Purdue University Northwest Archivist Joseph Coates wants to hear from people who have memories of Acme Steel and heavy industry in the Indiana Harbor area.
“What we’re really trying to get are people from all over Northwest Indiana who worked at the steel industry to come in and talk, even if they were there for a year or two or retired a decade ago,” Coates said.
Indiana University Northwest has the Calumet Regional Archives, which has a lot of information about U.S. Steel’s Gary Works. PNW is focused on the extreme northwest corner of Northwest Indiana and South Chicago, as well as the Westville area. Information about NIPSCO’s failed plan to build the Bailly nuclear plant at the site of the Bailly Generating Station is also welcome.
“We’re trying to focus a little more about the Riverdale up around the lake to the Indiana Harbor works, sort of the Hammond/East Chicago area,” Coates said.
“The other mill,” as Coates called it, doesn’t get attention, he said. The headquarters for Inland Steel and its predecessors were in the area, while U.S. Steel was headquartered in Pennsylvania.
The grant PNW received from the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest was for oral histories relating to Acme Steel, which has a complicated family tree. Its roots go back to the Acme Flexible Clasp Co., founded in Chicago in 1884. After various mergers and name changes, it became Acme Steel Co. in 1925, according to the Chicago Encyclopedia. The Riverdale plant opened in 1918.
By the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression, Acme employed about 1,400 people in the Chicago area. By 2002, International Steel Group bought the bankrupt Acme Steel and reopened it as a mini mill employing about 200.
Coates is trying to capture memories not just from employees but from others who had a connection to Acme Steel in its various iterations. Suppliers, contractors, family members and others can relate stories and share memorabilia they might have.
“People move; they retire. We’d like to gather that from as far back as we can get,” he said. “Trying to get some of those old memories could be super helpful.”
The grant has no specific deadline, but capturing memories before they fade offers its own sort of deadline.
Coates has already collected several oral histories. What he has learned so far is enlightening.
“One of the things I found really fascinating is how the safety things evolved over time,” he said. “Hearing protection wasn’t standardized until well into the 2000s. I thought, really?”
“Just the number of people we interviewed who had seen people die at work was just kind of amazing,” Coates said. “They just talked about it like this was everyday stuff.”
It’s different now. “You can’t have that many people die. Most of it is automated now.”
Coates served in the military and didn’t see anyone die. He once worked on a ship built in the 1960s. “There is no way any of this would fly today,” he said. One plant was nicknamed the “Sailor Inhaler” because it could suck you into the engine on a carrier deck.
Steel mills were dangerous, but workers understood that going in. “I think a lot of it is the pay was good, the benefits were good, the retirement was good. There were a lot of benefits in working there and putting up with the danger in it,” Coates said. Steelworkers could retire in their mid-50s after a lifetime of brutal labor.
They might not be rolling in cash in their retirement, but they wouldn’t have to go out there anymore. That’s a tough equation. “Do I really want to risk that when I can go somewhere else and make slightly less money?”
“The older I get, I’m like, man, I’m glad I have an office,” Coates said.
As steel industry employment shrank over the decades, finding jobs in other industries was problematic. “Working at a steel mill is skilled labor, but it doesn’t translate well into other fields,” Coates said.
He compared it to being in the military. There aren’t many nuclear submarines in the civilian world.
“If that job goes away, you’re kind of starting from nothing.”
Losing steel jobs hurts more than the steelworkers and their families.
“When I think about what built Northwest Indiana, the steel industry was huge, and everybody really benefited from it,” Coates said. “This all affects everybody who lives here. If the local factory closes, there are fewer people who can afford goods and services,” the birth rate declines, fewer people go to college, and the ripple effects continue throughout the economy.
“I’m hoping that we’ll be able to change with the times to be able to remain a viable community,” Coates said, but he doesn’t want to lose that blue-collar past.
“A lot of times it’s either people who have money or civic power” whose stories are preserved. “You’re very rarely going to get the history of some guy who worked at a mill.”
“People won’t understand that history that helped to put us where we’re at now.”
Even as the area evolves, it’s important to preserve that history. “We can remember the past but not have to maintain that past.”
“I don’t see this as a project that’s going to end anytime soon,” Coates said.
“We really just want to be able to tell their stories in a respectable way.”
Coates is looking for keepsakes as well as stories. “We’re more than happy to take on smaller collections from people” and make them available to researchers, he said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.