The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It

to get past the tent flap and mingle with the clowns and elephants, I chucked my job sorting nails when I found a

erformance is continuous, whose fire-eaters have real flame to contend with, and whose snake-

me from the coruscating metal, molten yet crystallizing into white-hot frost within the furnace puddle. Flaming balls of woolly iron are pulled from the oven doors, flung on a two-wheeled serving tray, and rushed sputtering and flamboyant to the hungry mouth of a machine, which rolls them upon its tongue and squeezes them in its jaw like a cow mulling over her cud. The molten slag runs down red-hot from the jaws of this squeezer and makes a luminous rivulet on the floor like the water from the rubber rollers when a washer-woman wrings out the saturated clot

muscled arms big as a bookkeeper's legs. The gases, they say, will destroy a man's lungs, but I worked all day in the mills and had wind enough left to toot a clarinet in the band. I lusted for labor, I worked and I liked it. And so did my forefathers f

at causes new growth to come out of old dirt and new worlds to be continually spawned from the ashes of old played-out suns and stars. When nature ceases to

upported him by running a r

ere are in the United Stat

to work it is because you're sick. I'm a well man, and I've got to be working all the time or I'd go crazy. I have no more desire to be idle like yo

him. He was working out a plan for communism in the United States. He believed that enough work had now been done to supply the ra

n oyster. He didn't have enough energy to realize he was all in.

uch about. What he needed was a dose of castor-oil. I