https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnknXOTiRwg&feature=youtu.be

I:Alright so, we want you to say your name and you can start.

CC: My name is Chris MacLarion, I started at Bethlehem steel august 26th of 1996. I was hired into the plate mill before it was shut down. Stayed at the plate mill for a little over a year and a half. I believe I saw the writing on the wall of the plate mill; business wasn’t good, the mill was breaking, they didn’t have spare parts to fix it. So I get out of the plate mill into the cold sheet mill and in about a year, they closed down the plate mill for the first shut down that I experienced at Sparrow’s Point. I spent the remainder of my years in the cold mill then it became the new cold sheet mill that I transferred over to that on a bid, then I worked in the cold sheet mill (the new cold sheet mill) until it shut down last year.

I: Would you tell us a little bit about what it was like to work at the plate mill, what you did, and then the cold sheet mill?

CC: The best way to describe it is there are certain things, certain sounds, certain smells, tastes, that once you’ve experienced them in your life, they never go away. The birth of my kids for example. I’ll always remember the moment they were born. I remember when I was in the army, I remember the exact sound and smell when the airplane doors opened. I was in the 82nd airborne. That rush, that feeling of the wind coming in. The plate mill was just like that. I remember, they didn’t have uniforms yet.  You had your first hard hat, your safety boots which you had to buy yourself at the time. Jeans and a fireproof cotton style t-shirt. And they walked you to the plate mill, and they walked you section by section through the whole mill and I remember coming to an end shear where they cropped the plates. And this massive knife basically comes down and crops the end of the plate off so that it’s square. And I remember when it hit it, I remember the smell, the sound; I remember vividly everything about it. And I thought, oh my God, people die here every day. These machines were massive. The sounds were beyond comprehension. There was like a jet engine next to you. It was amazing and it was great. I knew I was home. And you’d be walking through the aisle way, and these huge slabs go through the mill and it looked it like a roller, I think it was called the three high. My memory fades a little bit. But this slab would hit the rolls and it looked like a war with all the sparks. It was just sparks and the typical steel mill images that you hear about. And you can probably YouTube it, and there’s YouTube video of slabs going through a plate mill – really neat. It’s a really neat experience. I was a laborer there. The first day, the boss comes up to me and I was terrified. You hear all these stories. I was in the union, and I had no idea what the union was. My hirer said you had to be in the union to work here. There was no labor education in high school so I just said okay. And at that point I think it was $13.25 an hour. I would have signed whatever the hell they wanted you know. So I’m in the union and I heard the boss said you couldn’t sit down, you couldn’t be sleeping because they worked you. Six o clock, and another guy got hired on the same day, and we’re sitting there. Nothing’s happening but 6:30, the boss comes in and we’re both terrified. We’ve been sitting there for a half hour and there was no work to do. He calls us outside and breaks down the work day for us – where we needed to be at 6, 6:30. 7 – Basically how the whole day is structured. Then he said, we work six days a week over here even though you’re scheduled five. So do you want to work Saturdays or Sundays he says. I couldn’t have cared less so I said, “Saturdays are fine”. Then he said, “no you will work Sundays”. “Unless you’re religious”. No Sundays are fine. And they explained in the union contracts that you get time and a half Sunday which would trigger time and a half again Friday because you had over 40 hours into the week so you got paid an extra four hours to work that way. And I worked that way for the next six months. And I remember my first paycheck, I think we got paid Tuesdays. And I went out to my car. It was just a job class two or three $ 13.24 maybe. And I remember opening it up, and I closed it, and I’m like holy crap, there’s no way this is right. Because I left the army making around 2 grand a month and that was total. Needless to say, a week in the steel mill with some overtime, you could compete. In two weeks, you were blowing away a month’s pay obviously. And I loved it. This was the first time I had a chance to bid. I got sent over to the east process bay where you loaded trucks. A crane would come up and you would hold these measuring sticks to the edge of trucks to make sure that the plate would be lined up so you could make sure the trucks could go down the road neatly and not be too far to one side or the other. And that was literally where I stayed until I could bid out of the plate mill but, it’s one of those things where you see the plates and you look up the air and it looked silver everywhere. Silver specks everywhere so you’re breathing it in. It didn’t bother me and I know it was probably bad for me, but looking back, it was just part of the experience. And it’s one of those other smells that you will never forget. So if they dropped the crane was going the plate fell of the magnet or off the hooks. When it would hit the ground everything would disappear in this huge cloud of steel dust. For the next three or four minutes until it all settled,  you can’t even see the other end of the mill. So it was really, it was a great place to work, it was my favorite, probably one of my favorite jobs ever was the plate mill.

CC: And then you went to the cold sheet mill?

I: Yup, the plate mill broke down, and I don’t remeber the exact scenario, but I remember where it broke down, they said it’d take a week or two to fix.We have to custom order parts for the machine shop because we don’t have them in stock. Coming out of the army, if a weapon broke or a machine broke, it was fixed. I was literally fixed, um quick. So uh, I remember thinking this is not a good thing. This mill’s old, it was a hundred, it was a hundred years old at the time, give or take. And uh, I thought well, let me go somewhere else. So I bit over to the cold mill. Which is a completely different experience, it’s a finishing mill, and the plate mill obviously was a steel mill. And uh, I bit into there, and I went to the skin pest mill. and I was, if you picture a roll of toilet paper that was 50 thousand pounds, that’s made out of metal, That’s a steel coil. It goes in one side rough, and it comes out the other side smooth. So you’re finishing the steel for a customer, and uh that steel goes through the mill um I think it was 35 hundred feet a minute. So in your stand there’s a little guardrail, it’s kinda cute, you know like you’re leaning on a guardrail and this roll of steel is zipping right by you, um 35 hundred feet a minute and you’re responsible for manually guiding it through the mill, with the set of uh, through like little handles.Picture little handles. So you would tilt the mill, you’d roll the mill, and when it would wreck of course, you’d have to stand there and stop the mill. So there’d be steel flying out the other end, people would be running in every direction as the steel because it’s much like uh, a speedy roll of toilet paper begins to shred as it wrecks.And uh, so I stayed there um I think this was 2000, the new coal mill started to come up and I went from um number 3 skin pass mill. There was two left, when I got hired, number 2 and number 3 skin pass mill. And I was the junior guy so I worked number 3, and I went over to the new coal mill where one skin pass mill replaced number 2 and number 3 and produced just as much as both of them together. And uh, when I got over there, I had been getting involved in the union at that point and I was a shops torge, um Ed Cachenova was my manager, great guy, now is a great guy. At the time, he was a bit of a jackass. But he was a good storyteller. He was good to talk to, he was a bodybuilder as a kid, he only had one eye, you know he had a lot of good stories that you could relate to with him. And um, but we didn’t get along because of the union. And when I got over there, he told me there wasn’t a job for me in the skin pass. And he uh put me over the tanum mill. And the tanum mill, is the mill that will produce coils for the skin mill. So it’s the first phase of finishing a coil. It was attached to the pickler and in the old mill, there was two picklers and two tanum mills. And now there’s one pickler one tanum that are connected together. A coil starts it at the south end, and finishes at the north end. It never stops. They’d weld the next one right to the tail, and it just never stops. In theory, that mill will never stop running. So if you have customers and you have orders and you don’t have a wreck, it’ll run forever. Um, and in good days it did, it ran real well. So they put me in the tanum mill, and I know it wasn’t because of personality conflict, but to me that really solidified me and one individual for the union. An um, I stayed at the tanum mill until they closed it. That’s where I exited even though I didn’t work there regularly than a while. Cause I was an elected officer by then, um that was still my home. That was where I knew everybody, that’s where I was you know another one of those you feel everything you know. And I went in there in August, July. July or August of last year and there was one coil left. Actually I have a picture of it on my phone. And uh, the zone, the grave’s commitment of the mill at the time was to gather a replacement. We went in there together, took pictures of it you know, because we thought we’d start it back up. And we thought it was pretty neat that they’re shipping the last coil, one day we’ll fill these fields up again. The superintendent of the mill came out, we took a picture together. I remember I didn’t have my safety shoes. I just wore tennis shoes in there because at that point who cared? Who’s going to fire you right? And uh, that was it. The picture became the end for me at Sparrow’s point.

I:Should we do something about the dog? Or is the dog fine?

CC: It’s fine, I don’t know what else to do, it’s fine. Set it downstairs, put it out back. She’ll probably dehydrate and die. I can set it downstairs.

I: I uh, well I think it’s fine. Okay, just making sure.

CC: No problem.

I: You’re doing wonderful, thank you. Um let’s go, let’s get into the union a little bit. So you were in a way forced to join the union, become a part of it. Then you were “ shop steward “ If you don’t mind defining what that means, and then talk about your transformations in the union.

CC: Labor laws are different in every state, when I joined, you had to join the union and I told you that it didn’t bother me. Later on it would come to mean a lot to me, in fact it came to mean a real lot. So Darlene Reddaman, who you interviewed was Darlene Jeeter at that time so this story will come blur and change directions but I came in the cold sheet mill. It was an introduction and she was a very outgoing woman, she’s not shy. SHe wasn’t shy then. SO we became friends. At one point she said “you are going to be shop steward in this unit and things were changing, young guy in here. I couldn’t have told you what a damn shop steward was. So shop steward was really the lowest elected officer of the union. The shop steward was the representative that will do first step grievances and if an employee had  a complaint, manager violated the contract labor agreement, You will facilitate agreements. You’ll represent them if they’re in trouble, you’ll represent them if they’re violated. All those early stages of their complaint process is what that basically means. And I became a shop steward. I stayed in the shop steward role till 2001, 2002 maybe. I didn’t get active in the union again until 2006. In 2006, the mill that we were in was more in a youth direction so that was 6 or 7 years ago and I was in my young thirties, 32 I think, 31. I ran for grievance committee men. Grievance committee meant the top union representative in each individual mill. At that time, the plan had changed dramatically so my zone, my grievance area was two mills. It was coding, coding products, and the cold mill. I ran for grievance committee man against a much older. much more experienced guy and 190 to 187, That was my real foye into the union. That’s where it really to me got hot and heavy. i did take labor classes under direction of one of my old grievance committee members. He really encouraged me to go to school. He had left the mill in 2003 or 2004 and tapped out and went to work elsewhere but I pursued to the labor sites program at CCBC so I thought that I was a little more educated at that time I ran. I thought I did a decent job. I loved it. It was great. Time were changing. We had cell phones and we created lists of people, leaving text messages, you can answer complaints all day all night. Really trying to be a little more responsive. It was really a great job. 2009, I ran again and I ran unopposed which didn’t happen very often so for me it was really flattering. It was also more encouraging to continue down the path. In 2011 the president of the union resigned. ONe of the new different things I suppose goes to the different own I think his own. He’s been president for a long time.He’s been in the union for a long time. I think he was ready for a break. Jeff Mccoola became the president and I became by nomination of the executive board, vice president. In 2012 I was on the ill-fated ticket that was destined to happen sinking ship. That happened in April 2012? I think the election happened around post vice president. I believe that I was the only one on our ticket that ran unopposed. It wasn’t for me obviously. It wasn’t a contest except getting our ticket elected. I think our ticket came pretty close to sweeping. Most of us were elected in and within a month or two taken office. Maybe not even. It was over. I think we took office May 14th and they announced the bankruptcy thing May 31st. They was never again negotiations. There was never any will you give concessions. Will you work with us on wages, benefits, working conditions. It was we’re going on bankrupt and by June they had their process well in hand. By July they had announced the sell date. In August it was over.Helco bought the plant. There was a sense that there was really no more union and there was no more sparrows point, at least for me.

I: You mentioned that you went to classes and labor studies, labor movements, Knwoing you really started to develop a deep love to the union. It became a big part of who you are. Can you talk about that? What was it about it? What was the transformation?

CC: You know it’s for the labor sites program around the country are slowly drying up and that’s a shame. It’s really for me, heartbreaking, and that of itself is it’s own separate issue from the sparrows point. So, in our labor site program is dying is horrible because, I think American workers got complacent with wages and you know…so when you begin to go to these classes, you get to read about the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, well and of course much earlier people dying trying. The witch hold fire, workers being shot and killed for being on strike. Union men happen to blow up train stations to get the people off their case. It was fascinating, you know. The whole evolution of the labor movement is fascinating, as you get into it, everything management does isn’t necessarily wrong, but you do get the cases where they are dead wrong, and when you go in there, and you get to fix something for somebody, you get to make a small difference. Get them a day off, get them out of trouble, whether it was by their own design or the company’s design. It’s a great feeling that the working force can actually dictate some of its own conditions. So going into labor site program, where I got my associates degree. I think I was one of the last graduates when they ended the program at ccbc. That in it self is great, I loved the program. It transferred into the union job. It was just amazing. I got to do a little bit of organizing of side shops. You get to go to a few conferences, you get to do a lot more being an elected union rep than a lot of our members did. Which, that also is a shame, because they don’t get to see we become a minister of this contracted labor agreement. They just know what it says, and they don’t…I think when they get elected, you begin to understand how it breaths, and how it is its own living document, and if you don’t protect it, if you don’t fight for it, if you don’t continually  interpret the document, men will change it on you. And once you change it, you can’t get it back. Once you let go of things you can’t you know get it back. In labor class you learn about little steel strike of 59 where imagine one of the change of the work clause. And damn, all these steel workers go on strike, and you know the companies will say and business will say, the unions did this, and you know because of this strike, imports being to creep in to this country but you know if you read neutral opinions, it was already coming. So for me that whole evolution of a union really began to grow on me. And I have the luxury of reading contracts Ive got a 1947 bath home agreement upstairs right now that I was using for this research paper at school and I get to read their wages and how few holidays they had no real vacation, their agreement was smaller than an index card. By the time I left ISG, I’m sorry, I mean RGsteel, several hundred pages of contracts, and you get to see how these agreements have grown over these past 70 years. In april of 2012, the US (something) was 70 years old, that’s pretty cool. And we were there since 42, so to be a part of it, the union was the most amazing thing that could happen to a working guy a working person, its not perfect and it can’t help a shutdown, it can’t get you a benefits out of a bankruptcy. That hurts you know, I lost my severance, I lost my vacation, but I feel like I lost so much more than our brothers and sisters that were like in their 50s, they were so close to their retirement. I think for the union, for us, that is a disappointment. Watching your members get washed away like that it sucks. Its horrible you know to guys that were 58, 59 they lost in the behem shut down a decade earlier when they were just about to hit their 30th year when they can retire and it was taken away from them. And now their 58 and they might not have quite made the 30 year mark, the first time so when you are in the union and you think you can fix the problems the side effects is when you are in the union and it really goes south and you feel like culpable for a lot of it. There is a lot of uh what’s the word I’m looking for…You feel a lot of guilt, what could we have done, and I know in my heart that there was nothing we could have done in this particular case. But um, yea for me back to it the union is the life blood for the work force. I know we are getting smaller and beaten down and I know it’s getting harder to organize, and I know that we are right now in a decline but that it will come back one day. And I think that every working man and woman needs a union just somebody to be there. It’s a cheap insurance policy. Between you and a rogue manager. Between you and a bad boss. Between you and a boss that is hung over and wants to take it out on you the next day. Between you and a boss that is getting a divorce that wants to take it out on you. There is a million reasons to have a union. The security, the contract, the terms that went with it. I liked all of that. I liked that the manager couldn’t come out and say that I don’t like your attitude, you’re a good worker but I don’t like your attitude so you are getting a dollar less than the girl next to you. Or flip side where women today make 84, 89% of what a man makes. In the labor agreement…absolutely not.

20-40:00

MacLarion: You’re all equal, and that’s a great thing. I was talking about a research paper I was working on-I have a contract, it’s a 1947 agreement, I think it’s with the USW and a venetian blind company if I remember right, it’s upstairs, I can show it to you before you leave, and in it there’s a clause that women doing the same work as men will make the same income. So if you look back to ‘what does a union mean?’, that long ago you had a labor rep somewhere that said “men and women should make the same amount of money.” But they had to put it into an agreement, and that agreement became something that got a woman somewhere paid the same amount as her male counterpart. So, that’s what the union meant to me, it’s that continuous force behind the worker, you know.

Interviewer: Can you talk a little bit about, from your personal perspective, what the closing meant to you?

MacLarion: Meant or means?

Interviewer: What did you lose, do you feel?

MacLarion: You know, I don’t know, it’s...I guess every day you would ask that question it would be a little bit different, you know?  I lost my vacation, I lost my healthcare, I lost my pension, I lost my hourly rate-I think that almost means less to me though, you know what I mean? The steel mill was-I said the union contract was a living, breathing document-the steel mill was a living, breathing entity. It consumes you, it gave to you, and it changed and it evolved, and it contracted, and there was a potential for it to grow. I told you that the plate mill closed and that the cold mill closed, so we were contracting, but at the same time we were still consuming and producing product. And I think you lose that: you lose "I'm a steel worker, I'm a part of something bigger." A woman I know quoted “You felt like you were part of a bigger process, you were patriotic, you produced the steel that goes in the golden gate bridge, you produced the steel that goes in the world trade center, it might be in a car that goes by.” You were part of a bigger effort. The plate mill would make steel that would go into the shipyard nonstop, so our steel would go into battleships and aircraft carriers and submarines, and that's neat in itself, but the Point consumes you and it becomes a huge chunk of your identity. You spent a lot of time there and they paid you well; I'm not complaining about the time, I didn't actually work many holidays, my mill was closed most of the holidays, so a lot of mill workers will say ‘oh, you work 24/7. I was there Thanksgivings or Christmases.’ I don't know if we ever worked Christmas...a lot of Sunday nights, Saturday nights, Friday nights, early mornings, but when you take the point away from me I lost my union identity, and to me that bothers me more than maybe losing the Point..but you needed the Point to fuel the union, at least for me with the local union, so you lose everything you have wrapped up in it. A huge chunk of your family is taken away, and everyone says they'll keep in touch, but I graduated high school and I know they don't. And then I left the army and I keep in touch with, you know, only a couple of people. And every time you transition through a stage in your life you can't keep everybody. It just doesn't work. People have to change jobs, they build a new family, they build a new network, they build a new community, and losing that is hard, you know. And there's a lot of silly little stories in the mill; and the mill is its own world. It's its own little universe. It could be a damn soap opera-but it was yours. And you can't recreate it. You build a factory today it would be different. In the old coal mill you were tight, you were in a room the size of this room. In the new cold mill you would be separated by a couple hundred feet so it was isolated, but it still was the mill, you know? It was still where you worked, where you went all the time. I mean you lose everything...I would absolutely do anything to start it back up. I would work for a lot less, I would give vacation back, because you could get it profitable again and start over and it's just...you lose everything.

Interviewer: Can you talk more about the Dundalk area, did you ever live, did you go to Mickey's or anything outside of the mill?

MacLarion: I went to the union hall. I came to Maryland in the mid-80s. I was an army kid; my dad was assigned here, I lived within a couple miles of Harford County. When my time came I joined the army and then I came back here. And the woman I was married to at the time's father worked at the shipyard there, and he got me and application, he helped to get me in the steel mill, and my relationship with Sparrows Point was minimal because I would just drive there and come home. I've been to Mickey's a handful of a times, it's Pizza Roma's, Mickey's, Costa's, they're all little community stopping points for, at one point, there was a lot of steel worker traffic. It wasn't a big hangout for me-the guys I hung out with, we hung out with outside of the mill so, I’m not, you know, we were so watered down at Sparrow’s Point by the time the shutdown came that I don’t know if the community of Sparrows Point is suffering the way they would have in 1985 or 1975 because most of us had moved into different directions. You know, out of 2000 people, 400 live in Harford County, 400 in Baltimore City, 400 in PA ,and then 800 live in Baltimore County, so we were spread out so much that I don’t know if Sparrows Point was impacted as much as it would have been if all 2000 of us had lived there because then your community was more tightly bound. And if we go back to the thing about the union, the union was a facilitator of movement, of social mobility, of financial mobility you know and as our members got a little more free time off the 8 hour work day, vacations, a higher pay rate, of course you have the ability to move out to a row home in Edgemere or Dundalk and you were able to go a bit bigger. A lot of the workers they came up here, they came to PA, they’ve been all over Baltimore county. So you dilute your membership base in the local region but you also dilute your economic base in that region. I often wonder if all 2000 of us lived in Sparrows Point when it was going down the tubes, could it have been a little different? Because then a community is really, really screwed because you have 2000 earners who are in a very small network, but you know, we’ll never know. So, not huge into Sparrows Point community because I never spent a lot of time there

interviewer: We discussed change and mobility a lot and I was just wondering what your thoughts were and how does the change from school to the army to Sparrows Point to the cold mill to no more mill, how does it develop?

Maclarion: You know, change I understand is a part of life. It’s part of the cycle, and when I got out of high school, I worked construction for a very little time and then I joined the army, and it was a voluntary choice to join the army and I loved it. And I had kids, I’m spending time away, you make a choice-my choice was to be home with the kids more, so I came back to Maryland. As you can tell by the walls I loved the 82nd airborne. I loved the army, it was a great job, it treated me great. It gave me health insurance. Both my children were born army kids. I left it voluntarily, that change was self inflicted. I came to Sparrows Point and started to go to school while at Sparrows Point, and once again that was a voluntary change of culture for me that just happened to be..it worked out for me. Sparrow’s Point shutting down...the change that goes with it there wasn’t a voluntary change. We didn’t want that change. It was like  a bad divorce but worse, and I’ve had a divorce and I have no problem saying...I don’t have a problem with change, but like I said, I’ve been through a divorce and that’s a hard change. That’s a change of life, your home, your household, your emotions, your family structure obviously, and definitely finances, and this was way harder than a divorce. This shutdown was...I’ll change because I have to...I was lucky that I already had an associate’s degree, I was able to go back to school to work on an undergraduate degree...I don’t mind being a college student but I’d rather be a college student working at the Point. Change that you choose is good change, change that’s rammed down your throat by the harsh business realities, the needs of business to migrate to cheaper climates (which I think is a load of garbage), that’s all change that corporate america or the corporate world structure now is ramming down working people’s throats. Workers shouldn’t have to change that way. Should we have to adapt to technology when they build a new mill? That’s the change that, yeah, you’re building a new mill, we’ll adapt to it. We did it in the new cold mill. They’re building new plants I think it’s in, I wanna say it’s Ohio, out in the, they’re building a  plant, hey, that’s the way it goes, that’s change that the workforce can adapt to because you’re still there. This kind of change is horrific. It’s emotionally devastating for the old, there’s young workers who will never recapture their earnings and benefits, period. And there’s older workers who, as you know, didn’t go through this change well, and we had a brother lose his life. And I’m sure that while we’re talking, this is about Sparrows Point, but remember there was Warren there was another steel mill right up the road from us, you know, and there’s will and though they hadn’t run in a while there still exists the hope that their mill will run again. And I’m sure they’ve suffered every bit as much as we have. Um, this was thousands of us not just 2000 at Sparrows Point. So everybody has to change, you know, you’ve got the change with the given self, like I don’t have a landline in my house that’s a change, we don’t write letters we email, okay, I’ll change with you, this wasn’t change, this was abuse. This was neglect. This was...I think it was murder. It was industrial homicide. They destroyed our plant, they destroyed our lives, the whole fabric of what existed down there, and then when our brother lost his life they can say, ‘well he made that choice.’ I don’t think he did, I think they made it for him, you know. I think that they took away a huge chunk of his identity and for some people your identity is smaller and Sparrows Point is a job, but for a lot of us it was a huge chunk of everything. And I think for him it was. And so just to be poignant about it I think change is okay but this wasn’t change this was brutal. So I hope that touches base with what you’re looking for but, you know, it is what it is I guess

Interviewer: Can you talk a little bit about the piece that you wrote, The Ode, where that came from inside of you? Why did you do it?

Mac: Um, yeah, I suppose. I went back to school in January, when the end began to come. I had taken like 100 credits for my courses at CCBC. The union contract paid for them, so I took courses on a regular basis. I have a ton of philosophy and psychology-I didn’t need them but they were free and I enjoyed being a student. So towards the end I thought it’s best to cover my bases and I went ahead and took my science and math which I jerked around to the bitter end because I disliked both. So coming January I’m finishing up my credit math class, my credit science, getting my associates and transferring to UB, which is right to school now. Those courses overlapped, I was an amillion master in January so CCBC was still going on and UB started that same week. The last week of one was the first week of the other, so I’ve had a lot of work. I have 5 classes at UB and my 2 classes at CCBC. And I was sitting right in the kitchen, facing the living room, and I was supposed to be writing a philosophy paper on one of the 3 centers of philosophy. I was spaced out, looking at the window. We were supposed to go out for dinner and I was alone in the kitchen, and I don’t know what was the triggering thought, but I remember I wasn’t thinking about philosophy. I was thinking about the Point...and I think I was on facebook. Jerking around on facebook, answering messages, and at some point I was thinking about the furnace, and, you know, I wasn’t like a waxing poet, but, you know, you’re thinking about what you miss and what you don’t miss...and you read a lot-I’ve got guys that since I wrote the Ode to Sparrow’s Point, which I didn’t title, someone titled for me, have sent me their stuff. Like a guy who retired in the 80s sent me-he was a plate mill guy and he got it forwarded in an email by another guy at the plant-this is a guy who’s in his late 60s, he forwarded his stuff on the plate mill that’s very traditional poetry. You know, like the plate rolls through the mill, you can hear the jingle, the sound of steel. It’s very 123123 and it’s good, it’s great work, but I felt like I was wanting to talk about it in a little bit of a different way, you know what I mean, so I’m sitting there thinking ‘how do you refer to this being, this entity, because it’s not a plant, it’s not a machine, it’s like it’s real,’ you know, and so I was thinking about it as a woman, you know, and I started it that way. And it was just like, you know, a couple lines and, I think over the next-it didn’t take long-10 or 15 minutes I ran it, I did a quick edit, and I thought it said what I was trying to say. And it wasn’t meant for anyone or anything. I threw it up as a facebook status, and I don’t remember if anyone read it before I left or not, (in the house anyway: my daughters, or if my girlfriend had read it) but we left and we went to a German restaurant, and it’s such a happy thing. And anyway we left and I had no cell phone reception and came out of dinner, and facebook appears on your phone of course, and there’s like 47 little red ones. And I’m thinking ‘what is it?’, and it was all comments on it. And someone copied and pasted, and someone copied and pasted it, and then I learned that one day it was on a website. And steel mills in Louisiana, and a guy from the US sub put it on a blog, then it got on a career development blog, so it was kind of neat, it just got shared. And I remember the last time I saw it, it was shared like 150 times, I don’t know. But the other guy reached out that was gonna do a book and asked to put it in and I said ‘yeah, I don’t care, it’s for the public.’ So that’s where it came from, and that’s how it spread. and I didn’t realize anyone outside of my little circle of facebook friends had actually seen it until much later

Interviewer: Would you like to read it?

MacLarion: I don’t have a copy of it.

Interviewer: I do, but if you don’t want to…

MacLarion: Okay, we’ll give it a shot. But if it doesn’t go well I prefer it not appear. I suppose that’s okay to say?

Interviewer: Yes. Is it edited?

MacLarion: I have no idea, I haven’t read it since...

Interviewer: I saw the 0 you were talking about, I got rid of that.

MacLarion: Kind of funny now. One of the neatest things that I had a guy forward me in an email, this appeared on President Gerard, the international president of the union, a guy that I still to this day I have a lot of respect for, like him a lot, I think he’s very sincere. He’s a real union man, and he had sent out an email to the...I believe the whole executive board, because you can’t follow the CC’s, you know, and he said ‘for all of you that have ever been through a shutdown, or represented somebody who’s been through a shutdown, this says it all.’ So I think that for me...that was like one of the biggest compliments, do you know what I mean, that it was recognized. And I think the director sent me an email saying ‘this was well written.’ So it wasn’t so much that they appreciated is the thing, but that they were actually steelworkers, because Gerard comes out of a mine, the guy who sent me that comes out of a legitimate steel mill, so the fact that a steelworker...and steelworkers, we have workers, we have teachers, we have nurses, and they’re all steel workers...but these guys actually came out of the mines. So they were able to actually touch and feel the emotion, you know. So obviously I can’t look at you while I read...I mean, you know, it would be difficult.

Interviewer: Just relax

MacLarion: It’s long. Alright, let’s give it a shot. This was the Ode I wrote. I don’t remember who titled it, maybe Bill Barrett titled it, maybe titled it, he was the guy who circulated it on the blog... Nevertheless someone titled it for me. So, Ode to Sparrows Point. I think I wrote this...I don’t remember when...it was last year, I think. No it had to be this year, I was in school, probably January. We’ll call it January, okay. So sometimes saying I miss you just isn’t enough. Alright, actually this might not happen.

Interviewer: You can read parts of it, whatever you want.

MacLarion: We should cut all that part out, alright.

40:00-end

MacLarion: Sometimes saying I miss you just isn’t enough. You were more than a woman, more than a friend, more than a companion through good times and bad. You were a creature of your own, a life of your own, with more passion inside of you than any man or woman could hope to understand. you were colder than any of God’s creatures and hotter than the flames of Hell and I’d like nothing more than to feel your heat on my body again, to feel your cold embrace one last time, to smell you on my flesh and to love you, and to hate you, with all the passion I can muster. One last chance to curse you, one last chance to sit with you, one last chance to spend the night with you, a weekend with you, to tell you how much you meant to me.

The years wore upon you; I can see that now in hindsight. I can see the toll life took on you, on your spirit, your body, your very existence. The years were harder on you than I realized and you weren’t loved like you truly deserved. I am beyond sorry for the neglect, the abuse, and the agony you must have felt as you slowly died.

I won’t lie. I hated you nearly as much as I loved you. The problem is that I didn’t know that I loved you until it was too late. Until you were taken out of my life, stolen from me, and given away to another I didn’t realize the passion you created in me. You were loved more than you’ll ever know. You provided to me, carried me, and made me the man I am today. You were my family and yet my enemy, the woman that moved me and the woman that inspired me.

I didn’t mind that you cheated on me. I didn’t mind that there were other men, other women, which you loved like me. A hundred thousand men and women knew your love, your embrace, your unending desire to please and provide. You had needs beyond which I could fulfill. The same needs that so many others had, the same needs that you fulfilled without having your own needs met. You continued to provide while we consumed, to give of yourself while we abused. Sometimes you lashed out. Sometimes I saw your dark side, the angry vicious side of a woman scorned. I saw how cruel you could be if I let my guard down. I saw you hurt those you loved, and I saw you hurt those that loved you. I knew you were a murderer yet I trusted you, I trusted you like so many others trusted you. I trusted you with my life despite knowing how many lives you’d taken in your bloodthirsty rage. I trusted you…

Your needs were as human as my own. You had the need to feed, to breathe, to consume and to produce. Those same burning desires that we all have as living beings. In the end it was those same needs that doomed you to death. Your continuous need to consume, to produce, meant you weren’t going to be with me much longer…that your time was limited. They didn’t tell me how long you had to live, I just woke up and you were gone. A beautiful piece of my life taken from me forever. A beautiful piece of all of our lives, taken from us forever. You were more than a woman to me, you were a piece of the fabric of my life, a part of my very existence, and I can barely breathe at times knowing you’re gone.

I still look for you when I drive the long lonely drive past where we used to spend our days and nights. I look to the horizon for your light, for your breath against the sunrise, for some sign that you’re alive. I pray one day I’ll hear you beckoning to me one last time, calling to me, bidding me to come to your side and to spend one last dark night with you. One last night, one last chance to say goodbye, one last chance to be together.

I know it’s not to be. The sky will remain clear; the smoke of your soul won’t darken the sky any longer. No longer will your silhouette stand tall against the fading of the sun, as if daring the very night sky to darken your flame of life. No longer will the Mighty L produce, no longer will the “Beast of the East” challenge her rivals on the field of battle, and no longer will troops of Steelworkers man the mills and coax liquid metal from your belly. No longer will Steelworkers nurse you through the night, through blizzards and floods, through the brutal summer heat.

You were more than a woman, more than a friend, more than a companion. You were also more than a job, more than a way to make a living, more than a place I went to in order to feed my children. You weren’t just a mill or a factory, you were Sparrows Point. I wake up every day and think of you, I go to sleep and I think of you. I know the anguish, the resentment, sadness, despair and rage will fade with time…but not today.

Today I just want to hate. I want to hate those that took you from me, from us, and condemned you to die. I want to hate those that didn’t stand up for you, that didn’t throw their bodies into a frenzied self-sacrifice in order that you might survive. I want to hate that you’re gone and that we’re still here. I want to spend one last night consumed by rage, a rage that burns hotter than the furnaces that poured liquid steel into our very lives.

So when tomorrow comes I’ll say goodbye for good. I’ll mourn and I’ll remember, I’ll reminisce and tell stories, but I’ll say goodbye. Tomorrow I’ll let go.

That’s it.

So hopefully we will edit some of the silences out.But ah,

Interviewer: They were powerful silences, that was wonderful thank you.

MacLarion: Yeah, having that all over YouTube might not be the best career move for me though. So we’ll see. But ah, that was ah, I think that was the first time I read it out loud.

Interviewer: You did a good job.

MacLarion: Usually to read it quietly, you know. Usually to read in your head. But that I guess to me was first appointment. You asked something way in the beginning or somewhere in the middle maybe what this Sparrows Point means to you, well there you go, that’s what the point means it’s you know, and I hate the iromanners of the world. I hope that there is a special place in Hell for him. And I hope somehow that he watches this one day. And I hope that he knows that I don’t forgive him you know, he could’ve saved Sparrows Point, he could’ve saved the warning willing, the capitals there, the work force was there, the machines were there, the lack of effort on his part is criminal. Him and his son both. I hope they both rot in Hell. And I hope that there is a special painful for him. So to me that’s what Sparrows Point meant.

Interviewer: Thank you.

MacLarion: You’re welcome

Interviewer: Anything else?

Interviewer: Yeah, that was wonderful.

Background Interviewer: Yes, That was..

MacLarion: I go school there, so I come home, Martin Luther King to 95. And um Ravens stadium to your right and I’m an eagles fan, Ravens stadium to the your right, Orioles stadium to your left okay. You come up on the turn, so you are overlooking the water and you can see, if you look to the distance it’s the same place everyday. You can see the front. So my eyes go past the cranes, the long charmins cranes, right to the furnace, to make its, I don’t know why it’s not gonna run, I understand it’s not gonna run. But there is a weird carmen effect looking at it, and I look everyday, everyday I leave school or if I’m working in the city, I went in the city and I remember leaving and it must of been Febuary, March a little hazy, foggy maybe and I came up over that bend and it was gone and I got cold chills, I felt sick, I felt like I needed to pull over. But ah, it was clearly still there, But the sad part is if I know that its not gonna start again, what was I doing that thousands of other people and you know, everyday I go by, I still look at it. It’s not going to run again and at some point they need to deployed it. They don’t need to deploy it but they will deployed it and ah hopefully I can pull off a career somewhere and make it there where I can get an invite because I do think that I should have the right that death peace, that final little piece of his life when it really does come to it his end. But everyday I look to right at the 1 o'clock, but I use to 11 o’ clock. As you round the rot, you shift to 1 o’clock and everyday I look at it and I come out of the tunnel and you come up to the high part where you’re by the Peter Bal Factory, and I look again, and I can see it, it’s just my eyes gravitate to it, it’s just, you know. I’ve taken pictures from the highway, you know, which you are not allowed to do. But I have taken a picture or two from the highway. I turned down and I took a picture, I won’t go there again till then but it’s still one of those drawing things for you and you can see that thing forever you know, you can see it from a long ways away. I never even worked there, I have never even worked in the feres but thats what my eyes were drawn too, but yeah, don’t know about that thought so there.

Interviewer: I do the same thing, I look at it everytime i’m on the highway. You can see it from UMBC, Catonsville.

MacLarion: You know, It’s open in my eyes that when I go to Eastern Avenue to go to work, to go to school, rephrase that I go to school and I pass shutter places you know. Um there is the Old Eastern Stainless. All the workers that were there produces wood. And there are a handful of workers there. You pass on Pamco plant across from Bay, I think thats the Hospital and its shuttered and fallen to pieces and you go across the key bridge so the last thing passes across is Sparrows Point. First thing that you pass when you get to the side is chemicals being torn down and they are de-industrializing there so fast and they want us to be service workers, technological workers, technology workers are computers, which is great, it’s part of the change that you asked me about earlier, and yeah a sight of us really have to embrace that and we do need the whole stem approach, we need science and technology and mathematics and we need more young kids in college but you’re not going to get the industrializing Baltimore in Philadelphia, Chicago, Gerri, Indiana, Detroit, you’re not gonna get terren plants down because we can’t all work on a computer, we can’t all work at McDonalds you know. Somebody has to manufactur, you got to have tax base, you got to have, people got to have the ability to own things and um so you drive through Baltimore it’s horrible and I never noticed it until they shut ours down, go down north point, Sparrows Points gone, Thomsons gone, The signo plant shuttered right now and it’s one after the other. Some are just smaller manufacturers but one after the other they are closing um you can’t replace them and you know they are not replacing them and a little tip that crap jobs are thrown, they’re throwing it in the deep south, there’s no unions and where they get low wage workers and then nobody can organize, well we can but we have very little success organizing because of the culture, the climate and the fear that the businesses thrown in the workforce and they know that you know they are going to run from us, they are going to go to Asia, they are going to go the Pakistans and the Indias of the world where they can exploit their workers and they can have the Indian’s ship working businesses where they are killing people, wholesale in Bangladesh where buildings are collapsing so we can where cheap ass foreign clothes because we don’t want to pay a little more for shirts but the reality is that we are not paying anymore anyway, they are charging us the same damn prices that if we made it here. Um, little bit of a ramp there but this is what they are doing and this is when we would talk about like what feelings that generates is that they all are doing this and I don’t care if it is through general electric through. An Apple with there oh we are going to bring a factory back, yeah right. And you’ll put it in South Carolina, you’ll pay these men and women ten bucks an hour and you’ll abuse the hell out of them and if we ever unionize it you’ll throw it back in China, until the Union is gone. And you’ll exploit these poor chinese workers for a nickel a day or an nickel an hour. And you’ll do your token bullshit safety stuff in Bangladesh is the world where you’ll throw some money in some safety problems but the moment the workers say we want a committee to look at our own safety, you say, what do you know about safety, you don’t know what we know about safety, well you’re the assholes who just blew this building up you know. You killed a hundred of us or whatever that final death toll was. And it gets a blink on CNN, it gets a blink and there were workers trapped in there and I think they had to pulled a women out of there who hit a ten day mark. I mean, God, think about it for ten days with no food, no water, you’re under the weight of a building and you know that you are going to die, but then you don’t die. And you’re pulled out but you’re not pulled out of anything, you’re pulled back into hell because you’re going to go work in another factory because if not you are not going to eat and these corporate angels if you will, that will want to tell how much they give these workers that oh we are going to reimburse their families. I bet this woman got 200 bucks. Maybe not even than yet or that, to me that’s what we are doing and that’s what we did to Sparrows Point and we’re doing it to community after community after community and we all sit here and watch this stupid ass T.V and it’s not us so it’s okay, it’s not us, it’s somebody else, it’s somewhere else and you know I talked to Troy Pitt today who you’ve previously interviewed and um we were talking about Gary, Indiana where was an enormous steel mill, and when it shut down, it pretty much killed in my opinion Gary, Indiana that a 40% I think was the number, their buildings were abandoned. Detroit got, I think we looked 70,000 of them were abandoned buildings or structures. How the hell does that happen? And, How are we okay with making cars in China, Korea and Mexico and if you are going to do it they should be organized and they should be like we need to level this plane field so that American’s can work. And I don’t want the Chinese to not work and I don’t want the Mexicans not to work. But I want them to work like we work, I want them to make good money. I mean, you know they want to live in their home countries as much as we want to live here and they can’t, I mean there’s no jobs there and when we try to unionize there, theres fire, plants are closed, the whole workforce is dismissed and I don't need a workforce tomorrow and nobody’s going to do anything about it. So the Fords, the GMs, the RGs steels, they all are playing the same game. And the apples or cheap ass IPhones that probably cost 500 bucks that they pay a worker four bucks to make, there’s no savings in it. Now, when is it okay for exon to not make 51 billion dollars and exploit it’s work force. You know, they can dump oil all over Alaska and cry the blues and appeal this all to the supreme court for the decade and a half and that’s okay. But where is the worker share of it and it’s the same game. So, now i’m really done my rant. But that those from what I feel about the union and where we all are heading. It’s this race to the bottom that’s Wal-martization of our economy and you know there’s some great movies on Wal-Mart. But I remember one story where I think rubbermaid resisted if I remember in the book right, i’m maybe mis-quoting it a little bit but the facts is the same. Rubbermaid resisted, the drive for lower prices at one point in Wal-Mart are basically total piss off, what are you somebody else. And that was rubbermaid's huge outlet for sales. Rubbermaid now makes a lot of it’s products overseas of course because you can’t get to the bottom quick enough for Wal-Mart and these jack-asses went D.C. and wants to pass up a little bit of higher minimum wage and that’s not points always change.

Interviewer: They are going to have to pay everyone else in the country the same wage.

MacLarion: It’s twelve bucks I think, $12.50, you can’t buy a home on it so you want to take poor men and women and give them the ability to ride the bus everyday to work pay rent to eat to not be on social services and to step in soon up words well we won’t be able to build our next 3 stores in dc well you want piss on your next 3 stores build um on china i can give 2 shits if theres another walmart in this country. and the same people there the most effective my beloved union brothers and sisters are the first ones saving a buck there and they’ve got us beat so bad. and i haven’t shopped there and my daughters well they may occasionally go behind my back but we haven't shopped at a walmart since Britney's 19 about a decade maybe even more and um mate six or seven years ago my dad send them a christmas card 50 i think from walmart i told I him go to walmart but you gotta buy something that you can give away. so they bought dog and cat food and cat litter and we took it to the spca in boston i donated it all and i didn’t tell them ahead of time once they made the purchase i gave them 50 bucks doing the right thing .. and you know as far as I’m concerned i can go bankrupt i can lose my job but walmart won’t get a dollar from me and target is probably no better but the corporate symbol is walmart and one day i hope people wake up and one day punish walmart and maybe by punishing walmart we can.

Interviewer: But like you said some people are trapped to shop there, they must, they have two jobs and they can’t afford enough.

MacLarion: And you put it in the middle of downtown and you crush the local community, you crush the hardware stores you crush the grocery stores and then you eventually you crush the steel mills. and auto mills until all of us are utterly depending on walmart on cheap ass junk products we can throw away in a month.

Interviewer: But you know, I don’t get in the end they are cannibalizing themselves because they are using up the environment I mean it sounds sustainable.

MacLarion: But the waltons don’t care because the waltons are rich. and you don’t use the hamptons up right because you'll never live there and i'll never live there and our renters of the world can build 85 room mansions and have homes in 2 countries and planes are fine there so.

Interviewer: I know.