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Working in Number-one Kiln Room

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column appeared previously. You can read more of Pugh’s past work by purchasing his book, “The Best of Vingnettes,” available for sale at The News, 130 Park Place, Alpena.

Back in the day, you couldn’t see the sky for all the cement dust. It permeated your exposed pores and those that weren’t. Your car came clean only with a muriatic acid bath. For some, whose workdays ended with an unquenched thirst and parched lips, shots of whiskey slid down to dry dusted souls.

When I worked at the cement plant, you could tell who knew what by the color of their hats. Shift supervisors wore orange hats, skilled electricians and millwrights wore red, front-office types wore white. The rest of us wore green. Everyone wore a hardhat.

Having an orange hat elevated a person’s position not only in the plant’s hierarchy but also placed him in an important extra-vocational spectrum of expertise: financial adviser, domestic counselor, a source for whatever one was needed for.

I recall being in the lunchroom when an old hand was trying to write a letter. When the foreman came along, the man asked him: “John, how you be spellin’ put’em?”

The foreman paused: “What?” he asked.

“How you be spellin’ put’em?” the man repeated. “You know,” take’ em from here, put’em there — how you be spellin’ put’em?”

There were unique challenges when you wore an orange hat.

Working at the cement plant, I learned how to shovel both white and black dust — cement and coal. They paid the same, and there was plenty of each. But I came to specialize in shoveling a different substance — raw feed: pulverized limestone and shale. I learned to handle this stuff hot in liquid form before it was fused by heat into a clinker — that solid black nugget born in a kiln, later ground into cement.

Stan and I worked together in “The Ditch,” a low, narrow, severe space below the kilns. Our shovel blades would turn red hot and the top of our hard hats melt from the intense heat we had to bend to face – red-hot liquid feed that had poured from the lip of a white-hot cement kiln and that Stan and I had to shovel away.

Stan was one of the toughest men I ever knew — unsophisticated and uneducated — honest, dependable, kind. He was a bull of a man, but deep down good. During the first hour or two of a shift, you didn’t say much to Stan, because his eyes were so bloodshot he wouldn’t be able to see your point of view. But he would come around after he had a chance to sweat some — and he did.

The sound in the Finish Grind Department was deafening. Huge round steel tumblers were filled with steel balls that, when the tumblers turned, were flung against clinker, pulverizing it to a powder so fine it flowed like water. The dust clouds were so thick you could barely see the light from a 100-watt bulb hanging only a few feet away.

This wasn’t just a place where there was dust and noise. Here, they were created.

I had to go through the Finish Grind every day, and, every day, the operator — a slight, wizened fellow — would come out of his shack and move through the dust up next to me to shout in my ear, “It’s a —- today!”

Then he would turn and sift back into the swirling powder. He said the same thing every day and every day he was right. As yesterday had been deafening and filled with dust, so would be tomorrow.

A lot of men worked in Number One Kiln Room at Huron Cement during the early 1960s, when I worked summers there. The machines I worked around were the same machines that had been used for generations. Even with people as tough as Stan, it had to change.

Number One Kiln Room doesn’t exist anymore. Now, they make more and better cement with fewer workers, using superior equipment, working in safer, cleaner conditions.

But I doubt the stories are as good.

Doug Pugh’s “Vignettes” runs weekly on Saturdays. He can be reached at pughda@gmail.com.

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