Steel Shavings

Steel Shavings “As a result of grinding, drilling, filing, and boring, all day, every day, the steel manufacturing process generates scrap metal shavings that can be recycled and used in many ways, including in filters and cleaning agents.” Gardner Metal Recycling the early 1970s, when Ron Cohen and I started Steel Shaving magazine with the intention of publishing IUN student family histories, the steel industry was still labor intensive and a source of good paying union jobs. Most of our students, many the children of immigrants, came from steel-working families, so “Steel Shavings” seemed an appropriate title for our venture – and still does as I am preparing volume 51. Representative of our early efforts was Margene Milisavljevich’s account of her Serbian-born parents Stanoje and Eleonore. Stanoje arrived first in 1952, working at a crap job in Chicago until a distant cousin found an opening for him at Gary Works. A year later, he was able to send for his family. Margene wrote: “Stanoje’s job at the mill enabled him to provide for his family very comfortably. They lived in a nice home, owned a car, and, perhaps most important, always had enough to eat. They all had known what it meant to be hungry, and Stanoje vowed never to let his family go hungry again.” From time to time, I get requests for back Shavings issues. Many are officially out of print; but with one exception (“Steelworkers Fight Back: Rank and File Insurgency in the Calumet Region during the 1970s,” several hundred of which were purchased at discount by Eddie Sadlowski, who shared the cover with fellow union leader Jim Balanoff) I can usually scrounge one up for somebody whose loved one or relative is in it. I recently mailed off the Cedar Lake issue to California. Jesse Salomon generally wants several copies of “Froebel Daughters of Penelope” every few years. The other day I received a request from the husband of Jennifer Borkowski for “Tales of Lake Michigan and the Indiana Dunelands” and decided, reluctantly, to part with one of my four personal copies. Jennifer had interviewed Joe Demkowicz about pier fishing and wrote, “Fishing began at the age of four or five for Joe, first at Buffington Pier and the Edison plant and then at the Whiting lakefront and the barge canal. Joe and his friends would spear carp with archery equipment or use them for target shooting. No one minded; they ate trash and were sometimes referred to as “garbage fish.” He claims the carp sometimes weighed 30 or 40 pounds and looked like great sharks coming at you.” Perch were also plentiful then, gathering in schools attracted to the warmer water near shore. Joe Demkowicz recalled catching two or three hundred perch in a full day. Some people used double hooks and would pull out a pair at a time. Demkowicz told Jennifer: “We would go early in the morning, fish all day, and by the time we were through, have enough fish for the winter.” I was shocked to read in the Post-Tribune that Wirt graduate and Miller mainstay Eric Reaves died at age 59. Recently a member of Gary mayor Jerome Prince’s administration, Reaves, along with Bill and Karren Lee, cofounded the Miller Beach Art and Creative District along Lake Street and helped acquire through a donation the old Miller Drugstore and then convert it into the Michael J. Gardner Center. A eulogy honoring Reaves from that organization called Reaves a visionary and iconoclast who “was able to eject disruptors [and] in his own way was a disruptor himself, but he was a happy disruptor and he was our disruptor.” George Rogge, whom Reaves succeeded as head of the Miller Citizens Corporation, told reporter Carole Carlson: “He was smart, and he never saw color in any way, shape or form. He was a wild horse that had to be tamed, an earth mover. He made people work and he made things happen. If you’re in his way and don’t want to work, he mows you over.” Four years ago, I published a piece in Steel Shavings that Eric Reaves wrote after Philandro Castile was shot to death in a St. Paul suburb after police pulled him over for a broken taillight. Asked for his identification, the 32-year-old was mortally injured while reaching for his wallet as his horrified girlfriend recorded the scene. Minnesota governor Mark Dayton stated flatly that such a scenario would not have happened had the driver not been Black. Reaves observed: ANY life that is lost as a result of terrorism, racism, sexism, gay bashing or for any reason is one too many. I fear for my son and young nephews and secondarily myself on a daily basis. I pray that they are never stopped and the incident escalates into death. I cannot count the times I have been stopped for DWB, Driving While Black. Having a gun drawn on me is one of the most unnerving experiences of my life, one that I will never forget. My proclivity to date outside my race only exacerbated the stops, as the officers generally asked, “Ma’am, are you OK?” Many officers asked the young lady to step out of the car for a verbal scolding for dating a black man (when I was younger, they always threatened to take them home to their parents to ensure that the daughter would stop this behavior). It also never helped that I was driving a Mercedes Benz (mom’s) that clearly had to be stolen. I am 50+ and I am tired of racism on any level.