The Steel City Legacy

Steel Mill at Work
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I received an email a couple of weeks back from someone I didn't know with the subject line Your Blog.  She was asking if I would use my forum here to help spread the word about mesothelioma, a form of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.  I hesitated, didn't reply, but didn't delete the email either.  Because, I thought to myself at the time, I have a lot of causes that are important to me that I have touted over the years:  animal rights, women's issues, addiction and mental health issues and, of course, eating disorder awareness, because that's the one that ripped through my family like a buzz saw.  But, really, because of those very weighty issues, I started this blog to be a little more upbeat and give myself a separation from all of that, if I'm just being totally honest.  Plus, this is a new venture and my readership is tiny, I'm not sure what I could bring to the table for any cause right now anyway.  Besides, I can't spell mesothelioma without looking it up, and my tongue ties around it.  I thought to myself initially that if I can't even pronounce it, how can I advocate against it?  Yet, as we were at the St. Patrick's Day parade, and I glanced back at my daughter's boyfriend, engaged in an emotional conversation with his cousin, both life-long Pittsburghers, I realized that it is part of my world now, because these are my people and this disease is a large part of their world.

The reason the conversation between the two cousins was so emotional was because the boyfriend's uncle is in the late stages of the cancer.  He was in the hospital at the time and the odds were he was not going to be coming back home (he since has shown some improvement, I'm told, and actually is home at the moment).  That's hard for the family because Boyfriend's father passed away from the same disease only a couple of years before.  Boyfriend is still deeply mourning his dad, whom neither my daughter nor I ever met.  Facing his uncle's cancer is a really heart-wrenching struggle for him so soon after watching his father succumb to it.  The thing is:  Boyfriend's father worked in the steel mills.  Asbestos was used routinely to protect the workers and equipment from the high heat of the liquid steel. His uncle never even worked in the mills, but their father before them did.  And that's where he was exposed to it.  All those workers brought asbestos dust home on their clothing every night.  It coated their washing machines, their showers, anyplace or anyone they touched.  The boys were breathing it in every time they greeted their dad with a big hug at the door.  Boyfriend (he prefers we not use his name), in addition to mourning two men he loves who seem to have been doomed since childhood, has the shadow of doubt about his own fate as well because he also ran up to his dad every night as he came home from a long shift and hugged him.  He's breathed it in as well.

And that's just part of the legacy of steel in this area.  You may not realize it if you've never been here, but this town helped build your town by providing the steel for your buildings and infrastructure.  It helped win the wars that have kept us free with the steel for ships, tanks, planes and more.  This is a proud city with a proud history.  But it's a complicated one.  The thing I didn't tell you when I outlined why it was I moved here was why I didn't move here in the first place.  There are a couple of reasons:  a rebellious teenage desire to really piss my parents off by moving to Texas with my best friend, whom they didn't like, but also the memory of a morning several years before when we drove into the Pittsburgh metro area from the surrounding area where my aunt lived.  It was a beautiful morning in the rolling hills outside of the city.  The sun was rising in a crystal blue sky, tainting the clouds with pinks and yellows, the hills were green and lush, and then it was like a curtain fell as we neared the city.  It went black.  Literally.  You could see the blinking lights on the steel mill towers cutting through the darkness, but not much more.  I was just a girl, so I've often wondered what highway we were driving along, but I remember one of the rivers, so maybe Route 28?  I don't know, but hitting that sudden wall of air pollution left an impression on me.  A deep one.  And, as much as I loved the Steelers for all my life, I wasn't really looking forward to living in that level of dirt and grit to be near them.   Can you imagine what it was like living and working in that every day?

Coke mill in Hazelwood about the time of my Pittsburgh experience, but after the Clean Air Act of 1970

 That’s not the town we live in today.  Pittsburgh has reinvented itself and done wonders to clean itself up in a relatively short amount of time given where it came from.  As I look outside now, I see the blue of the sky, only marred by white wispy clouds floating by, and the green of the fir trees in my neighbor’s yard.  But downstairs I have a radon mitigation device quietly whirring away.  I didn’t even know what radon was until I started the process to buy this little house and the inspection showed a high level of it.  I’ve never before been in the “sensitive” groups to have to worry about air quality alerts, having only smoked once in my life, fueled by two Long Island ice teas (whereupon I went home and threw up in the bathroom sink and that was the end of my smoking and drinking that particular beverage), but I’m painfully aware of bad air quality days here because I struggle to breath on those days and climbing the stairs to my office is painful.  Steel is no longer the leading employer in the area, but its effects stay with us.  And so, I look at a young man who walks around not knowing what time bomb might be ticking away of inside of him just because he loved his dad so much he hugged him every night, and I think I should indeed ask that people be aware of mesothelioma.  And so, tipping my hat to the beautiful young woman who emailed and made me think about this, here is the link to her website:  http://www.mesothelioma.com/heather.  You may be surprised at some of the information she has on there.  I was.  She was asking now because next week is Mesothelioma Awareness Week and as she stated in her email, awareness may help save lives.  Maybe even yours.

 University of Pittsburgh Archives above, circa 1950

and my archives below, circa 2012