CHAPTER XV. THE IRON BISCUITS

In the Sharon town band I played the clarinet from the time I was

thirteen until I left that town several years later to chase the

fireflies of vanishing jobs that marked the last administration of

Cleveland. A bands-man at thirteen, I became a master puddler at

sixteen. At that time there were but five boys of that age who had

become full-fledged puddlers. Of these young iron workers, I suppose

there were few that “doubled in brass.” But why should not an iron

worker be a musician? The anvil, symbol of his trade, is a musical

instrument and is heard in the anvil chorus from Trovatore. In our

rolling mill we did not have an anvil on which the “bloom” was beaten

by a trip-hammer as is done in the Old Country. The “squeezer” which

combines the functions of hammer and anvil did the work instead.

When I became my father's helper he began teaching me to handle the

machinery of the trade. The puddling furnace has a working door on a

level with a man's stomach. Working door is a trade name. Out in the

world all doors are working; if they don't work they aren't doors

(except cellar doors, which are nailed down under the Volstead Act).

But the working door of a puddling furnace is the door through which the

puddler does his work. It is a porthole opening upon a sea of flame. The

heat of these flames would wither a man's body, and so they are enclosed

in a shell of steel. Through this working door I put in the charge of

“pigs” that were to be boiled. These short pieces of “mill iron” had

been smelted from iron ore; they had taken the first step on their

journey from wild iron to civilized iron. There isn't much use for

pig-iron in this world. You've got to be better iron than that. Pig-iron

has no fiber; it breaks instead of bending. Build a bridge of it and

a gale will break it and it will fall into the river. Some races are

pig-iron; Hottentots and Bushmen are pig-iron. They break at a blow.

They have been smelted out of wild animalism, but they went no further;

they are of no use in this modern world because they are brittle. Only

the wrought-iron races can do the work. All this I felt but could not

say in the days when I piled the pig-iron in the puddling furnace and

turned with boyish eagerness to have my father show me how.

Six hundred pounds was the weight of pig-iron we used to put into a

single hearth. Much wider than the hearth was the fire grate, for we

needed a heat that was intense. The flame was made by burning bituminous

coal. Vigorously I stoked that fire for thirty minutes with dampers open

and the draft roaring while that pig-iron melted down like ice-cream

under an electric fan. You have seen a housewife sweating over her oven

to get it hot enough to bake a batch of biscuits. Her face gets pink and

a drop of sweat dampens her curls. Quite a horrid job she finds it. But

I had iron biscuits to bake; my forge fire must be hot as a volcano.

There were five bakings every day and this meant the shoveling in of

nearly two tons of coal. In summer I was stripped to the waist and

panting while the sweat poured down across my heaving muscles. My palms

and fingers, scorched by the heat, became hardened like goat hoofs,

while my skin took on a coat of tan that it will wear forever.

What time I was not stoking the fire, I was stirring the charge with a

long iron rabble that weighed some twenty-five pounds. Strap an Oregon

boot of that weight to your arm and then do calisthenics ten hours in a

room so hot it melts your eyebrows and you will know what it is like to

be a puddler. But we puddlers did not complain. There is men's work to

be done in this world, and we were the men to do it. We had come into a

country built of wood; we should change it to a country built of steel

and stone. There was grandeur for us to achieve, like the Roman who

said, “I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.”

The spirit of building was in our blood; we took pride in the mill, and

the mill owners were our captains. They honored us for our strength and

skill, they paid us and we were loyal to them. We showed what bee men

call “the spirit of the hive.” On holidays our ball team played against

the team of a neighboring mill, and the owners and bosses were on the

sidelines coaching the men and yelling like boys when a batter lifted a

homer over the fence. That was before the rattle heads and fanatics

had poisoned the well of good fellowship and made men fear and hate

one another. Sometimes the Welsh would play against the Irish or the

English. At one time most all the puddlers in America were English,

Irish or Welsh.

In these ball games, I am glad to say, I was always good enough to make

the team. After telling of being a bandsman at thirteen and a puddler at

sixteen, I would like to say that at seventeen I was batting more home

runs than Babe Ruth in his prime, but everything I say must be backed up

by the records, and when my baseball record is examined it will be found

that my best playing on the diamond was done in the band.