Out of This Furnace (Regional)

by Thomas Bell

Dobie felt that it would have profited America to have voted him his millions out of the public treasury rather than permit such waste and destruction as his mills had wrought.

All over America men had been permitted, as a matter of business, as a matter of dollars and cents, to destroy what neither money nor men could ever restore or replace.

With this result: that America was no longer, except to a few of its peo...

Where it wasn't blighted with slums its deforested hills were being washed into the sea, or the soil of its plains was be...

there were so few places left that one could love.

In their details they were ugly, clumsy, apparently built of cast-off odds and ends

congenital inefficiency

slovenly workmen doing everything the hard way with...

Haha

they might try finding a satisfactory substitute for bosses and bossism.

Haha

work itself.

At its best, work was fun.

was), it had sunk to a privilege. Ultimately, of course, it would hav...

Robert Heinlein preached this in, inter alia, Starehip Troopers and Glory Road I think.

“What are you trying to do, make the world over?” Why not?

Somebody’s got to.

it didn't seem to matter as much as it once had. The old heart-burnings, the miserable self-consciousness, even a good deal of the bitterness, were gone.

In their place were pride of achievement, a growing self-assurance, a certain degree of understanding

one was in duty bound to fight it wherever it appeared—under whatever guise, whether it sprang from ignorance or nastiness or a studied purpose.

kind that's got Made in USA. stamped all over them, from the kind of grub they like to the things they wouldn't do for all the money in the world.”

it wasn't where you were born or how you spelled your name or where your father had come from. It was the way you thought and felt about certain things.

We’ve lost that idealism, at least among almost half the population, today.

the whatever-you-wanted-to-call-it that determined for a man which things he couldn't say or do under any circumstances, not for all the money there was, not even to help his side win.

Out of this furnace, this metal.

Now he thought that having a couple kids around the house might be fun. A lot of worry and expense, no doubt, but a lot of fun too.

The only reason for not having children that still made a little sense was the kind of world they'd have to live in.

THE Monongahela Cemetery

Captain Bill Jones,

Andrew Carnegie's first steel-master, killed in a furnace accident in 1889.

Here a recurring icon is the triple cross of the Eastern-rite churches.

Michael and Mary Belejcak.

And his own birthday, p. 231

Mary and Michael Belejcak

Michael Belejcak

Tvarosc

Sa...

Michael's three younger brothers—Joseph, ...

recruiting agent

the precariousness of life in the mill towns,

Thomas Bell's brother Anthony,

John Belejcak,

Of the four Belejcak brothers, only Joseph survived into middle and old age.

suppressing tragic coincidences that actually happened because they might seem implausible in the world of a novel.

His career was a perhaps more successful version of the experience assigned to Kracha in the novel.

Dobrejcak means “good man”).

there were books in that break-front bookcase.”

the love of Mary and Mike Dobrejcak,

George Kracha (in real life George Krachun),

Black Susan”

Raymond Shedlock,

the “cripples gang,”

a people who had been a rural peasantry less than fifty years before.

While Irish and German kids could boast of the history of their ancestors, I as a Slovak boy did not know anything about the history of my people.