Every time I think of Weirton I'm reminded how happy I am that I talk to workers all day about fighting the boss, instead of college students or activists.
In dying town, steelworker yields to despair COLUMBUS DISPATCH
WEIRTON, W.Va. — Mary Tice drove along Main Street, barely seeing the worn storefronts, the seedy strip clubs, the flashy video poker bars promising better luck. Her mind was on Larry.
"I screwed up," her husband had mumbled on the phone. She'd asked what he meant, but he wouldn't say.
"I'll tell you when you get home," he promised.
She tried calling back, but Larry didn't answer.
At the edge of town, the old mill rose around her, a vast and vacant complex of corrugated steel, once mint-green but now faded and streaked with rust. Behind crumbling concrete walls and broken barbed wire, its parking lots were empty, its smokestacks cold. Moss clung to the sagging remains of an acres-long rooftop, knee-high weeds sprouting from the gutters.
Mary didn't notice any of it. Weirton, once dubbed "the beast of the East" for its world-class steelmaking, had been dying for a long time.
They had both grown up here, children of a different time.
A time when furnaces and coke ovens spewed great clouds of gray smoke, flecked with graphite that glinted silver under the sun. A time when schools kept their windows closed so the children could breathe. A time when smog was synonymous with success.
National Steel Corp. supported 13,000 families, nearly everyone in a town of about 25,000. The mill was a birthright. Children were raised to believe if they worked hard enough, they would always have a job.
There was never a doubt where Larry would work. He'd grown up listening to Dad's stories at the dinner table. Uncles worked there. Cousins. So when Larry graduated from high school in 1973, he signed up.
He worked at the heart of the mill, where glowing molten steel drifted overhead in 340-ton ladles, then roared out of 3 1 /2-inch holes.
It was like the heart of a volcano, smotheringly hot and ready to erupt. Danger lurked everywhere in the pit, a delicate balance of heat and heavy equipment, of fire-boosting oxygen and water that could, on contact, detonate the liquid steel.
Many men couldn't take it. The heat seared their skin, blistered their faces, made them vomit.
But Larry thrived in the inferno. He jotted notes in a logbook he carried every day and quickly became a crew chief to six men.
They wore their scars with pride, shiny pink proof of their labor. And Larry had plenty. Hundreds of times after they married, Mary sat at a table with boiled rags and tweezers, peeling off dead skin, bandaging the burns.
She never heard him complain.
The mill sold every pound of steel it made.
Steel was the spine that held the nation together, a mighty, ever-growing web of bridges, buildings and railroads. In times of peace, the mills made steel for cars and cans. In times of war, armor and bombs.
For decades, the trouble that lay ahead loomed largely unseen.
Other countries were learning to make steel cheaply. In 1970, Japan sold twice as much to American buyers as Weirton produced. Yet the owners did not feel threatened. They cleaned up the air and built a more modern mill.
Then consumer tastes began to shift, and aluminum and plastic packaging began to replace steel. Workers watched as slabs piled up, waiting for buyers.
The layoffs began — 781 in 1977, another 3,500 four years later.
Decisions by executives half a world away began to have consequences, stripping workers of the two things they thought they'd always have — pride in their work and power over their destinies.
When National announced in 1982 it would no longer invest in the mill, the town was shaken. But Weirton was tough, and people adopted the slogan painted on the side of a giant oil tank: "Our future lies in cans! Not can'ts! "
Workers accepted pay cuts, found ways to make steel cheaper and bought the mill through an employee stock-ownership plan in 1984.
The new Weirton Steel Corp. was smaller, but Larry still had a job.
For a while, things went well. But even more countries began exporting steel — Brazil, Mexico, Russia, South Korea, China.
As Weirton's profits shrank, the workers began to give up ownership, selling stock twice in the first decade. The mill lost $75 million in 1991, and as jobs vanished, Main Street lost tenants.
Still, people fought. Thousands marched in 1998, demanding the federal government stop the imports. "Save our steel!" they screamed.
But it was too late. Some 40 American steel companies filed for bankruptcy over the next three years. Weirton lost $533 million in 2001 and cut another 520 jobs.
That summer, Larry and Mary had taken their only real vacation, a Caribbean cruise on a boat called Destiny. Almost immediately, Larry regretted the extravagance.
By May 2003, Weirton Steel was in Chapter 11, and workers realized they had to sell what they'd fought so hard to keep.
The mill changed hands twice in the next 18 months, swapped by billionaires Wilbur Ross and Lakshmi Mittal. Weirton became part of the world's largest steel company, and within months, Mittal announced job cuts.
In June 2005, Mittal shut down Weirton's blast furnace and temporarily laid off 750 workers, including Larry.
"No one cares about us," he told Mary. "We're just a number in someone's book."
Through the fall, Larry kept busy. But his worries mounted when he realized a long-ago layoff had cost him the chance to collect a pension and retire early. He would have to work nine more years. Maybe 14.
By January, the temporary layoffs had become permanent for 950 people. Most had accepted a buyout offer, allowing others to return to work.
Weirton no longer made raw steel, so the pit was cold. Larry was sent to the tin mill, a dark, cavernous building where workers reheated steel shipped in from Ohio and Maryland, then coated it with tin, zinc and chrome.
It was someone else's job, and it felt like it. Larry, now 51, had two weeks to master the machines that cut the finished product to the right width.
He didn't move around as much as he used to. His leg, surgically reconstructed after an accident and held together with pins the past 15 years, ached constantly from standing still.
He worried it might not last.
But mainly, he worried about the daunting tableau that lay before him — pistol grips, gauges and the small beige computer, spitting a constant stream of numbers.
He tried to absorb everything his trainers said, making notes in the battered log book. But the task seemed insurmountable.
"I'm stupid," he told Mary, although she knew it wasn't true. "I can't get this job."
Fear began to consume him. Fear of misreading the computer. Fear of setting someone up for an accident.
When the phone rang, he flinched.
"You'll learn," Mary told him. "You just need time."
He told her he didn't have it.
One night, Larry came home without the log book. Someone had taken it, he told her. Someone had told him what he already feared — that he was stupid, that his notes were wrong.
Larry didn't fight back when his co-worker threw the book away. He wasn't even angry.
When Mary looked into his dark eyes, she saw a stranger.
Mary doesn't want to imagine what Larry did in those final hours on Feb. 8, although he left clues.
He'd poured a glass of milk, set the silverware to soaking, gotten food out for the dogs.
In less than 24 hours, he would go back to the tin mill. To the computer.
Still wearing the bathrobe he'd folded around Mary for their goodbye kiss, Larry went to the bedroom and pulled a box from under the bed. Inside was a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol.
He sat on the edge of the mattress. How long, no one knows. Then he raised his arm and fired two shots into the wall, close together, about a foot off the floor.
Perhaps surprised, perhaps dissatisfied, he laid the gun on the bed. Then he leaned the case against the wall, hiding the holes.
Police believe he went to the living room next, pulling a boot knife from a drawer. He slashed at both wrists, but it was a halfhearted effort, the cuts superficial.
Then the phone rang. He bled onto the receiver as he brushed off Mary's questions.
When he hung up, he trudged into the den, to the cabinet that held the rest of his guns. He opened the bottom door and picked out a .44-caliber revolver.
In the living room, he fired one shot into his recliner. Then he put the muzzle to his broad chest and fired again.
Mary still doesn't know how Larry "screwed up." He left no note.
There had been no accident at the mill. Was he talking about the bullet holes in the wall? Those could be fixed.
Mary, who had discovered her own father's suicide years earlier, could not be.
At Larry's funeral, strangers hugged her. They cried. They stared.
As many as 800 people came, some in dress clothes, many in the jeans and boots they'd worn to work that day. Most barely spoke, yet their eyes held questions: How could this happen? Should I have known?
And perhaps deeper, more troubling: Will that be me?
Weirton's sidewalks are empty now. Its skies are clear. Where once trucks rumbled, there is silence. Fewer than 1,200 workers remain at the mill.
Hope that Weirton will recapture its former glory has died, and hope that it can hang on much longer is not far behind.
Though Larry died by his own hand, Mary holds others responsible — the mill's many owners, an industry that waited too long to change, politicians who didn't protect it.
"We believe that Larry's death was not a solitary act. We believe that it was in many ways assisted," she wrote in an open letter after his funeral. "Larry was raised to believe that if you worked hard and did a good job, you could earn financial security for yourself and your family.
"We all believed that."
Now hundreds of others fear losing it all — their pensions, savings and way of life, all things of the past.
At the union hall, men look at each other more closely, watching for signs of depression.
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