My summer ballet….
By Mike Richwine
The summers of ‘66 and’ 67 while attending Indiana University, I had one of the most imprinted experiences I have ever had that I have never talked about. While many stories have been told of the early heavy-industrial life[1]I do not believe there has been a story of a skinny 19 old college boy working in Dante’s Hell of a night shift in a Heat Treat department at Link-Belt in Indianapolis, Indiana.
I grew up in Speedway, Indiana (8 blocks from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway) in a blissfully middle-class family. My Dad was a factory worker and my mother, the ambitious partner of the pair, worked her way from lunchroom to the immensely proud first female Officer of Speedway State Bank. Our home was a two-bedroom one bath home. I had a very normal upbringing having gone from kindergarten thru my senior year in the-same school building, three blocks from home. Our months of May were filled with the roar of open-wheeled race cars racing around the 2 ½ mile oval which housed the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing” every Memorial Day. This car race brought in over 300,000 fans to our small 8,000 people town. You could hear roar of engines and almost taste the burnt rubber from the tires as we set in our un-air-conditioned classrooms. A.J. Foyt, Eddie Sacks, Tony Bettenhausen were all fighting for position around the track in my daydreams at my desk!
I say my dad was a factory worker, but he was in fact a gifted machinist who worked his way up to a general Foreman position at an early age. Dad was proud of his job and worked on about every metal working machine in the large plants of Link-Belt and Allisons. My favorite take-home was when he brought shards of fist-sized metal magnets! For me, magnets were great mysterious gateways of science fiction dreams! I was sure I would eventually find a way to defy gravity with them!
If Dad complained about his job, I do not remember it. Work stories abound; Union life and job issues were often discussed. My favorite story was that he bought his and my mom’s first home from the $300 wining from the match book numbers that he bought for ten cents on the factory floor.! Gambling was rampant. I had heard a lot about factory life by the time I was off to college.
My father decided that my older brother and I should get jobs in the manufacturing sector during a very tight summer job market. He used his connection to find us jobs at Link-Belt, a large heavy manufacturer in Indianapolis. The South Belmont factory was a dark hulking series of buildings built in the early 1900’s, near to Speedway. The third shift paid a premium, and I was promised $3 per hour! There was no hiring process, fill out the forms, just show up an hour earlier than the 11pm starting time, and leave at 7 am – in the morning! My brother, (twenty months one week and one day older – but who is counting) as usual got the first job – a janitorial job. I got the HEAT TREAT job!
Armed with stories from my father’s years on the factory floor, I thought I knew what to expect—but nothing prepared me for my first night in the Heat Treat department.
Upon wandering thru the appointed door, I walked into a high school-like locker room with a punch clock. Suddenly, a large inside door opened and several very dirty smelly men entered and started stripping, clothes on the floor, men of every color size and shape, in unison walked naked into the open shower room and started soaping up with no mind to me and no conversations! As I stood there, trying to be as inconspicuous as I could, the outside door opened, and a new batch of men came in with street clothes also started stripping. -Change of shift. The filthy lockers were pre- assigned, and the work clothes were exchanged for street clothes and vice-versa. Time clocks were punched in and out as the dance went on. “You the new kid – yup- here is your locker, change and come in the Forge. But… I do not have any work clothes – too bad, come along”
Welcome to the Stage!
I tagged along into what had to look like a modern Dante’s Inferno. The inside seemed the size of a basketball court, had two blazing furnaces the size and shape of a cement truck. Overhead cranes everywhere like a spider’s web. The air was ridiculously hot and thick, smelled intensly like thick bad insect repellant and the floor was very slippery. The lighting was veiled thru oil covered bulbs. What had I gotten into?
The process of heat treating involves using an overhead crane with controls to move heated metal parts into a furnace and then out into the quenching medium. Once the metal reaches a correct temperature in the furnace (as high s 3,000 Fahrenheit), you move the white hot, red hot, blue hot, 2,000-pound buckets of chain bits. Ten feet in the air, the bucket were directed with the simple handheld three button controller. You were tethered 20 feet below the cranes and would dunk it into a pool of oil or water beneath the floor level by your feet. The heat was overwhelming for those few seconds until rapid cooling in oil is what “quenches” the metal, locking in the hardness and the strength characteristics that the engineers want. It is a frightening visceral process. As a ton of steel hits the oil, billows of scorching hot oil cloud steam are released with an incredible sizzling/boiling sound. Caps and headgear that were flammable were not worn for fear of being set on fire by embers and not knowing it before a conflagration. Safety glasses or normal glasses were worn but keeping them clean enough to see thru were an issue.
The cacophony of sound, light, heat, and smell is overwhelming, not to mention the oil that penetrates the air. Sparks fly out and just miss me as I stand there gaping and sweating from the nearby heat. Showers are required of everyone every three hours. Strategically positioned posts and wall red buttons were within reach. These buttons were emergency shut off switches that stopped all processes and prevented catastrophic events! What that would look like, I did not want to know. I was told restarting the blast furnace processes took over three hours, so do not be skittish – “are you kidding – me skittish?” All workers had a production bonus.
I was introduced to my six co-workers who at once nicknamed me Doc because the Forman somehow knew that I was a pre-med major. If I was “DOC,” these guys were dirty mirror twins of Snow White’s dwarfs, all different and distinct personalities. The dwarfs were proud hard working third shifters, all of whom had some partial characteristics of my dad. They were all young men in their late twenties to late forties They had a purpose, not only to put bread on their tables, but they were proud of their jobs. The chains and metals processed were integral in the transmissions that Link-Belt not only made for large trucks and machines’ transmissions, but for all the military tanks that were built over the last 30 years. This post-WWII group, like my father, may have been excused from military service for the building of the US. war machine. They were proud of their $3 per hour wages. They made a good and honest living.
The whole manufacturing process like a well-practiced dance of timing, heat, light, However Gritty-dirty, smelly, hot. “Why did the piece of steel fail his driving test? – Too brittle under pressure—should have been tempered!” (Typical humor)
There was a lot of downtime as materials restocked, furnaces were calibrated, last batches were tested for hardness, new batches were loaded and brought up to proper temperatures. Showers were mandatory and changing clothes and shoes were a necessity before you left the building – the quenching oil clouds permeated every pore of your exposed skin, and who knows how much you breathed in. Everyone smoked but me. How you smoked along with the polluted atmosphere we were in was beyond me.
The life of a 19-year-old college kid working the night shift was eye opening. However, I soon found the rhythm of a whole novel dance. My co-workers introduced me to The Working Man’s Friend’s Tavern on north Belmont, and the Golden Ace. Twenty-five cent beers at 7 am in the morning along with steak and eggs were heaven. There were no issues of an underaged drinker in the Taverns at that hour. The places were busy, and dancing was common. There were a surprising number of women and couples were common. Their internal clocks were as twisted as mine. Coming out of a Tavern in the morning sunlight was surreal.
Fascinating was the entire process—just the idea of at 3 o’clock in the morning transforming metal through heat and then that dramatic quench in oil and then going to a bar at 7:30 am. It was like an evil, gritty, dystopian, Mid-Summers Night Dream.
[1] H.G. Well’s “the Cone” was my favorite. In a dystopian world the scarry villain did away with his competitor in a blast furnace.
