“It gets into your bones. It’s weird! You’re in the open hearth, and you can hear the wind blowing down the river and making noise around the stacks. And you go into the furnace and come out. You’re all sweated and you’re standing back behind the open hearth and you’re freezing.”

“I always had a beard and long hair. And there was another thing, when I first started at the steel company, I was the first hippie!”

Bob Burkey, age 64, of Bethlehem, passed away in 2006 after working for 26 years at the Bethlehem Steel and earned the name “Sneakin’ Deacon”. Bob was a shop steward in Local 2600 and worked with the union on local issues. Bob transferred to the Trucking department and was able to learn about the entire plant. During this time, Bob joined the Bethlehem City Council and later worked to get the old Bethlehem Plant remodeled and a Casino built in the old plant. During the meetings between Sands and the City of Bethlehem, Bob insisted that an office in the Sands be made available to the Steelworkers’ Archives.

Bob also worked with the young people of Bethlehem and became a kind of mentor to the poets, folk musicians and rockers at the 19th-century gristmill. Among Bob’s many talents, Bob was also a silver-smith and had a store front on the North side of Bethlehem.

“I often wondered. All the steel we handled on a given shift, where does all this steel go? Thirty-five years of moving steel, round the clock, where on earth could all this steel be going? But when we go out to all these various shopping malls, and ah, to the older ones, in Reading, that’s all constructed with older steel. I always look for the Bethlehem Steel mark, Bethlehem USA. It had to go somewhere; cause I know it didn’t all rust away. I always admired our steel. It was always superior to other steel companies that I have seen. The steel we always shipped out was always perfect. If it were a little twisted or just a little bit what they call gagged, why they’d reject it. I am always proud of that. In fact, if you go out where I was born, you’ll see a steel bridge there. And that steel bridge has Bethlehem Steel in it. In Kernsville, and that’s there since 1929, and it’s still standing. When we were kids we crawled up and down these beams, never thinking I would be working at the steel company. I would like to look at the plant now, and walk through the gate and go down through the tunnel, and walk what we used to call the “other world”. Like going down to ‘The Wizard of Oz’ or ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where you walk through the tunnel to another world. Another language down there too! I’d rather not elaborate on it. That was another world.”

“The mills rolling normally, you know. Many blooms an hour. And the spirits up, you know. It’s just like another day, only today’s our last day. And we were rolling, and then finally, when the last bloom, when the last piece of steel comes out of the mill itself, they blow this one loud siren, and somebody says the end! And they wrote on the last bar in soap chalk, because it’s red hot. When it cooled, the end, for sale! And then, when the mill was done rolling, everybody’s mood got somber, you know, cause the end set in there, like forty bars away. And as the bar kept getting closer, things got quieter. And when the last bar came down the roller mill, the very last happened to come down on the south side, and we were, they were cuttin’ it up. We were told to cut into twenty foot pieces, we were cutting it because we wanted the Bethlehem Steel logo, every eighteen inches, so we got some of those. And then, when the guy, when the saw operator made the last final cut, the tears started to come down our eyes, and we hugged everybody. We were sad. And that was the first time we heard the mill silent. A lot of the guys you work with, you’re never gonna see them again. A lot of the guys that had accidents, you nurse back to health, call them at home, and be right there. A lot of those you are never going to see again. Some of the guys come from Tamaqua, Lehighton, Hazleton, you know. Some of them a long ways off. You know you are never going to see them again. Just wish them luck!”