Gratitude Friday 11 28 2025 Steeltown Kid

I grew up in a steel town, Bethlehem PA. My dad worked for “The Company” aka “the Steel” for 43 years. The company, of course, was Bethlehem Steel. Up until the mid-1990’s it would have been hard to separate the town from the company. Everyone was in some way connected to what at one point in American history was the second-largest steel producer in the United States. Bethlehem Steel reached its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the company employed around 300,000 people, with 180,000 of them in shipbuilding during WWII. It launched a ship a day in that era, and the steel is still all around us. It makes up the NYC skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge as part of its legacy.

This was an era in American history where there were lucrative blue-collar jobs. I grew up just after the peak and saw the full decline. It is now gone. 30 years ago this month on November 18, 1995 the last cast of  steel was poured, marking the end of a century of steel production in the city the Bethlehem Steel's South Bethlehem. The news report from the day after described thirty years ago, as workers opened the side of the blast furnace for the last time and iron began to flow, everything fell silent while steel worker Herman Stengl whistled "Amazing Grace" over a speaker system on the furnace floor. It was the end of a long and proud history and the role our community had in building the nation. It took until 1998 for the shutdown to be complete, but the end had begun. The plant's closure had a significant impact on the community, leaving a void both physically and psychologically on the whole region. 

It is difficult to put into words the pride in community we had then. Our families and neighbors made the steel that built the nation and defended us in time of war. We had red dust on our windowsills when the plant was in full swing. It meant food on the table. The sound of machinery echoed through the valley at all hours of the day and night. It never stopped, until one day, it did. Growing up, it started into steep decline on Black Friday, September 30, 1977, when massive layoffs occurred at the company. The end began to be considered. The day when blue flames over the furnaces stopped burning. We worried in those days that Bethlehem would become a ghost town.

Now of course the rusting plant is a casino that also had planned a water park inside the No. 2 Machine Shop which was the main ordnance facility of the Bethlehem plant, once considered the largest industrial building in the world. In that building which still stands and was being planned to be a family waterpark, the largest naval artillery 16-inch guns ever placed on a U.S. warship was forged for Iowa-class battleships (USS Iowa, USS New Jersey, USS Missouri, and USS Wisconsin), which all carry guns that were at least partially produced in that machine shop.  

Everyone in the community was impacted by the fall of Bethlehem Steel. We made stuff back then. People could raise families on wages earned at a full-time job. Our worst fears did not come true; the town did not close with the Mill. Bethlehem, the city remains a vibrant community. Julie and I don’t go to the casino but fairly regularly we see movies at the Banko Cinema at SteelStacks. We walk past the mills, shops and furnaces from that bygone era frequently.

I am glad that I was a part of that world. It formed me in ways hard to express. Kids I went to school with had dads who worked with molten steel every day. It poured out of buckets at temperatures up to 3,100 F. The news account linked above spoke about how they had to wear long underwear to keep their own sweat from causing steam burns on their bodies. It was serious work. Trucks loaded down with I beams bound for NYC and Philadelphia rolled down Third Street on the South Side. My father would walk to work at Martin Towers that I watched rise from a hole as its foundations were formed as a child and watched it fall back into that same pit decades later as it was imploded.

It is all just a memory now, but at the very least, those memories are part of me. It is part of all of us who grew up then, in that place. I have spoken to other people from across the nation who lived in communities that had heavy industry and the associated well-paid jobs in their communities. There are a lot of parallels in the experience. In writing this, I paused a long time in an attempt to express what it means to me to have lived in the times of “the steel” in the town I grew up in. It is hard, but in essence, we saw in very real ways what the industry contributed to our nation and the way that sons could follow their fathers into a good livelihood making steel. The Steel was a way of life.

Now, in that space are casino and entertainment industry jobs. I am glad those jobs exist, but I am not sure there is the same pride of living in a casino town in comparison to coming from a place that built some of the most iconic structures across the skylines of America. To all those who did these jobs and surviving family who share the memories, my hat is off to you and yours. Pride in accomplishment is a real thing. Workers in my hometown in that long gone era risked life and limb to make steel and they absolutely loved what they did when they clocked in to work. I hope as a nation we find our way back to some of the kinds of jobs that provide not just a living but a way of life. I am grateful that I saw those days.

What are you grateful for today?