm’s property,” the article states.

And the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission even honored the “grave” as eligible for protection under the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. It went as far as to send a researcher to Donora to interview former mill boss Glen Howis, who repeated the burial story as truth.

“The young man’s remains sealed within the steel were loaded from the open hearth area onto a rail car and carried via a rail spur to the vacant area … where the mass was buried,” the narrative of the PHMC research states.

Now, in light of the Progress Council report, the agency is unsure whether the Posey site can survive the National Register, said April Frantz, a commission survey coordinator.

“I don’t know … just because a whole hoax was perpetuated and the story was that good,” Frantz said.

She said it could survive the distinction because it sheds light on the way “the company operated and how it treated its workers.”

When he revisited the site Tuesday, McKenzie, 67, said a bigger mystery exists as to why Posey was afforded any special attention by the company in an era when as many as 900 steelworkers died on the job a year in the Pittsburgh region.

The company could have been attempting to keep peace with workers who had just returned to their jobs from the bitter first labor strike against U.S. Steel in 1919. During the walkout, a band of Donora steelworkers set off dynamite at the homes of two of their coworkers who crossed their picket lines. Another angry mob of striking workers, their wives at their sides, assaulted and disarmed the police chief when he escorted mill bosses through the gate to the Donora zinc works.

The labor dispute was marked by other riots, one of which involved 50 men who threw bricks at black scab laborers, according to headlines pulled from The Donora American.

“This is the only 'grave' of its kind in America,” McKenzie said.

“I wonder if there was any ceremony at that site at all? Did they move in a rail car for theatrical purposes? Blade up the surface a little to fool the grieving rubes? We’ll probably never know.”

Regardless, Jeff Huff, who manages a nearby warehouse for Elizabeth Milling Co., regularly mows the grass around the Posey plot out of respect for any relatives who still may live in the area.

“There was a time family members would come to visit,” said Dave Felgar, manager of Elizabeth Milling, which doesn’t own the Posey land. “Less and less, they’ve been coming.”

(Caption: Former Donora residents James McKenzie of St. Paul, Minn,, right, and his friend, Paul Rank of Rock Cave, W.Va., visit the so-called Andrew Posey grave in their hometown.)

First published in the Observer-Reporter

A tale forged in steel

DONORA, Pa. – In a far corner of former mill property, behind a loading dock to a modern milling company, lay “the remains” of a steelworker who met his death in a ladle of molten steel in 1920.

Just home from World War I, Andrew Posey, 21, was working as a stopper setter when he was killed in the open hearth at U.S. Steel’s American Steel and Wire Co. Donora works, a mill that would disappear from the landscape in the 1960s.

Legend has it that, behind a blast furnace, U.S. Steel buried the entire 65 tons of steel that consumed Posey. And his 10 siblings bought the story, as did many others in the borough along the Monongahela River.

As it turned out, developers of a new building in what is now the Donora Industrial Park considered relocating the grave site in the 1990s because it stood in the way of progress.

The Mon Valley Progress Council had experts drill and dig into the “grave” protected by a 20-foot wall of crumbling yellow bricks and marked off by steel pipes forged at the mill. The grave turned up empty.

A historian was also consulted who theorized that the Posey family had probably been duped by the company into thinking that a big chunk of expensive steel had been buried as a fitting tribute to their loved one. These kinds of tales have been told for decades in the many mill towns that dot the Pittsburgh region, where the life of a steelworker once had much less value to a company than an ounce of steel.

In the end, the road was routed away from the Posey monument that also is hidden behind an outcropping of weeds. Stop by to pay your respects if you can find the site just north of the Donora-Monessen Bridge, but poor Andy Posey’s memory is more likely part of a bridge over a different valley.

A cantankerous boom town

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 4

By Scott Beveridge

The hardscrabble Pennsylvania borough known as Donora wasn’t even a speck on a map in 1900. Four plantations consumed the land hugging the 4.2-mile stretch of the Monongahela River for more than a century before a new steel town came to life. Along with wheat and barley, the farmers planted walnut groves and weeping willow trees to separate their property lines in what was once part of Carroll and Fallowfield townships.
The sharp curve in the river at the base of a foggy valley would never look the same after entrepreneur William H. Donner of Indiana surveyed the area’s rich coal deposits that he could turn into steel and boost his fortunes. Donner had no trouble convincing Andrew William Mellon, a Pittsburgh banker and industrialist, to invest in his scheme to establish a new wire mill there because of his success in a budding tin mill across the river in Monessen. As a result, Union Steel Co. was born along these banks of the Mon to compete against steel baron Andrew Carnegie. The borough would be incorporated in 1901 with a name that was inspired by combining the Donner family name with the Christian name of Mellon’s wife, Nora. Within two short years, Carnegie's successors bought out Donner and folded the Donora project into a monopoly they were creating with U.S. Steel Corp.
And the world was watching.


Land speculators camped beside the stakes that marked vacant lots the night before they were sold at an auction that began with the sound of a gunshot sharply at 10:30 a.m. Sept. 10, 1901. By nightfall, more than $100,000 changed hands over 200 parcels of property while Donner was carving up the land along the riverfront.
U.S. Steel later announced plans to invest $20 million to build the world's largest rod, wire and nail mills in the borough. Within a year, there was a severe housing shortage as immigrants scrambled for some 10,000 jobs that were supposed to be created. The housing famine worsened after 1915 when the corporation unveiled a $3 million zinc works, the size of which had no rival. Local health officials were worried about the spread of disease because families and borders were practically sleeping on top of each other.


(The zinc mill as it looked in the 1940s from the village of Webster)

In some ways, Donora was much like the many other wealthy mill towns that were sprawling across the Pittsburgh region. There were 147 businesses in the borough, that combined, were doing more than $3 million in sales a year at the end of the Great Depression. Everyone either worked at the mill or toiled to feed and clothe its laborers. Work was especially tough in the zinc plant, which employed many Spanish men because they had the stamina to withstand three-hour intervals beside its 120-degree smelters. They had to lift 60-pound ingots to keep their jobs, and stock a steady supply of new clothes because their shirts and trousers disintegrated almost overnight from exposure to acid.
But historians have never been able to explain why the town became a magnet for some of the most violent and radical immigrants from Europe. As early as 1902, local police were stationing themselves at Slavic weddings because of the shootouts that were taking place at their receptions. Police officer Clarence L. Eaton was shot to death that same year at a dance grove. Three years later, borough officials were launching crusades against gambling and attempting to shut down bars over fears of violence when the mills closed for repairs. As the nation entered World War I, 40 percent of the mill workers in Donora gave the draft a false address in a show of protest against the federal government. It was an unusually high number and a further indication that the town was home to rebellious Socialists who sympathized with Germany.
During the first U.S. steel strike in 1919, a band of steelworkers even set off dynamite at the homes of two of their coworkers who crossed their picket lines. Another angry mob of striking workers, their wives at their sides, assaulted and disarmed the police chief when he escorted mill bosses through the gate to the zinc plant. The labor dispute was marked by other riots, one of which involved 50 men who threw bricks at black men who the company had hired as scab laborers.
Work resumed, but, the dark clouds never lifted above those cramped houses that climbed the steep hills beyond the smokestacks at the river's edge.
Introduction

Chapter 5


(The blast furnace photo is published with permission of the Donora Historical Society. The aerial photo: Observer-Reporter
The Donner photo credit: William H. Donner Foundation)

Steel wives were desperate

Welcome to nowhere, chapter 3

By Scott Beveridge


By early 1962, the wives of hundreds of steelworkers in Donora were lucky to scrape together a few bucks to buy a cheap cotton dress from the local department store.
Some 1,200 workers had been laid off for 20 full months from the furnaces that fueled U.S. Steel Corp.’s Donora Works about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pa. Another 500 had been without paychecks for a year at the rod mill, bringing a near halt to business at the fine shops along McKean Avenue, two blocks up from the mill. At least 1,000 men had already lost their jobs in 1957 when the zinc mill was shuttered because the company had depleted its ore reserves. The 1960 furloughs were blamed on competition in the industry from the Ruhr Valley in West Germany and a sluggish market for wire. They couldn’t have come at a worse time. Nearly 550,000 members of the United Steelworkers of America were threatening a seventh strike since 1946 against America’s Big 11 steel producers. President John F. Kennedy urged a settlement, as he feared another walkout might lead to the stockpiling of steel and further unemployment. That was a calling for the Donora women to leave their “men home changing diapers and baking bread” and take a break from gossiping on the telephone to fight unemployment, the local newspaper joked about what these wives were cooking up.

More than 300 of them called a series of meetings and packed the auditorium of a local public school to save the mill. They demanded an ear with Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg and an audience with U.S. Steel executives. They wore bright green as a symbol of resurrection and hope, taking inspiration from an ancient Egyptian custom. They pinned homemade buttons bearing their slogan on their purses because that was where the layoffs hurt them the most. Similar signs were posted in storefront windows. Worse yet, they attacked the union.

The bold ladies scolded the workers for threatening a wildcat strike, believing one would surely spell the death of the Donora mill. There came demands that the men abstain from drinking alcohol at labor meetings and union dues be paid into an unemployment fund. It also was time for union officials to quit paying off politicians. Within a few weeks, Donora Local Union 1758 accused the women of obstruction for their malicious remarks. The steelworkers also denied the accusations that were aired by their wives, all of whom remained anonymous in the stories and photographs that were being published in the Donora Herald-American.

Oh, how it was getting hot in the town. There were four major fires in the months before the housewife crusade. Two Donora women and a local man went on an armed robbery spree that targeted service stations before they were nabbed by state police. Meanwhile, a local bank clerk embezzled $50,000.

On April Fool’s Day of 1962, the industry and union reached what Time magazine called the “most moderate labor agreement of the post war era.” The workers received raises of 10 cents an hour and the mills won the right to encourage early retirements. The pay increase would take the average wage in the mills to $3.27 an hour.

The outraged women of Donora did win a few meetings with labor officials in Pittsburgh during the steel talks, as well as mentions in newspaper articles across the nation. But in the end, there was nothing they could do to help their husbands, who, like them, were descendants of some of the most radical immigrants in the region's steel belt.

Introduction
Chapter 4

(Photos courtesy of the Observer-Reporter of Washington, Pa., which holds the copyright to the old Donora newspapers)