Ken Kobus and Ron Barraf

Ken Kobus and Ron Barraf

Interview transcript

KK: The Mill was always in my life, even as a baby. I always heard and smelled the mill, just ever present. My father worked there all his life. His nickname was “Crow”. They called him Crow. He was what they call a first helper. He was a man in charge of one furnace in the plant. And the first time I went into shop , I remember it like it was yesterday. There were all these things moving back and forth, and I was afraid I was going to get run over. My dad just walked straight through like nothing was going on. You know? It’s just amazing.

To face a furnace, it’s hard to describe because…you watch cold steel being put into there and it just gets more and more red and red and red. Then it dissapears and falls apart and it’s just unimaginable.

I know it stuck with my father for all his life. I mean, when he was dying, he had cancer and he was in hospice. He was a lot of pain him so they were giving him lots of morphine. I was watching him in the bed once and the doctor came in my dad was laying on his back. And he had his hands, like, up in the air, turning and manipulating. The doctor saw that I was looking at my dad, and he said, “we’ve been wondering what the heck he’s doing”. Because he did it all the time. He’d be laying on his back and doing this stuff. They had no clue what he was doing. And I said, “oh I can tell you. He’s making steel”. He was opening furnace doors, and adjusting the gas on the furnace, and the draft. I could see. I could see what he was doing. And the doctor was amazed.

Till the day he died he lived steel making.