Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”– Martin Luther King Jr.
Labor Day always makes me think of my Dad. You see, my father was a steelworker. From the day he was discharged from George Patton’s army to day he retired, Dad worked at the Bethlehem Steel plant near Baltimore, at that time, the largest tidewater steel mill in the world. Like all of my uncles—my mother had 13 brothers and sisters—he was a staunch trade unionist and felt if that you owned a car he believed it should be made in America. But like many kids, I didn’t always agree with my parents.
In 1964, I bought a used 1958 Volvo PV444 sedan —it cost me $395 at the time— and my Dad was upset with me about purchasing the car because it used Swedish steel. That was before my cousin Mike would shock the family further by purchasing a Triumph Spitfire, In those days the largest customer for American-made steel were US car makers like General Motors. Ford made most its own steel at its River Rouge steel mill. Dad wasn’t a big Ford fan either.
Fatherly Advice
Labor Day reminded me of one of the few times that my Dad felt it was necessary to dispense fatherly advice. While I was in high school and long before any of those “take your kid to work” programs got started, Dad took me to work with him and introduced me to his workplace at the Open Hearth furnaces at Sparrow’s Point. There are many ways to turn iron into steel, the Open Hearth process being the most brute force way to do the job. Iron is heated in giant furnaces and then blended with other minerals at extremely high temperatures to produce molten metal.
The building where he worked housed several open hearth furnaces and was so huge you could have parked the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise inside. Both ends of the building were open to the air and inside, creeping along the roof like a demented spider, a giant crane moved back in forth to grab and then pour immense ladles of molten steel into I don’t remember what. The heat was oppressive. Before introducing me to some of his friends, Dad waved his arms in front of this spectacle as if to say “some day all of this will be yours” but instead, he being a man of few words, simply said to me “don’t work here.”
Then it was time to meet his boss, a rough-looking red-haired man named “Brick” and then one of his co-workers they all called “Jaguar Joe.” Since my Dad’s name was Joe and he was first on the job, the new guy became “Jaguar Joe” because he owned the only foreign car parked in the acres of parking lots around the plant that was brimming with Detroit Iron. His car was an XK140 and while drivers of lesser European cars—the Japanese were not even a blip on our radar yet—were hazed and had obscene remarks scrawled in the red dust that spewed from the smoke stacks and landed on every car on every parking lot, Jaguar Joe was left alone, because his fellow workers admired the style and performance of his Jaguar roadster.
A few years later, while standing on the running board of my 444 Volvo, I reminded Dad about Jaguar Joe and he reminded me that “this car was no Jaguar.” Thirty-six years later, I finally got my first Jaguar, a 1986 Series III XJ-6, pictured above, but it was a real Jaguar and my Dad was finally proud of this foreign car. He didn’t get to see my second Jaguar, the XJ-S before he passed away and I think he would have liked it even more.
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