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This is my hometown.
It's called Youngstown and it's in the state of Ohio near the Pennsylvania boundary.
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In Youngstown we make steel.
We make steel and talk steel.
I guess it's the same in Sheffield, England, or that place the Russians built in the Urals,
Magnitogorsk.
I'd like to tell you something about how we make steel here, and while I'm at it, introduce
you to some friends of mine who work in the mills.
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[whistle blowing]
Look down any street in town and you'll see the mills at the end if it.
There are 25 miles of them along the Mahoning River, and today they're busy day and night.
Every eight hours a shift change.
Fifteen thousand men to the shift.
[train engines]
The men going to work can see the freight trains bringing in the raw materials,
iron ore, coal, and limestone.
[train engines]
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This is the ore.
It looks like dirt, but in a few weeks it'll become part of a ship, a tank, or a gun.
And in peace time, an office building, a bridge, or a dam structure.
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An overhead crane picks it up and carries it over to the skip hoist, which take it up
to the top of the blast furnace.
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[roar of the blast furnace]
In the blast furnace, the boys smelt the ore into iron, the first step in making steel.
[roar of the blast furnace]
Molten iron comes out at 3,300 degrees.
[roar of the blast furnace]
The slag comes up to the top like cream in a pitcher, and goes out the other way.
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That's Johnny Trunco on the snort valve, controlling the blast.
When things get too hot, he's gotta think quick and move quicker.
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Peter Zeeman's the blower, head man on the shift.
He tells 'em when it's time to stop the flow.
And this is Frank Milay, a friend of mine.
Frank came here from Italy 45 years ago.
He's got his own place up in the hill.
Come Christmas, it's full up with his children and grandchildren.
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Frank doesn't talk much, but I know how he feels about his home, his kids, and the satisfaction
he gets knowing they'll grow up with the same chance as the kids next door or any other
kids in the country.
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[train rumble]
This is the open part where the molten iron from the blast furnace is mixed with scrap
iron and the two purified into steel.
I remember the first time I saw it, the size of the place, the noise, the sirens wailing
when the big stuff moved overhead, and the heat hitting you like a solid wall.
It's something you don't forget.
[siren wailing]
[train rumble]
These boys are slagging, lining a furnace with dolomite.
This protects the wall of the furnace against the extreme temperature.
[roar of the blast furnace]
Down the line, Bob Wentworth is charging scrap iron.
Scrap that came from farms, backyards, and attics all over the country, collected by
school kids and housewives to do their part in the war.
[roar of the blast furnace]
Next door, Tommy Hughes is giving one of the furnaces a drink of hot iron from the
35-ton ladle.
This iron is fresh from the blast furnace.
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These are the foremen Bill Riley and John Strauss.
John came here from Croatia.
He's got two sons.
The older's a captain in the Army.
The younger, Ed, is still in high school.
He's a substitute on the football team.
Next year when he gets a little more beef on him, he'll be a regular.
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[crowd cheering]
Of course, it isn't all football.
Education comes first.
The principal, Mr. Glasgow, understands the kids.
He believes they should help plan their own schooling.
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Ed's interested in flying, so, along with languages and literature, he gets
courses in physics and aerology and internal combustion engines.
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It means a lot to have pre-education like this for your kids.
If you listen in on these youngsters, of course, you'll hear them talk about football and dances
and things of that sort.
But you'll hear other things, too, talk about what kind of a world this can be after the war.
Things maybe their parents didn't talk about enough.
They know what's going on, these kids, and that's all to the good.
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Yes, if you listen to them, you get to appreciate how much democracy depends on education.
Education for everybody.
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In the open heart, the steel is nearly finished.
The first and second helpers take a sample.
Mike Kubinski's the first, Earl Strong is his assistant.
[clanging of metal]
[roar of blast furnace]
Mike's people came here from Czechoslovakia.
Earl's ancestors came from England in the 17th century, when there wasn't much to America
but a few colonial villages along the coast.
By inspecting samples of the molten steel, the boys can tell exactly when the furnace
should be tapped.
Earl's a musician.
He plays bull fiddle with the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra.
No professionals here.
They're all steelworkers and their wives and daughters.
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The maestro, Michael Ficocelli, is a timekeeper in the mills, and there's been
plenty of bad jokes about that.
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They're rehearsing a piece by Gerald Meirovich, a Youngstown boy who's in the Navy now.
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Steel men get in the habit of doing things together, like in the mill.
[roar of the blast furnace]
The open hearth gang ravels out the hole in the rear of the furnace and lets the steel
out, roaring and spitting at 3,000 degrees.
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The pit gang dumps in alloys to give it the special qualities they want in this batch.
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This ladle weighs 100 tons, but the overhead crane handles it like a toy.
Lifts it over to a line of ingot molds where it's tapped off.
We call this teeming.
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Just to be on the safe side, another test is made to be sure that the alloys have been
added in proper amounts.
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[train whistle blowing]
The ingots are carried over to the blooming mill, where they get their first shaping.
[train rumble]
[train whistle blowing]
It looks rough, but these rollers squeeze the ingots down to a tolerance of a 16th of an inch
George Bannon and the Clarence Kenney control the operation from the pulpit.
They've been doing this together for so long they work like one man with four hands.
[pounding]
When the ingots flatten into a slab, Fred Ingram takes over.
[whirring of machine]
He cuts a slab with hydraulic sheers under many tons of pressure.
[whirring of machine]
Fred's a shop steward for the union, which has an agreement with the mill.
He represents the workers on the plant's labor management committee.
These days they're discussing production problems, and they've been doing a great job up there,
working together, planning together, figuring out new ways to make more steel.
We've got the machines, like this one in the hot spit mill, where, in one continuous operation,
a slab of steel is flattened into a sheet.
[roar of machine]
Each roller operates at a different speed, synchronized to handle a slab that's growing
longer and thinner and moving faster all the way down the line.
[whistle blowing]
[whirring of machine]
This is it.
Steel.
Only a few hours ago it was iron ore.
Now it's finished and on its way to become a part of the new world it's building.
We've proved we can lick production problems.
We've got the equipment, the science, everything it takes to get the job done.
But when the war is over, we're going to have other problems.
We know about that in Youngstown.
We've had it here before.
There were times when there was no smoke in the sky.
The mills were quiet.
The street full of men, angry, questioning, wondering.
We're beginning to understand that these things don't just happen in one place.
They happen everywhere.
We're thinking that all this production all over the world that's doing such a job in
a war can do a job in peace, too, if we can just learn to work together.
And I guess we're beginning to learn.
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