Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit

by Eliese Colette Goldbach

I had tried my best to understand these Democrats by parsing together bits of wisdom I’d heard from my parents and talk radio. Apparently, Democrats thought that good and evil were relative terms. They practiced New Age philosophies that condoned all sorts of immoral behavior. They believed that every person was on par with God himself, just as Lucifer had done before the Fall. Democrats wanted to destroy American democracy by instituting global socialism, whatever that meant. They wanted to ruin our economy with NAFTA, whatever that was. They did drugs. They did yoga. They believed in gay rights, which I was taught was an abomination. They believed in feminism, which undermined the God-given sanctity of women. Worst of all, Democrats defended abortion. In doing so, they were invoking an apocalyptic wrath on the rest of us.

he taught Melissa Etheridge before she became a hit.

I didn’t want him to go any farther, but I wasn’t sure how to make him stop.

I wanted the boy to stop, so I looked over at him and shook my head.

If I couldn’t make the boy stop, then I would brace myself like I did before a needle prick at the doctor’s office.

There was something in his stare that frightened me. He looked vacant and ravenous and wild. As a child, I didn’t recognize that look, but I would come to know it as I aged.

They were the eyes of a man sizing you up as nothing more than a void to relieve his pressure.

The boy’s sudden change in demeanor made it clear that whatever we had been doing could get us into serious trouble. I didn’t like getting into trouble. I prided myself on being an obedient student, and I felt guilty for breaking a rule I couldn’t quite articulate. “Don’t tell anyone,” the boy whispered after computer class. His insistence further solidified my guilt.

When Charlie finally returned with a forklift and a dumpster, I was surprised to see that he drove the vehicle directly into the rail dock. I couldn’t help thinking about what Jeremy had said to us earlier that morning. He told us to drive the forklift along the rail dock, not into it. Maybe I should say something, I thought. I quickly reconsidered. Charlie had worked at a hardware store, so he already had a good deal of experience with forklifts. He certainly knew more about them than I did, and Sam didn’t seem concerned about driving the vehicle down the dock. I was probably just being a perfectionistic English major who thought too much about language. Besides, the train tracks in the rail dock were flush with the ground. Even though the wheels of the forklift straddled the tracks, there was no way the vehicle could get stuck.

The two men were probably aware of the rising tracks, and they didn’t need some woman worrying about a stupid, inconsequential detail.

“I wonder whose bright idea it was to drive a forklift in the rail dock?” an old-timer said to me after the incident. He looked me up and down. By his tone, I could tell that he thought he knew exactly whose bright idea it had been.

Another man pulled me aside. “Don’t worry about this little blunder,” he said. “You’re not gonna get in trouble over this, but let it be a lesson to you. Think things through next time. Use your head.” More men told me the same thing: I needed to be a little smarter the next time around. Sam and Charlie didn’t receive these kinds of lectures. The other steelworkers simply joked with them.

When I tried to join in on the jokes, all of the old-timers paused for a second. They looked at me with the same telling stares. I wasn’t supposed to joke. I was the woman in the group, so it had certainly been my fault.

If we had an idea or an opinion, these same men always asked another man to confirm what we’d just said. There was a good deal of mansplaining, and there were offhanded comments that came straight out of the 1950s.

One man told me that I needed a manicure. Another told me that I would never find a husband until I learned how to cook, and still another was perplexed by the fact that I didn’t have children.

did. I told myself that their attitudes weren’t conscious or malicious—and I was probably right most of the time—but the underlying sexism was difficult to ignore.

She gave them some attitude about it, so they fired her.”

Amelia’s fate gave me pause. I had seen other Orange Hats—all of whom were men—break petty rules like this, and they were usually forgiven. I knew an Orange Hat who got caught leaving his shift a little early, but there were no repercussions. I heard of another Orange Hat who took a long nap on a picnic table. The main boss in the Finishing Department woke him up angrily, but the Orange Hat didn’t lose his job. When I heard about Amelia, I thought back to what some of the other new hires had said during orientation: The guys down here aren’t gonna put up with all that bubbly shit. I wondered whether Amelia had been singled out by the Hot Mill bosses, many of whom were men. I wondered if some of those bosses had hounded Amelia in a way that they wouldn’t have hounded their male counterparts. If they had picked on Amelia unfairly, she was certainly the type to stick up for herself. In the Rumor Mill, people said that Amelia had attitude. Maybe she was just being assertive. Maybe she was just calling bullshit. Maybe she wasn’t the right kind of woman for the mill.

If there was a difference between me and Amelia, it was this: I was, in fact, the right kind of woman. This wasn’t exactly a compliment. When the men blamed me for the incident with the forklift, I wanted to tell all of them that it wasn’t my idea. I was the one who’d noticed the rising tracks. I had been smart this time around, and they were simply making assumptions based on my gender. I didn’t dare say anything, though. I sensed that many of the men in the mill wouldn’t take kindly to a woman who accused them of being somewhat sexist. Even if I explained my position in a polite, rational way, I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t go over well. At best, I might get an eye roll. At worst, I might be ostracized. If I wanted to save face with the old-timers, then I had to take the fall for the two other Orange Hats. Afterward, I decided to work even harder to prove that I was better than what the men assumed of me. As it turned out, the right kind of woman was the kind who didn’t protest too much.

After all, I was just a newbie who hadn’t yet absorbed one of the unspoken rules of the mill. You weren’t supposed to point a finger at a problem and identify it directly. You couldn’t say that you didn’t like being called QuackQuack, and you couldn’t say that people were misjudging you because you were female, and you certainly weren’t supposed to reprimand old men for referring to a fellow woman by a derogatory name. In the mill, you were supposed to bottle up the problem and let it come out in an unrelated way. If someone calls you QuackQuack, you flick him off for some other reason. If someone misjudges you because you’re a woman, you work harder to prove yourself. You believe, for a moment, that it solves something, but the guy still calls you QuackQuack behind your back and people still assume that you’re a ditzy woman who doesn’t think things through. The problems still exist; they just morph into something else.

I could take sick days and extended absences without question. No matter how long it took me to recover, my job was always waiting for me. In the back of my mind, I knew that a full-time position wouldn’t be quite so forgiving. It felt easier to paint houses than to risk failure elsewhere, so I spent years putting half-hearted applications into the job market with the secret hope that I would be turned down.

My mind turned to my bipolar disorder. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my disease was the cause of my loneliness, even though there wasn’t a tangible reason for my thoughts to twist in this way. Bipolar disorder hadn’t caused the accident. It wasn’t the reason my parents hadn’t answered their phones. It wasn’t the reason Tony hadn’t come to meet me at the hospital, and it wasn’t the reason my glasses had flown from my face. I equated bipolar disorder with loneliness out of habit. After years of dealing with the disease, I had experienced the heartbreak that comes when people see you in your worst times. Friends are lost. Parents grow angry. Lovers call you a crazy bitch. I often felt isolated as a result of my symptoms, and I had unwittingly taught myself to blame any form of isolation on my disease.

“Sometimes I see shadows out of the corner of my eye.”

“Yeah, my wife says we can’t afford a sports car, so I just work on the minivan. I don’t mind it. You can still do a lot of stuff to a minivan.”

For a moment I pitied him in the way you might pity a three-legged dog in a kennel. The dog doesn’t seem to notice the missing leg, which makes his wagging, panting enthusiasm all the more endearing.

I often wondered whether the stories told by the older employees were meant to scare me. Their stories certainly had that effect, but I was beginning to sense that they were motivated by more than a blatant attempt at hazing. I started seeing the stories as a type of memorial. Death graced the strangest places in the mill. In the corner of the Social Shanty, there was a bulletin board filled with the obituaries of past employees. Notices for upcoming funerals could be found on doorways and lunch tables, and people often took collections for the families of those who had passed away. It didn’t matter if someone died from a heart attack or old age or cancer. Everyone was remembered with enthusiasm, like family. The gruesome stories weren’t told for shock value. They were a way to remember all of the men and women who had given their lives to make a living. Perhaps more important, those stories were a way to speak a hard truth: It could have happened to anyone. It could have happened to me.

Being a steelworker was who they were, and making steel was what they knew. Leaving it all behind would have felt like losing a religion, because the mill was more than the rust that everyone else saw. It was a moving piece of history, and within its borders we were all connected to something larger than ourselves.

Then, in 1935, Corrigan-McKinney was bought out by the Republic Steel Company.

A coalition of four companies—Bethlehem Steel, Inland Steel, Republic Steel, and Youngstown Sheet & Tube, which were collectively known as Little Steel—refused to recognize a worker’s right to unionize.

The Chicago mill was still in operation at the time, and it was heavily guarded by police.

Memorial Day Massacre, left ten people dead and nearly a hundred injured, ten of whom were permanently disabled.

Later, coroners discovered that some of the people who had lost their lives had been shot in the back.

A few weeks later, in Youngstown, Ohio, a similarly ugly scene played out. The wives and children of striking workers had joined their hu...

Nearly a month after the violence in Youngstown, people began returning to work. Nothing seemed to have been accomplished.

With this long history of hard-won—and hard-lost—battles, it’s no wonder that the mill represents something nearly holy to the people who work within its borders. It’s a memorial to the people who have lost their lives on the job. It’s a shrine to the men and women who have been killed or injured in the fight for better pay and safer working conditions. It’s a testament to the sacrifice and ingenuity that built a nation, but that’s not the story that people usually remember.

Dynamo walked quickly out of the shanty, scanning the ground for anything aluminum. He was something of a scavenger. He took old pallets home to use as firewood, and he had gotten himself into a few precarious situations in the pursuit of renegade pop cans. He sold these cans as scrap metal, which struck me as odd. None of us were hurting for money in the mill. Still, Dynamo’s scavenging was strangely refreshing. I had already given up my recycling campaign with the water bottles, and it was nice to see that someone still had a feverish desire to reuse and repurpose the mill’s waste.

All of those big-name stores, whose goods came from China, rubbed salt in the wound of an already flailing economy. We had traded the high-paying full-time jobs of the mill for the low-paying part-time positions of retail stores and restaurants. We had shipped our livelihoods off to China, and now we couldn’t afford more than the cheap Chinese crap sold to us at Walmart. Some of the people in the community recognized the troubling symbolism of a shopping complex built on steel mill soil, but their tiny cries of dissent didn’t echo very far.

When you worked at the mill, you felt owned by the mill. The lack of sick days meant that you slogged through your shift with a fever. The absence of paid time off meant that you might miss your daughter’s birthday or your son’s graduation. There was very little vacation time, especially for newer employees, and you couldn’t request a day off. That wasn’t even the worst of it, though. I had only been working at the mill for a couple months, but I already got the sense that the rich, powerful people who ran the company thought we should be grateful for being owned. That was the kicker. We sensed it from the bosses, who said they could replace us in a heartbeat. We sensed it from the HR Department, who scanned the footage from CCTV cameras for people to punish. We sensed it from the corporate types, who always wheedled their way out of paying us a profit sharing bonus.

Luckily, the union was able to spare the majority of our benefits by sacrificing a pay increase, but the company’s opinion of its workers resonated long after the contract was signed.

Corporate culture isn’t as obvious as a drug dealer on a street corner, and the wage gap can’t be cuffed by police. The real enemies bringing us down aren’t easy to isolate, so Trump gave people a few targets to blame: It’s the immigrants, the Democrats, the Muslims. It’s Black Lives Matter. It’s Hillary Clinton. It’s an enemy with a name and a face.

For years I had heard priests say that the end of the world would come suddenly. Many people would find themselves unprepared, and those people would wind up in Hell. There was only one thing I could do to make sure that I wasn’t caught off guard. I had to fear the worst, so I spent hours convincing myself that the end was at hand.

Years of talk radio had taught me the same lesson as the Catholic Church: I was afraid of not being afraid. I feared the Democrats, who disagreed with Bush’s tactics. I feared the terrorists, who could attack us at any time. If I didn’t cultivate my fear, then the boogeymen might catch me by surprise. So, I rooted for Bush. I wanted him to invade anyone and everyone. I didn’t mind feeling vengeful and defensive, because it meant that I didn’t have to feel vulnerable.

I began to wonder how many of his vulnerabilities had been displaced into his beliefs.

After the failed business endeavor, my father began stockpiling guns and ammunition. He bought gallons of bottled water and a year’s worth of freeze-dried food. Obama was in office at the time, and my father believed that an apocalypse was coming. Back then, no one in my family could understand his suddenly irrational behavior. The recession was bad, but it didn’t seem like the end of the world. Looking back, however, the underlying rationale feels obvious. My father had lost so much, and he was afraid of losing more. His angry far-right politics masked the vulnerabilities that pervaded his life, and his guns gave him the illusion of control. He was primed for a man like Trump, who gave credence to his fears. The immigrants were at our borders, and the Muslims were at our doorsteps, and Hillary Clinton had a chokehold on democracy. When Trump told everyone that the next disaster was already upon us, my father was too afraid to ignore the message.

He bolstered the people who were down on their luck, and he still found contentment in everything he had left.

He was the kind of guy who didn’t let a devastating loss defeat him. He continued to create. He continued to give. He continued to make models and move forward. More important, he didn’t let a few bullies take his passion. That’s what made him Cleveland. That’s what it meant to live and work in the Rust Belt,

wanted to endear myself to the faith-filled women who otherwise ignored me.

I focused so intently on my prayers that I barely listened to what he said. I directed all of my attention toward abortion, ignoring his words on racial diversity, economic opportunity, and the end of the war on terror.

At the time, I believed that praying rosaries on street corners was an adequate form of activism, and my world wasn’t wide enough to show me otherwise. I hadn’t experienced poverty, as I would in years to come. I didn’t yet understand the privilege of being white. I hadn’t met any women who had exercised their right to choose, and I hadn’t been faced with the issue myself.

After all, reality involves the admission of a painful fact: You are not as well as you thought, and the sickness you’ve inherited can never be fully fixed.