Viewing page 351 of 421

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

in production.

We arrived in Massillon about 11 and had a look at the locomotive before lunch. Barclay, manager of the Akron and Canton offices was there with a Timken man, Shooey, to look at the loco. Jim Shane, the yardmaster, who resembled Beardsley Dobbs, took us in tow and Bert Ladley didn't arrive until after lunch, having been held up on some accident investigations - one man broke his back, another got badly burned when he fell into a hot ingot pit. It was very reassuring as to the safety of a steel mill.
 
While Bert was tied up on more investigations, Jim took us on a trip through the plant. The new stainless steel mill was very interesting, the stuff looking like a mirror as it comes off the rolls. It is fabulously expensive, the scrap being worth $600-800 a ton, but they can't produce enough of it to meet the demand for decorative use, cutlery, kitchen fixtures, autos, etc. We saw the big blooming mill scrunching down big ingots and rolling them like dough. The open hearth charging machines opened my eyes to a service where electrical equipment takes a tougher beating than on a locomotive. The way those fellows manipulated those machines with all the different controls, was astonishing, especially a little outfit that swiveled around 360[[degree symbol]] in addition to everything else.

The rolling mills where they were turning out special alloy shapes was interesting, the red hot steel coming out onto the transfer tables like a big hot shiny snake. Shane told how a man at Timken once had a wire go between his foot and the sole of his shoe and couldn't get away from it until it burned the sole of his shoe off.