Rework at No Charge–My Life in Heat Treating I

When I was nearly thirty my wife encouraged me to get a job. I had worked regularly since I was sixteen but had never had a job with real earning potential. I had a choice, go back to school and get a teaching credential or learn a trade. Either would have taken about two years. I chose learning a trade.

I enrolled in a local junior college in the Materials Technology, i.e. vocational metallurgy, program. I loved it. I decided to become a heat treater. In retrospect it wasn’t the the most sensible decision I ever made but it took me a while to figure that out.

Heat treating is making metal harder or softer by various combinations of heating and cooling. When people asked me what I did I would tell them I was a chef who cooks steel and aluminum. If I wanted to annoy them I would say that I manipulated the mechanical properties of metals by controlled allotropic phase changes. Both are true.

After graduating I found a job at a company usually called OMT. The business is defunct, the owners are dead, and the building has been converted to urban loft housing. It had a fifty year run.

OMT was a job shop. It heat treated steel and aluminum for local machine shops, foundries, and manufacturers. The building was nearly a block long. It was built a few years before the beginning of WWI. It was a standard corrugated iron industrial building. Disrepair was the theme of the décor. About a third of the windows were broken and the siding was loose in many places. It was not long until I found out that the roof leaked badly. A third of the equipment in the building, mostly furnaces, didn’t work and stood abandoned.

The owner’s son hired me. He and his father were both named Richard and called Dick. When I started work I learned that the employees called them “Big Dick” and “Little Dickie.”

Little Dickie was tall, about 6′ 2″. He was one of the thinnest men I had ever met. He had a long acne scarred face with a prominent nose and deep set eyes. He had a deep mellifluous voice and radiated nervous energy. He was a bit older than I. His darkening blonde hair seemed incongruous.

My first day at work I met Big Dick. He was immense. About the same height as his son he weighed well over three hundred pounds. He had a florid complexion and thinning sandy hair. His sweet tenor voice belied his size. It seemed to me that he and his son had received each other’s voices by mistake. We shook hands and I sat down.

“Are you a drinking man?” he asked.

I said “I’ve been known to take a drink now and then.” He welcomed me to the OMT family and I went back to work.

It turned out that he embraced alcohol with born again fervor. By “drinking man” he meant someone who drank a quart of whiskey a day as a normal part of his diet. Big Dick had created OMT in his own image. All of the veteran employees were drinking men.

The work included a lot of hard manual labor. Ten to twenty thousand pounds of rough castings and another five thousand pounds of small parts went out the door every day. None of the work was automated. Labor saving devices comprised two bridge cranes, two fork lifts, and six men of uncertain immigration status from Mexico.

Tags: bio, drinking man, heat treat, industry, martensite, memoir, metal working