Generally I’ve found Morning Edition’s StoryCorps project to be pretty hit or miss. The oral history project roams the country giving normal people a chance to tell their stories.
This morning’s segment was a definite hit.
In it, Ken Kobus tells the story of his steelworker father, who toiled in Pittsburgh’s J&L works. The part that really got me, though, was when Ken described his father, dying of cancer and on morphine, making odd motions in his bed.
The doctors where befuddled, but Ken figured it out right away. He told the doctors: “He’s makin’ steel. He was opening furnace doors and he was adjusting the gas on the furnace and traps. “I could see, I could see what he was doin’.”
Reading it really can’t do this justice. Go to the NPR page and listen to it. Amazing stuff.
One reply on “A man of steel till the end …”
Bob,
Thanks for the tease to this. I grew up in the steel town of Pueblo (peeyeblo to you out-of-towners, not pweblo), Colorado. To say the CF&I dominated the town would be an understatement. I still hear the screech of the wire mill in my dreams and think of noon as the ’12-o’clock-whistle.’ In high school one of the ‘parking spots’ was behind the District 60 stadium where we watched the CF&I dump slag, its orange glow coloring the night sky. And I still remember the fear that gripped me the first time I stared into the devil pit of an open-hearth furnace knowing, as every steel-city child does, how many lives were lost there. I hear the absence of a hiss as a worker dropped a bit of steel into the pit to demonstrate. One life – gone.