Days of Steel
Tuesday, 15. January 2008, 03:31:21
The demolition sequence that I have been following recently reminded me of a visit I made to an old workplace last year.
I was with my friend Mary, my usual Tuesday lunch companion, and we decided to spend a half hour after our meal at 1111 Mississippi (our lunchtime haunt at the time - no longer though) driving through south St. Louis city. This took us down Broadway Boulevard, close the riverside and right past the factory where I worked during my early days in St. Louis.
I was expecting to see the dingy grey metal walls and the strange little brick shoebox office, built up on a riser just in case of flooding, but I was greeted with a much more astonishing sight.
Almost all the buildings, the casting pattern storage rooms, the main shop floor and half of the office had been demolished - indeed, were in the very process of being demolished as we drove by. I was amazed. There were plenty of times when I worked there that I wished the place would fall down, but here it was actually happening.
I expected to feel exhilarated, but there was a distinct bittersweet emotion masking the feeling. I worked in that building, in the office, under the office in the laboratory, for four years. I breathed the filthy dust and smoke laden air (the latter far more from the chain smoking staff than any furnace generated gases), and heard perhaps the most concentrated set of curse and oath filled language that I will ever experience. It was a world so vastly removed from anything I had ever experienced before (or after, for that matter) that it introduced me to a completely new way of living, thinking and doing.
The scrabble existance of a less-than-successful heavy industry, dirty, very poorly paid, relying mostly on Mexican immigrant labor (some legal, some clearly not so), attempting to eke out profits from orders that seemed to diminish yearly as overseas competition began to bite - it was an education as full and enlightening as any other I've undergone. I was hired initially to run the laboratory - that meant standing by the furnaces with a long hollow tube that was dipped (not by me) into the molten metal, then running back to the lab to insert the cooled slug of metal into a gas spectrometer and measure the impurity content (carbon being the most important).
After about six months of that, I was moved up to the office to install a computer system - and that I did, based around IBM PCs when personal computers were still sneered at by the mid and mainframe computer industries. I automated the entire accounting system, trained the office personnel, took over payroll and accounts receivable, wrote a complete inventory control program in dBASE III - and for all this was paid not much more than minimum wage.
Extraordinary.
I could have used the experience to springboard into a much better paying job, but I was tired of being an accountant, computer technician, programmer and systems analyst all rolled into one. So I returned to being a biologist. Being paid so little made it much easier; science is not a field for cash returns and I never had the opportunity to live - and get used to - a lavish lifestyle. Just as well, really. I've been able to follow my muse, and not the path made by material possessions and money expectations.
All of these thoughts - and more - went through my mind as I saw the wrecker's ball knocking out the office wall that day. What might have been and what was not.
I've been lucky.
I was with my friend Mary, my usual Tuesday lunch companion, and we decided to spend a half hour after our meal at 1111 Mississippi (our lunchtime haunt at the time - no longer though) driving through south St. Louis city. This took us down Broadway Boulevard, close the riverside and right past the factory where I worked during my early days in St. Louis.
I was expecting to see the dingy grey metal walls and the strange little brick shoebox office, built up on a riser just in case of flooding, but I was greeted with a much more astonishing sight.
Almost all the buildings, the casting pattern storage rooms, the main shop floor and half of the office had been demolished - indeed, were in the very process of being demolished as we drove by. I was amazed. There were plenty of times when I worked there that I wished the place would fall down, but here it was actually happening.
I expected to feel exhilarated, but there was a distinct bittersweet emotion masking the feeling. I worked in that building, in the office, under the office in the laboratory, for four years. I breathed the filthy dust and smoke laden air (the latter far more from the chain smoking staff than any furnace generated gases), and heard perhaps the most concentrated set of curse and oath filled language that I will ever experience. It was a world so vastly removed from anything I had ever experienced before (or after, for that matter) that it introduced me to a completely new way of living, thinking and doing.
The scrabble existance of a less-than-successful heavy industry, dirty, very poorly paid, relying mostly on Mexican immigrant labor (some legal, some clearly not so), attempting to eke out profits from orders that seemed to diminish yearly as overseas competition began to bite - it was an education as full and enlightening as any other I've undergone. I was hired initially to run the laboratory - that meant standing by the furnaces with a long hollow tube that was dipped (not by me) into the molten metal, then running back to the lab to insert the cooled slug of metal into a gas spectrometer and measure the impurity content (carbon being the most important).
After about six months of that, I was moved up to the office to install a computer system - and that I did, based around IBM PCs when personal computers were still sneered at by the mid and mainframe computer industries. I automated the entire accounting system, trained the office personnel, took over payroll and accounts receivable, wrote a complete inventory control program in dBASE III - and for all this was paid not much more than minimum wage.
Extraordinary.
I could have used the experience to springboard into a much better paying job, but I was tired of being an accountant, computer technician, programmer and systems analyst all rolled into one. So I returned to being a biologist. Being paid so little made it much easier; science is not a field for cash returns and I never had the opportunity to live - and get used to - a lavish lifestyle. Just as well, really. I've been able to follow my muse, and not the path made by material possessions and money expectations.
All of these thoughts - and more - went through my mind as I saw the wrecker's ball knocking out the office wall that day. What might have been and what was not.
I've been lucky.
WIDGETIZE