Get the latest news from The Morning Call on the Amazon Echo

Forging America: The History of Bethlehem Steel - Prologue

Once, the gargantuan Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces breathed fire that sweating steelworkers had to feed before they could feed their families.

Now, on a chilly March day in 2003, Guillermo Lopez Jr. tours this silent, shuttered place in Bethlehem, Pa., a worker there years ago but today a witness to an American way of life extinguished.


Once, in the days when steam meant progress, plumes from the blast furnace smokestacks touched the sky. Now they stand stark and empty, emitting nothing.


Once, in a time viewed now in sepia and black and white, Bethlehem Steel was the backbone of America. It forged the steel for ships and armaments that helped win two world wars, the beams for buildings that transformed the skyline of New York City and that built the Golden Gate Bridge.

This mythical place, at its peak a virtual city of 31,000 with its own police force and fire department, its own hierarchy and its own societal rules, so dominated its landscape that it even gave the children of south Bethlehem, the working people's side of town, their lullaby each night.

Bang. Boom.

A steam hammer pounded an ingot.


The hammer returned to its starting position.


Be happy for the sound, fathers would tell their little ones. ''When you don't hear it no more, you're gonna cry.''

The silence came on Nov. 18, 1995.

And this day in March, when even the name Bethlehem Steel soon would pass into history, Lopez hears no bang, no boom, except in memory.

He drives past weeds where there were workers, graffiti where there was fresh paint, and broken windows where buildings once were new.

He remembers following his father to work at this place, and his father's warning: Avoid the Coke Works, where coal was baked into coke to fuel the furnaces. But he soon joined his dad there, where it was assumed that Puerto Ricans could ''handle the heat.''

The place smelled like rotten eggs. Workers wore protective wooden shoes and wool clothing. They donned long johns even in the summer to buffer them from the heat.

Lopez was barely out of high school when he began working in the boiler house of the Steam, Water and Air Department, where men in a dungeon-like basement put water onto the ashes left over from burned coal.

Workers laughed as they watched the expressions on the faces of Lopez and other young trainees. All he remembers seeing was fire and steam, flying ash and sparks. All he remembers feeling was heat.

He thought he had died and gone to hell.

Lopez would have turned around and run out of the room, except that there was a guy standing behind him.

Once when he worked a job at the boiler house, steam and flames shot out of a door, burning off his eyebrows and part of his mustache.

It was a bitch shaving after that.

Workers talked in coarse language that would make a sailor on one of the Bethlehem Steel warships blush.

He stood with mouth agape the first time he heard one man say to another, ''How's your wife and my kids?''

God, he hated this place.

As he takes photos of the empty ground where he used to work, he laughed at the memory of the pranks pulled on the newcomers.

A fellow named ''Peg Leg'' would sit down next to a new employee. Another guy peeling an apple with a knife would sit on the other side.

Peg Leg and the guy with the apple would feign an argument that always ended with Peg Leg getting stabbed in the leg. The new worker would sit in shock until Peg Leg pulled up his pants leg to reveal that the knife was embedded in his wooden leg.

The protective wool clothing was given out only every two months. A guy came into work one day and asked his boss for a new wool outfit. The boss said his two months weren't up yet. So the worker put on his wooden shoes and helmet and glasses and went to work in his underwear.

Lopez laughs at the memory.

God he loved this place.

Now, he is executive director of a Latino advocacy group called Casa Guadalupe. He works in a spacious office and has a staff that calls him Mister. But he hasn't left behind his old world. It was a world of billets and beams, forging and fire, steel and strikes.

It is a world that is gone.

Public relations director Bette Kovach, Lopez's guide for the day, asks him whether he wants to visit any other building where he worked.

No, thanks, he says.

Guillermo Lopez Jr. has seen enough.


Copyright © 2017, The Morning Call