Sparrows Point during the Steel Age
An updated look at that vanished life and times

Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun, February 10, 2005

By Carl Schoettler
Sun Staff

Across Jones Creek, the jagged, vaporous industrial landscape of the Sparrows Point steel works lies cool and calm and hazy blue-gray in the sharp winter sunlight.

Mark Reutter looks out over the ice breaking up in the creek and talks about men who made steel there when the Bethlehem Steel mill was the biggest in the world.

"Here you've got these blue-collar guys who are incredibly skilled and they need a Homer," he says.

He laughs at his own hubris. He's no Homer, but he's making a nostalgic odyssey. His book, Making Steel, chronicles the lives of the men he talks about and the spectacular rise and ignominious decline of Bethlehem Steel and Sparrows Point. The Bethlehem Steel company, once an industrial giant that powered World Wars I and II, sputtered out of business in bankruptcy two years ago.

"When it fell," he says, "like Humpty-Dumpty, it cracked into a thousand pieces and those thousand pieces have put a black hole in the economy of Baltimore and the lives of actually tens of thousands of working-class people."

Reutter's book is out in a new expanded and updated edition published by the University of Illinois Press (535 pages. $21.95 paperback). The original 1988 book was immediately acclaimed as a lively, human and definitive study of a giant American steelmaker. Now he's touring the Point again, looking for old landmarks. He'll talk about Making Steel tonight at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson Theatre in Highlandtown, where many Sparrows Point steelworkers lived and died.

"The main subject is Sparrows Point, the plant, that's the character," he says.
But the plant is only a shadow of the mill where 30,000 people worked during World War II producing massive amounts of steel - 17 million tons - and launching hundreds of ships. Just 1,500 workers make steel here now. Vast portions of the plant have been demolished, many of the great sheds are empty. The shipyard is inactive and the town of Sparrows Point has vanished.

This battered relic of U.S. industrial might is owned now by a steel entrepreneur born in India named Lakshmi Mittal. With the acquisition of Sparrows Point, Mittal's company has become the world's largest steelmaker. Steel prices are booming, boosted by huge demand from China's burgeoning industries. But thousands of retirees have been left in the dust of the bankruptcy, bereft of promised pension and medical benefits.

"I realized when I completed the book," Reutter says, "that three people were the heart, the mind, the soul of Sparrows Point. The heart was Ben Womer, the mind was Mike Howard and the soul, absolutely, was Charlie Parrish."

The color line
Charlie Parrish broke the color line at Sparrows Point. Four years before the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision ordered integration of public schools in the United States, Parrish won an arbitration that promoted him to a coveted millwright job at a blast furnace. Reutter last talked to Parrish in 1998 when the Society for the History of Technology met in Baltimore.

"Both he and his wife - they were close to 90 years old - were in wheelchairs," Reutter says. "He had been a huge man. Very powerful. ... He grabbed my arm. He said, 'Man, I love you.' It was like he had given me a benediction or something. He then fell asleep during the talk."

Howard was a helper at an open hearth furnace and an ex-communist who was too independent for the party. He was expelled long before he refused to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era. After he left Sparrows Point in 1953, he took engineering courses at Johns Hopkins when he was about 38 and eventually worked in space research.

"He was a very thoughtful guy," Reutter says.

Howard painted expressive watercolors of steelworkers at work. One of the few that survives shows a crew trying to open a clogged taphole at an open hearth furnace. They recall the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. Steelworkers felt a kinship with frontline troops in both World Wars. Their jobs seemed almost as dangerous.

"Ben [Womer] was such a character," Reutter says. "He hated the union. He was the ferocious independent. He was kicked out of school because he didn't want to learn French."

Reutter tells the story of the end of Womer's formal schooling in Making Steel. When Womer was in Sparrows Point High School, the principal's wife, Nellie Blair, gave a talk in French. Womer's homework was to write a paper on the talk. He said: "I wrote on my paper. 'I don't know what the lady was talking about because she was speaking a foreign language.' "

Reutter asked one day if he ever read fiction: "And he glared at me. 'I don't go for fiction. I go for fact.' "

They've all passed, gone on to whatever reward men get when they've worked all their lives a step away from the fiery furnace.

Reutter, who's 54, was born in New York City and raised in northern New Jersey, but he has roots in Baltimore. Growing up, he spent several summers in the city and went to elementary school here briefly.

East Baltimore family
"The Reutters originally came from East Baltimore," he says. His great-grandfather, Fritz Reutter, who came from Germany's Black Forest, was a cigar maker on Fleet Street. Grandfather Ed Reutter was a principal at Patterson Park and Clifton Park high schools. Another Reutter from East Baltimore, Henry, ran for mayor in the 1940s as a Republican. He was beaten by Theodore McKelden. But no Reutter ever worked at Sparrows Point.

"They were a very odd group," he says. "They were all pure Baltimoreans."

A pure Baltimorean, he suggests, "is one who has sort of a fierce provincialism, knows the city intimately, [has] some sort of a tribal sense of place."

En route to earning his B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1972, Reutter became co-editor of the News-Letter, the student newspaper. He became a full-time reporter on The Sunday Sun after earning his master's degree at Columbia University's School of Journalism.

He first reported on Sparrows Point in an investigative series about accidents that he wrote with Steve Luxenberg, now an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post. Reutter left The Sun in 1979 to write his book. The first edition was published almost a decade later. He's now business and law editor at the University of Illinois. He also edits the magazine Railroad History.

'What really happened'
"I wanted to get down what really happened in steel," Reutter says. "History has a way of playing tricks. The powerful and those with tremendous stakes have a way of re-interpreting history. Who would tell the stories of the people who were there?"

He drives through the Sparrows Point.

"We're looking at the town," he says, at a dead end in the plant. "It was where that big blast furnace is."

"This is the town Frederick Wood, the first president, and his brother, Rufus, meticulously laid out," Reutter says. They began building the town in the 1890s. Eventually three or four thousand people would live there.

The Woods modeled Sparrows Point on their home town, Lowell, Mass., with an emphasis on Puritan morality for their workers. They didn't allow drinking in their town. So 50 saloons appeared along the Sparrows Point Railroad to assuage their workers thirst outside the Point.

"But the town has been torn down a long time," Reutter says. "Over here are the remnants of the open hearth where Ben Womer worked and Taylor Springer fell into a slag pot and survived.

"I love this stuff," he says.