Unlikely to Attend

This item serves as a good introduction to MAKING STEEL UPDATES. To keep up with demand, the 20-page booklet has been reprinted several times. –MR

From AMM’s MELTING POT column, September 23, 2005
Copyright © American Metal Market

The plants are shuttered, but the Baltimore Steelman Tour rolls on. Mark Reutter, author of “Making Steel,” a book that spotlights the Sparrows Point, Md., plant of the former Bethlehem Steel Corp. to chronicle the rise and fall of the U.S. steel industry, has a series of talks scheduled throughout the Baltimore area in September.

The Sparrows Point plant now is part of Mittal Steel USA, Chicago, the U.S. arm of the world's largest steel company, Mittal Steel Co. NV, Rotterdam. It is unlikely that Lakshmi N. Mittal, head of the steel company, or Wilbur Ross, the Wall Street financier who created International Steel Group Inc. and later sold it (and the Sparrows Point plant) to Mittal in a $4.5-billion deal, will attend any of Reutter's lectures.

The author has updated his book, first published in 1988, to include the most recent history of the plant, including details on the Mittal-ISG deal. In an update sent to promote his speaking tour, Reutter includes articles bearing such titles as "Suits Gone Wild," "How to Pocket $267 Million," "Everybody Loves Wilbur" and "Mysterious Mittal: Who is the Man Who Bought Sparrows Point?"

That final title also is the theme of one of the lectures Reutter presented Sept. 22 at the Community College of Baltimore County-Dundalk. His five-stop tour, which began Sept. 19, concludes with appearances at a Sept. 27 reception at the Baltimore Museum of Industry and a Sept. 28 talk entitled "Goddess of Industry: Early Sparrows Point" at the Dundalk-Patapsco Neck Historical Society in Dundalk, Md.

His latest update gives readers some insight into what the speaking tour includes. "Marvel at the outsized, if not outlandish, personalities who have seized so much power and money in so short a time," he writes. "And ponder how the current crop of strivers fits into the past mogulships of Charles M. Schwab and Eugene Grace of now-defunct Bethlehem Steel." Reutter then chooses to quote from a poem by Shelley:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Reutter's lectures are free and open to the public. Melting Pot figures he should charge admission, since he seems to be reducing his chances of landing a new job, should he need one, in the steel industry.