Weirton Steel Story Archives - Page 3 of 3 - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

What Happened to Weirton? Part 3: As Goes the Mill…

“History tells us, like it or not, as goes the mill, so goes Weirton, in good times and bad.”

This is a quote from Dr. David Javersak, a former professor and local Ohio Valley historian, from his book, “History of Weirton.” There’s a lot of truth in that statement: Weirton would have never existed without the mill. And up until its fateful bankruptcy, the town fully depended on Weirton Steel, like any devoted company town. This episode will trace through some of the highlights of Weirton’s history, providing an overview of its prominence and decline.

When Ernest Tener Weir arrived in the Ohio Valley in 1909, he had a larger-than-life vision: a fully integrated steel mill, or a steel mill that contained all the steps of the steelmaking process. The mill in Weirton had all of this and more, from the initial iron-making in blast furnaces, the smelting of steel in open hearths, to the eventual coiling of steel sheets. It was a massive production that required more than 10,000 workers.

Long before the mill existed, a much gentler landscape occupied the space where Weirton is today. All that was there was a small farming village known as Hollidays Cove, named after a colonial fort built in the area in 1776. Located in Hancock County, the northernmost county in West Virginia, the village rested in a beautiful valley nestled between rolling hills, marked with fields and thousands of fruit-bearing trees.

There was some industry there: the first being iron-making at the Peter Tarr Furnace, built in 1790. But, the farmland dominated for at least a 100 years until oil wells began dotting the landscape in the late 1800s. Ernest Tener Weir bought 105 acres of land there to develop a steel mill in 1909.

Weir might have liked the look and location of the land, but he also liked its relative isolation. He was fervently anti-union, and his managerial style reflected this. A large part of his vision as a CEO was to keep national unions out of his mill. He fostered a paternalistic environment to make this possible. Charles Varano, author of “Forced Choices,” a book about paternalism and its role in Weirton Steel’s eventual worker buyout, described this concept.

“Paternalism was a way in which the owners of companies, they were, you know, primarily the robber baron types back at the turn of the century, sought to organize their companies and in this case, organize the mill in a way that brought elements of a family structure into an otherwise industrial concern,” Varano wrote.

What Happened to Weirton – A Five Part Series

Weir, acting as the father figure, built up a community entirely dependent on the mill: his workforce constructed the infrastructure and public utilities that tens of thousands of people relied on. This company town structure faced opposition during the 1919 steel strike, when the American Federation of Labor, or AFL, attempted to organize the nation’s steel industry. As Javersak notes in his book, steel workers were disgruntled from working 12-hour shifts and making only $4 a day, which would be the equivalent of earning $5 an hour today.

But organized labor lost their battle in Weirton. In October 1919, Weir ordered his company police force to round up almost 200 suspected radicals, who were mostly workers from Finland, and marched them to town square. They were forced to kneel before the American flag, kiss it, and then were chased out of town.

In 1929, Weirton Steel merged with a few other metal companies to form National Steel, the only steel corporation to keep its head above water during the Great Depression. As President Franklin Roosevelt strengthened unions, Weir continued to douse the flames of organized labor and ultimately maintained Weirton’s reputation as a ‘scab’ town. Varano described this attitude.

“You know, we take care of our own, in our own way, and nobody should come in and tell us how to do it,” he wrote.

This paternalistic environment fostered a devoted Americanism that helped the war effort when the United States military entered World War II. When the battle of production intensified, Weirton Steel was there to support the front lines. Thomas Millsop was the president of Weirton Steel at the time. He arranged for the mill to produce 200 pound, 8-inch Howitzer Shells, and the mill was awarded an Army-Navy “E” Award for its excellence in production.

Of course, women played a key role during war-time production at Weirton Steel. Hundreds of Rosie the Riveters, donning their signature head scarves, worked on each step of the production line.

After the war, women returned to their domestic boundaries or remained in jobs specifically assigned to female workers. The most prominent of these jobs was called tin flopping. Women at Weirton wore blue uniforms as they flopped sharp sheets of tin into piles, sorting the metal and looking for defects. It was the highest-paying job for women in Weirton, but still failed to compete with the “family wage” that men were offered. And, up until 1969, Weirton Steel had a policy where they wouldn’t hire married women. Many women had to leave town to get married or act as if their husbands were only boyfriends; otherwise, they faced losing their job and the best income available to them in Weirton.

Just 6,693 people lived in Hancock County in 1900. Thousands of people of different ethnicities flocked to the area to work in the mill. By 1942, more than 13,000 people worked at Weirton Steel. The mill would continue to employ around 12,000 workers for the next few decades, making it the state’s largest employer and tax payer.

Weirton’s population reached its peak in 1960 with 28,201 residents. Enzo Fracasso, a former steel worker who now serves on the Weirton City Council, remembers how the mill and the city provided an idyllic setting for a comfortable, blue-collar life.

Retired steelworker and Weirton city councilman Enzo Fracasso stands in his living room holding his Weirton Steel employee badge

“It was fun growing up here in Weirton and the mill was always in my everyday life, really,” Fracassp described. “I mean, my grandfather worked in the mill. My father worked in the mill, my brother, myself, you know. The mill made a lot of people, tens of thousands of people, raise a family, send children to school, live the American dream.”

Everyone who’s lived in a steel town knows there is a dangerous price to pay for this American dream. More than 100 people have died in the mill, and their deaths were rarely gentle. Enzo filled me in on some of these tragedies. One time, a man was crushed by a steel coil.

“It was something he did every day for 25 years and one day it didn’t work, and he paid the ultimate price,” Fracasso said. “He was on daylight shift. I was on afternoon shift when I came out to work and they had the machine all taped off, caution tape all around it. They had the coil that fell on him. They had it bagged up, you know, from what they told me, they had to shovel him into a bag. It’s like stepping on a bug. I mean there’s a lot of gruesome stuff, a lot of gruesome stuff that can happen and has happened.”

Regardless of the dangers, the citizens of Weirton and the Ohio Valley stayed committed to the mill, and the area was seen as an example of the growth and progress of the United States. Unfortunately, it would eventually become a poster child of decline. When other countries rebuilt after WWII and revitalized their manufacturing sectors, they became less dependent on steel from the United States. In 1950, the U.S. produced about half of the world’s raw steel. By 1977, it was less than 20 percent. At the same time, U.S. manufacturers began to capitalize on cheap foreign steel.

As the American steel industry declined, National Steel, Weirton’s parent company, started taking profits from Weirton and investing elsewhere. National went from the fourth-largest steel company in the country to the fourth-largest savings and loans institution. To make matters worse, National started investing in aluminum, despite Weirton Steel being the second largest tin producer in the country. Following the onset of the early 1980s economic recession, on March 2, 1982, National announced they were going to divest completely from their Weirton branch. John Balzano, USW 2911 benefits coordinator, told me what happened.

“National tells Weirton, we’re cutting our ties with you. You’re a loser. You have to go. You can either shut it down or your employees can buy it, called the ESOP. Employee stock ownership,” he said.

John Balzano, United Steelworkers Local 2911 benefits coordinator, in his office

Employee Stock Ownership Plans, or ESOPs, were very popular at this time. They offered lucrative tax incentives and gave workers more ownership of their company through stock options that were normally only available to private investors. ESOPs also provide disengaged owners a way to sell their company to already-invested employees, as finding an outside buyer might be impossible. It would have cost National $420 to $770 million in shutdown costs and pension liabilities to close up shop. Their best option was to sell Weirton to the steel workers themselves. Charles Varano illustrated that this was somewhat of a forced choice for the workers.

“It was forced because they were kind of facing, you know, the demise of the town,” Varano explained. “You know, as I started off the book, the mill goes, so goes the town and that happened to a lot of places around there, you know. I mean at that point all you had to do is look over to Pittsburgh and the Monongahela Valley, what it looked like was just, you know, shut down plants and people leaving.”

To make the deal possible, workers were told their pay would need to be cut by 20 percent. They also needed to spend $1 billion in the first 10 years of employee ownership on capital investments to upgrade the plant. It was a harsh reality, but the alternative was worse: a finishing plant that employed at most 2,000 people.

So, Weirton Steel employees and citizens banded together to secure their town’s future. There were parades and donations from basically every business in town, benefit drives and telethons. The whole town rallied around saving the mill.

“We can do it” became the town’s new motto, and they would do it. On September 23, 1983, 7,700 workers voted to implement the ESOP, and on January 10, 1984, Weirton Steel Corporation was born.

The first five years of the ESOP proved profitable. However, Mark Glyptis, president of USW 2911 in Weirton, thinks these profits only came from special tax incentives given to ESOPs at the time.

“Most ESOPs fail because they went from losing money or not being viable to all of a sudden making money. They’re making money because they had these advantages that the government were giving them, not because they changed any underlying fundamentals of the company to be successful,” Glyptis said. “And you have about five years time to do that. Then if you don’t do it, then you’ll be losing money again. We made money the first five years before we started losing money again.”

In 1989, Weirton posted a public stock offering to fund a $500 million dollar modernization plan, and again in 1994, leaving the worker-owners with only 42 percent of their company. Every year, the company laid off more workers, blaming stagnating markets, new federal U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations that required expensive pollution control updates, free trade policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, and foreign dumping. In 1998, Weirton was no longer the largest employer in West Virginia. Walmart was.

Fewer and fewer employees were called back after each round of layoffs, and that took an emotional toll on the workers as job security became a thing of the past. Enzo told me he had many friends who took their own lives from the stress of the mill’s downfall. One time, while Enzo was cutting grass, a close friend of his randomly dropped by.

“He goes, ‘it was good knowing you,'” Enzo recalled. “I said, ‘what you talking about good knowing me? The hell you talking about? Good knowing me? I know you, and I’ll know you tomorrow, too.’

Enzo said he didn’t give the comment much thought, but later learned his friend had visited other colleagues that night.

“He stopped and saw them too, talked to them, and he went home that night and left a note killed himself,” Enzo said. “I think that was job related cause he was like really stressed out. I’ve known a lot of them. Probably more than I want to know. I can tell you that.”

By 1999, just under 5,000 workers remained. Hundreds of those workers and Weirton citizens rallied in Washington D.C. pushing for protectionist policies for the steel industry. President George W. Bush took the biggest stand for the steel industry three years later when he instated tariffs on steel imports in 2002. Mark Glyptis recalled trying to convince President Bush to continue with the tariffs after a year of their imposition.

“I said, ‘Mr. Bush, will you, what are you planning to do on the midterm review of the tariffs on your Fair Trade Act?’

And he said, ‘we will stay the course.’ That’s a quote from in the White House from Bush.

And I said, ‘I’m glad you said that because we have put together, we the steel industry, three year strategies to get us back on our feet. We appreciate you doing the tariffs, that’s going to help. It will be devastating if you revoke the tariffs on the midterm review.’

He said, ‘I’m going to stay the course.’

That was Friday. Monday, he revoked ‘em,” Glyptis said.

The tariffs were called off in 2003, and the short-term effort failed to save an industry that had lost hundreds of thousands of jobs since the 1960s. Glyptis placed full blame on the government for the fall of the steel industry in the United States.

“They deliberately made a systematic decision to shut down the steel industry in this country,” he said.

Foreign dumping wasn’t the only hurdle facing the steel industry. Automation had also been impacting manufacturing employment for many years. A new type of steel mill called “mini mills” began dominating the steel landscape. They use electric arc furnaces, or furnaces that are heated with high-current electricity, to recycle steel scrap into fresh metal. Mini-mills require far less manpower to operate and produced about half of the steel made in the U.S. in 2002.

So, nearly 20 years after the ESOP deal was signed, Weirton Steel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 19, 2003. The mill officially needed a new buyer, and this time, the employees weren’t able to save the business. There was, however, a two-year-old steel company buying up several bankrupt mills at fire sale prices. This was International Steel Group, or ISG, with now U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross at the helm.

ISG officially bought Weirton Steel for $255 million dollars in 2004, after Weirton Steel had already cut 950 jobs, handed off its pension liabilities to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, and cut both healthcare and life insurance benefits from its retirees. In 2005, ISG was sold to Mittal Steel, and in 2006, after a merger with Arcelor, the Weirton mill would find its permanent home with ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker.

Unfortunately, Weirton would no longer produce raw steel. It had finally become what so many had feared for so long: a finishing plant.

Currently, ArcelorMittal Weirton employs 880 people, a small number compared to the 13,000 who worked there when Weirton Steel was a world competitive powerhouse. I spoke with Tracey Lester-Locke, who’s been working at the mill for 45 years. She explained that the steel tariffs recently imposed by President Trump have helped ArcelorMittal, but acknowledged they aren’t a long term answer.

“Right now, we’re doing okay with the tariffs, but that’s only a temporary fix,” she said. ” How long are these tariffs going to be in place, you know? And, like I said, there is a need for tin plate, but not too many people make tin plate. I think that’s why we’re still here in spite of ourselves,” Lester-Locke said.

Tracey Lester-Locke, tin mill dispatcher, standing in front of ArcelorMittal facilities

Ultimately, Lester-Locke believes that the reason the steel industry still exists in Weirton stems from the efforts of the community.

“I mean, because in spite of all the turmoil and you know, shutting down the mill, you know, we still persevered. And it just shows what kind of spirit and tenacity that we have as Weirton people. It’s just not Weirton Steel people. It’s Weirton people as a whole,” she explained.

At this point arises another question: what has all of this meant for the community? We’ll take a look at the effects of deindustrialization in the next episode.

Music featured in this episode:

“The Call of the Coyote” by Monplaisir

“Folk Round” by Kevin MacLeod

“Industrial Revolution” by Kevin MacLeod

“Final Frontier” by Sascha Ende

“Lithium” by Kevin MacLeod

What Happened to Weirton? Part 2: He Could See Everything Folding

One person’s story can change your outlook on an entire town. Unfortunately, their story can leave you with more questions than answers.

By 2018, around 10,000 people had already left Weirton in search of a better life. I wanted to find someone who had stayed in the area and could tell me about their experience with the mill’s downfall. This led me to a story written in 2006 by an Associated Press reporter, Vicki Smith.

She wrote about Weirton’s decline through the lens of the tragic death of a Weirton Steel employee. His name was Larry Tice, and his surviving wife, Mary, lives in New Cumberland, West Virginia, about six miles north of Weirton. I figured if there was anyone who could summarize the pain felt in the region it was Mary, so I took a drive up Route 2 to visit her.

Mary described her home as a red brick cottage with a green mailbox, and when I pulled into the driveway of a house that fit the description, she was waiting for me at the door.

She showed me in, and I was blanketed with the smell of candles: peppermint, apple, cinnamon, one burning in every room. Amish furniture she and Larry bought over the years filled her kitchen. A giant Hoosier cabinet made of solid oak with a 48-inch pull-out table, a spice cabinet, and the table where we eventually sat were all handmade to their specifications. Mary said her furniture collection grew after she told Larry her jewelry trove was full enough.

“It was funny because he used to buy me jewelry, and then I was like, don’t buy me jewelry anymore, buy me furniture,” she said.

Milltown Love

Mary was happy to tell me more about her and Larry’s love. They met when she was only 12 years old. She was at a friend’s house getting ready for a church cantata, and Larry happened to be there with his buddy, who knew her friend’s father. When Mary came down the stairs dressed in a lavender gown, she remembered how Larry was standing in the room below.

“When I started to walk by, he says, ‘what’s your name?’ And I told him, ‘my name’s Mary Hall,’ (Hall was my maiden name). And I said, ‘Why do you want to know my name?’ And he says, ‘well, I’m Larry Tice.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And he says, ‘Remember my name.’ I said, ‘Why should I remember your name?’ He says, ‘I’ll be the person who marries you someday.’ And he did, six years later.”

They married in 1980, a year after she graduated from high school. Larry had been working at Weirton Steel since 1973, and soon enough, they bought a house together.

Larry and Mary Tice pose for a photo during a cruise vacation

Mary worked several clerical jobs in the healthcare industry, even though she didn’t have to. Larry’s income at the mill was enough, but they liked to treat each other, and Mary’s second income helped. She showed me some of the things he had gifted her. Hundreds of Cherished Teddies, horses, angel figurines, a kabuki doll, a music box. Her curio cabinet was filled with trinkets and gifts from Larry. But there was something else Mary wanted to show me, something even more special.

We walked into her bedroom and she pulled out what seemed to be simple blue Post-It Note from her jewelry box. It turned out to be so much more than that.

In 2004, Mary’s mother passed away. Knowing she would be hurting during Christmas time, Larry gifted her a pair of golden hoop earrings as a final gift from her mother. Even though he wasn’t a great writer, he included a note, which she read aloud to me:

“The last gift. A mother’s love for her daughter lasted a lifetime. It shines like a brilliant diamond in sunlight,” she read. “Bright, shiny like her smile, smiling face full of love and pride because her baby is … now full grown woman now, herself full of love. Love to pass on now … circle was complete love given forever … like this gift.”

“And it’s in my jewelry box, I have kept it in my jewelry box since then,” she said to me in a moment so precious that I was taken aback by her openness to share.

What Happened to Weirton – A Five Part Series

For a while, Mary and Larry were able to live out their American dream. They owned a house, had a steady income and enjoyed life together.
“So it just was, was the two of us, you know, just work hard and you know, plan for retirement … which never came,” she said as she started to explain how their modest life together would eventually be cut short.

Heart of the Mill Personified

Larry walked straight out of high school into the heart of the mill, the Basic Oxygen Plant. It was a scary looking building; at twenty stories high, the 250,000-square-foot structure seemed to take up most of downtown Weirton, like an idling beast.

“As a kid, you know, everybody used to say, ‘you know … that place is evil.’ You know, because it was the devil’s house, because of the molten steel on the bottom that you could see when you go by with the ingots and that and then the horns at the top,” she said.

Larry was a crew chief in that molten hell, known more often as ‘the pit’. Needle-like lances would drop down into furnaces full of scrap metal and molten iron and shoot out oxygen at 1600 miles per hour. This would heat the metals up to 3000 degrees, smelting them into 300 tons of steel in 25 minutes.

The job wasn’t for the faint of heart, and Larry had not only himself to worry about, but his crew as well. Mary told me that when Larry was training new workers, he emphasized the undivided attention needed for the job. Otherwise, you could pay the ultimate price.

“He says, ‘if I tell you to move, don’t say huh, because you’ll be burnt alive,’” she said.

And sometimes, people did pay the ultimate price. A total of 120 men died while working at Weirton Steel. The dangers made it all the more important for the steel workers to have a deep trust in one another.

“They were all very close knit and each, you know, each crew, they knew how to depend on each other,” Mary explained. “They knew what each one was capable of doing and doing for them, for each of them. And that solidified a bond that I can’t even imagine.”

“They would give their lives for each other. And I mean, Larry even said that, he says, ‘if it comes down to me or one of my buddies … it’s me,'” she added.

Larry worked in this flaming kingdom for 30 years, his whole life’s dedication spent refining a dangerous but rewarding craft. Yet, these years of devotion in the pit would make it all the harder for Larry when Weirton Steel finally went under.

The Change and the Worry

Along with several other steel mills in the early 2000’s, Weirton Steel filed for bankruptcy on May 19, 2003, after reporting around $700 million in losses over the previous five years. The mill was bought and sold a few times, ultimately ending with its new name and ownership: ArcelorMittal Weirton. All the while, the 3,000 workers who remained at this time were left to worry about their future.

Mary said it was a very tense time for everyone in Weirton.

“The change and just the worry, you know, am I going to go to work tomorrow and have a job?,” she said. “Are they going to come in and say, ‘hey, we’re going to take this off of you now.’ You know, no health care, you know, we’re gonna take another 20 percent or we’re going to do that. It was just, just the not knowing.”

When Weirton Steel filed for bankruptcy, they handed over their pension fund to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, or PBGC, a government agency that takes over benefit payments for businesses whose pension funds are floundering or at risk.

According to a 2003 PBGC press release, Weirton Steel Corporation’s Retirement Plan, which covered about 9,200 workers and retirees, only had $530 million in assets to cover almost $1.35 billion in benefit liabilities. Another press release stated that the PBGC estimated it would be responsible for about $697 million of those benefit liabilities, with a risk of incurring an additional loss of as much as $147 million for shutdown benefits.

The PBGC executive director at the time, Steve Kandarian, was quoted saying that, “I regret that the PBGC has been forced to take this course of action … because Weirton Steel did not set aside enough money to pay for the pension promises made to its employees, some participants will not get all the benefits they earned.” That is exactly what happened to Larry and his fellow steel workers. Mary explained how Larry’s pension was nearly cut in half.

“Per his calculations, he probably would have gotten clear around $3,000 a month. By the time that PBGC got ahold of it, he would have gotten less than $1,600 a month before taxes,” she said.

The PBGC method includes considering how long an employee has worked and how old the worker is at the time of the pension takeover. For example, if a man is 45 years old, because he is relatively young, he may see his “owed” pension reduced by a large magnitude, and on the other side of the equation, a man who is 65 might not see such a large reduction due to his age.

The PBGC figures that a person like Larry, who was 48 at the time, could still continue working and build up a new pension under ArcelorMittal or another company. What it doesn’t take into account, though, is the social and economic anxiety surrounding these situations.

It was a blow that was hard for Larry to handle.

“He could see everything folding I think. And you know, cause that’s what he kept saying. He says, you know, he says, ‘I’ve worked so hard for so long, gave this place my blood, sweat and tears. And then somebody’s just sitting behind a desk says, nope, we’re going to take half of it,'” Mary recalled.

She said the decision seemed impersonal.

“It was like, how, how did we let this happen? How did other individuals have that many people’s lives in their hands and just say, ‘We don’t care,'” she said.

Weirton Steel also cut healthcare benefits and life insurance for all of its retirees. Larry contemplated taking a buyout, but wasn’t sure what he would do after that. It would be hard to find a job that offered as much as the mill did, Mary explained.

“I think that was part of Larry’s desperation too, it’s like, what am I going to do? I have done nothing. I went straight from high school into this. What do I have to fall back on? What can I do if I take the buyout?” she said.

After declining the buyout and being laid off for several months, Larry returned to work in January of 2006. By then, the BOP had ceased operations as the new owners started downsizing the mill into a tin-finishing plant, eliminating all parts of the steelmaking process except for the last steps of production. Larry was able to retain his employment, but he would no longer face the heat he thrived in for so long. He was transferred to the tin mill department where he started learning how to operate a side trimmer, a computer-operated machine that cuts down steel coils to specific widths.

Rumor has it, though, Larry was being bullied by the men who were training him. He was slower to pick up the job than others, and he was completely out of his element. Plus, the workers who were training him were on their way out of the mill, as employees with more seniority filled their spaces. With only a short amount of time to learn his new job, Mary said Larry’s anxiety spiked as he attempted to pick up a new skill set.

“I’m like, ‘two weeks, nobody’s going to learn a new job in two weeks,” she recalled saying to him. “And he says, ‘well, if I don’t learn the job, … they’re going to move on to somebody else.’”

I Was A Lot Stronger Than He Ever Thought I Was

Mary had already noticed changes in Larry by Christmas of 2005, and things were about to unravel even further. He was becoming more quiet, more closed off. When he was on a long weekend and supposed to return to the tin mill on a Thursday, Mary pushed him to see a doctor.

He followed her orders, and even though he didn’t know what the doctor had prescribed him, Mary said the medicine was on the table when she got home from work Tuesday evening. He was supposed to start taking it the following morning with breakfast.

That night, as they were watching TV, Larry randomly mentioned he wanted to get rid of some of his guns. Mary said ‘OK, do whatever you want. They’re your guns.’

The next morning, Larry got up before her and had breakfast and tea ready. She asked him what he planned to do that day. He said he wanted to get his guns cleaned and cataloged and then decide what he wanted to keep and what he would sell. As she prepared to step out the door, Larry called her over from the corner of the kitchen.

“He was backed up against the microwave and he says, ‘come here,'” Mary recalled. “And he opened the robe up and just give me a big bear hug. And he says, ‘I love you … see you later.’ And I said, ‘okay … well, I’ll call you later this morning … find out what you want to do later.’”

Around 10:30 in the morning, Mary got a strange feeling and felt the need to call Larry. When Larry answered the phone, something was off about his voice.

“I said, ‘what’s going on?’ And he says, ‘I’m so stupid, I’m so dumb.’ I’m thinking, okay. He broke a dish, he stepped on the dog — something goofy. And, and I said, ‘Okay, what did you do?’ And he says, ‘Oh, I’ll show you … when you get home.’ And I said, ‘tell me, I’m going to worry all day.’ ‘No, I’ll just show you when you’re getting home.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And I hung the phone up.”

Moments later, Mary had a piercing pain in her chest that hurt so bad she thought was having a heart attack. She told a friend at work to call 911, but suddenly the pain subsided. Larry was the only thing on her mind.

“I picked the phone back up and tried to call and there was no answer. And now I kept calling and calling and I thought, ‘something’s wrong,’” she recalled.

She raced home to find her front door unlocked and her two dogs waiting inside the entrance. As she moved through the house, she called out to him, but received no answer. Finally, she made her way into their den, where Larry kept his gun cabinet. There, she found Larry laying face up, his guns strewn about.

“I said, ‘are you sleeping?’ And the dogs followed me into the room because I never put them back outside,” she said. “And when I walked in, I looked down and his eyes were open and he was gone and I could tell from his face.”

Larry had shot himself in the heart.

His medicine was still sitting on the table. He hadn’t taken one dose yet.

“I didn’t remember any of this for three and a half years,” she said, her voice becoming fainter.

“The two dogs that knew what happened in that house are gone,” she added. “I wish they could have talked back then. So I mean, you know, between God and those two dogs and my husband, nobody knows what’s happened.”

Mary said Larry was the type to shelter her.

“Didn’t want me to worry, didn’t want me to worry,” she said. “But I was a lot stronger than he ever thought I was.”

Mary said there weren’t any mental health programs for mill workers at the time. Only after the fact did people pay more attention.

I thanked Mary for living through the pain once more to tell me Larry’s story. When she originally talked to Vicki Smith for the Associated Press article, she was apprehensive. But, she figured if she told Larry’s story, she might be able to help someone going through a similar situation. And, it turns out, she did.

“I found out later that there was a gentleman who was contemplating suicide and … was at home alone and went to pick up the paper to read before he did. Had the gun on his lap and read the article that Vicki had wrote and said, ‘I couldn’t leave my family like this. Not in the pain that that woman went through,’ and he called for help and got help,” Mary said.

Mary was right. Larry’s story does resonate with others. When you take someone’s identity away from them, built up through years of labor and commitment, it’s hard to say how they’ll react. Some recover. Some don’t. So it makes you wonder, just like Mary did: how did we let this happen? It was the same thing I was thinking as I watched the BOP falling. All things come to an end, of course. But some end much better than others. In the next episode, we’ll explore how Weirton got to this point.

Music featured in this episode:

“White” by Kevin MacLeod

“Bittersweet” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

“Melancholy Aftersounds” by Kai Engel

Ross Reviewed: Trump’s Choice For Commerce Left Mixed Legacy In Ohio Valley

The billionaire Wilbur Ross is headed for Senate confirmation hearings as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Commerce. Ross made it to ultra-rich status in part by salvaging coal and steel assets in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. His business dealings leave a mixed legacy in the Ohio Valley region, from rescued steel mills to the site of a searing workplace disaster, and raise questions about the leadership he would bring to the president’s cabinet.

ommerce Secretary nominee Wilbur Ross meets Sen. John Thune (R-SD), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee.

Leadership in the Mines

Wilbur Ross made his billions from bankruptcies. He specialized in scooping up troubled steel and coal companies with an eye toward reselling them later at a profit.

Ross founded International Coal Group (ICG) in 2004 when he and other investors bought the assets of Kentucky-based Horizon Natural Resources in a bankruptcy auction. The investors purchased only Horizon’s non-union operations. (A bankruptcy court later stripped the workers at Horizon’s unionized mines of many of their benefits.) ICG soon had more than a dozen mines in Kentucky, Ohio, and the Illinois coal basin and was looking to buy more.

Early in 2005 the company initiated the purchase of mines from the financially struggling Anker Coal Group in West Virginia. Anker would expand ICG’s holdings of “metallurgical” coal, used in steel production. One of the Anker mines, the Sago Mine in West Virginia’s Upshur County, had a particularly poor record of worker safety, with hundreds of violations on record. But ICG pushed ahead with the deal and owned Anker mines by October of that year.

On the second day of 2006, a lighting bolt somehow met methane gas underground sparking an explosion at the Sago Mine that would leave 12 miners dead.

Media at the scene of the explosion at the Sago Mine in January, 2006.

The Sago Disaster

The Sago disaster unfolded in dramatic and particularly bitter fashion. Miners trapped by the explosion had barricaded themselves in a sealed-off chamber deep in the mine to await rescue. But all but one had succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning before rescuers could reach them.

As family members huddled in a nearby church, an error in communications led them to think the miners had been found alive. Even the state’s governor, Joe Manchin, burst out of the church to share with reporters news of a miraculous rescue, only to learn shortly after that a dozen men were dead. (Manchin, a Democrat, is now the state’s senior Senator and sits on the Commerce Committee, which will question Ross Wednesday. The ReSource asked Sen. Manchin and Mr. Ross for comment. Neither responded.)

An independent investigation found the disaster could have been prevented. An idled portion of the mine could have been more securely sealed. Authorities could have been notified sooner (more than an hour passed before federal officials were told of the explosion) and rescuers could have entered the mine earlier. Mine safety expert Davitt McAteer led that investigation.

“Mr. Ross was noticeable by his absence,” McAteer said, recalling the nearly two-day ordeal at the disaster scene. “He didn’t show up, though — being president of ICG — he was the ultimate responsible party.”

Ross later told New York magazine that he’s haunted by the deaths at Sago. The company set up funds for families of victims but also faced wrongful death suits and penalties and fines from mine safety regulators.

Now, a decade later, you’d be hard-pressed to find people in the region who even know who Ross is.

Roger Nicholson, general counsel at ICG when Sago exploded, said that’s normal.

“I think it’s an unreasonable expectation that he be known perhaps in any of the areas where his portfolio companies operate,” Nicholson said. “We don’t expect that of the chairman of McDonald’s Corporation to be at every operation of everything that he might have an investment in.”

Still, some remember him. Bill Hamilton, a West Virginia state legislator from the Sago region remembers Trump’s early announcement for secretary of commerce.

“My first thought was, if Wilbur Ross is going in there, well – he’s a businessman,” Hamilton said. “He buys companies that are bankrupt, tries to reorganize them, sells them for a profit and moves on.”

Hamilton said he was immediately concerned about potential influence of this shrewd businessman on the extension of the Miners Protection Act – a federal bill that provides health benefits for retired miners and their widows. The bill hasn’t yet been fully funded by Congress.

Fouled Water, Faked Records

Since those days Ross has earned several nicknames, including “King of Bankruptcy.” Some call him a phoenix that rises up from the ashes of burnt industries; others think of him as a vulture.

The social justice nonprofit Kentuckians for the Commonwealth was involved in litigation over water pollution caused by ICG mines. The mines were sending runoff into streams with high levels of selenium, which can be harmful to people at high levels and is toxic to much aquatic wildlife. The lawsuit not only pointed out the company’s pollution, it also presented evidence that ICG’s water discharge reports to state regulators were fraudulent.

Teri Blanton, a former chairperson for the citizens’ group, said Ross’ leadership of the company he formed was largely to blame. She worries about his nomination.

“If he would put [ICG] together and have total disregard for people’s lives he was operating around – how could we expect him to take such a high position and care about the people of the United States of America?” Blanton asked.

ICG ended up settling and paying $575,000 in penalties.

In 2011 the company was sold to Arch Coal for $3.4 billion, the largest acquisition in Arch’s history. It yielded a handsome profit for ICG’s owners that the New York Times “Dealbook” called a “vindication” for Ross. Five years later, Arch filed for bankruptcy.

A Weirton Steel facility in the upper Ohio River valley. Ross’ International Steel Group purchased many of the financially struggling company’s assets.

Saving U.S. Steel?

“From my dealings with Wilbur, he was a believer in domestic manufacturing,” said longtime president of the United Steelworkers, Leo Gerard. Gerard was there more than a decade ago to see Ross buy up major failing steel companies when no one else would.

Ross bought assets from a dozen collapsing steel companies between 2002 and 2004, including Bethlehem Steel Corporation and Weirton Steel. By purchasing only certain assets but not the entire company, Ross avoided taking on some of the company’s more costly obligations, including some health and pension guarantees to steelworkers. He sold the companies in 2005 to a company overseas called Mittal for $4.5 billion — fourteen times what he initially invested. Today Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal is the world’s largest steel producer.

Gerard points out that many of the assets Ross bought still exist as a result — including thousands of jobs.

He also says the demise of the steel industry in the U.S. has little to do with antiquated mills or labor costs.

“U.S. trade laws don’t work — period,” Gerard stated emphatically.

This is an area where labor finds common ground with the billionaire investor. When pressed for answers about national commerce priorities, Ross also focuses on the shortcomings of U.S. trade policy.

A month ago on Fox Business Network, Ross said addressing current U.S. trade policies was second only to putting a staff together.

“We’re going to go in a scheduled way through trade agreements,” Ross said, “through the [countries] we do have trade agreements with and [countries] we do not. Because we’re not anti-trade agreement, we’re anti ones-that-don’t-make-sense.”

Ross calls President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership — a trade deal seven years in the making — a “figment of people’s imagination,” and he wants to totally rework NAFTA.

Ross also hopes to see ten percent of environmental regulations undone to make more comfortable business environments – not that the secretary of commerce controls many of those regulations.

Ohio Valley Implications

Gerard believes improved trade agreements will allow the steel industry to grow, and that, he says, would also mean more coal mining.

“You can’t make steel without coal,” Gerard said. “So if we grow the steel industry back by standing up for domestic manufacturing, then you’ll obviously have to have some expansion of the coal industry for metallurgical coke.”

Davitt McAteer is less optimistic about the “King of Bankruptcy” taking over the Commerce Department.

“From the standpoint of looking at how you might build the economy up through the creation of jobs – that’s not been the way he’s operated in the past,” McAteer said. “Mr. Ross is noted for his buying companies that are in trouble, selling off the good parts, and dropping the others.”

A confirmation hearing for Wilbur Ross is scheduled for January 18th in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

***Editor’s note: Dave Mistich also contributed to the reporting in this story.