Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [7]
“Colonizer?” I asked.
“Which group were you with?”
I got it. It was how he referred to the steelworker wannabes, the young leftist sectarians who figured working in the mills would bring them closer to the revolution. “None,” I stuttered.
“Man, thirty years that memory goes.”
He patted me on the back, and laughed. What I later learned is that if, in fact, I had been a colonizer, it would have been okay by Sadlowski. At least, it would have meant I was on his side. And with Sadlowski, which side you’re on still matters.
Sadlowski was seventeen when he first went to work for U. S. Steel at its South Works plant, a collection of more than a hundred buildings that covered an area nearly the size of New York’s Central Park. It employed so many people—twenty thousand—that it sponsored a softball league of sixty-three teams. “When I went into high school, a counselor would steer you,” he recalls. “He said, ‘Sadlowski, you’re assigned to industrial arts.’ You know, wood shops, print shops, making shoeshine boxes, glass wind chimes, lamps out of old bowling pins. The whole point was that you were assigned to that with the thought that you were going to end up a worker in life, doing mechanical things.” In his junior year (it’s as far as he would get in school), a recruiter from U. S. Steel told an assembly of boys, “You can go there and get a trade, and no one can ever take a trade from you.” Sadlowski didn’t need much coaxing. His father, also named Ed, had become a millwright at Inland Steel after a stint as a semipro baseball shortstop, and although he discouraged the younger Ed from following him into the mills, he was his son’s hero. Often during the summer, after the elder Sadlowski’s shift ended near midnight, his son would meet him at the Plant 3 gate, and the two would drive to Calumet Fisheries, a takeout shack along the Calumet River (it still exists, and is worth a visit), where they’d order two pounds of deep-fried shrimp or sections of peppered smoked trout and pick up a six-pack of Meisterbrau. Then they’d wander down to the rocks along Lake Michigan, where they’d talk through the night—about baseball, about family, and about the union.
The younger Sadlowski’s first job at the South Works plant was in the machine shop. The men called it “Happy Valley” because compared to places like the blast furnace, where temperatures topped one hundred fifty degrees, it was a fairly reasonable place to work. There Sadlowski oiled the prehistoric-looking machines—the lathes, the drill presses, and the hulking overhead cranes—and so earned the moniker “Oil Can Eddie.”
“There was guys in the shop who done a lot of reading on the job,” he says. “They’d be running a lathe, and it’s gonna take an hour to go from here to there with the cutting tool, and they’d read a book. Management frowned on that, but guys did it. I’d read a book every couple of days. I’d go into the oil shanty away from the shop or into the locker room and sit in the toilet and read a book.” Sadlowski read John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell, Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos; in these novels he recognized himself and his fellow steelworkers, and the world began to make sense to him.
In 1959, Sadlowski married Marlene, who was at that time working as a dental assistant, and in four years they had four children. In 1962, he became a griever for the union. A griever is the union representative who takes workers’ complaints to the boss, and for Sadlowski, there was never much of a gray area. “The company was the devil,” he said. “Anyone who worked in the steel industry knew that—that the company wasn’t no good.” He learned the importance of good theater early on, and so made it a point to confront the foreman in his all-glass office where his coworkers could witness the exchange: the foreman sitting behind his desk with Sadlowski