Futurework past...
M
----- Original Message -----
From: "Parker Donham" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 4:13 AM
Subject: [Parker-L] [PBD 8-22-01] A Funeral for Sysco
> 23 August 2001
> Halifax Daily News
> Parker Barss Donham
>
> A faded billboard just inside the Sydney Steel Plant records the days
> since the last lost-time accident struck each of the defunct mill's
> departments. When counting stopped sometime last year, Shops and
> Services had the best record with 255 accident-free days.
>
> Just below the tally board, large letters spell out the words:
> "Caring for yourself. Caring for your buddy. Caring for Sysco."
>
> The accident-free record at the steelmaking shop, where the
> multi-million-dollar electric arc furnace lies cold and still, is
> obscured by a plastic poster taped over top: "TRANS-CANADA
> LIQUIDATIONS -- An Asset Management Group."
>
> All day Monday, redundant steelworkers shuffled past for one more day
> of caring about Sysco. They trudged along a slag-cobbled roadway
> toward a decrepit wood frame building lately converted to auction
> central.
>
> In vacant lots to either side, wild yarrow flowers and purple asters
> fluttered in the breeze. Here and there, mountain ash saplings fought
> to reclaim ground nature had ceded a century ago to steelmaking.
> Clusters of ripening berries caused their young branches to droop.
>
> Former steelworkers were everywhere: in the crisp black uniforms of
> the private security firm hired to keep watch over the sale; among the
> clutch of protesters at the plant gate, passing out leaflets decrying
> John Hamm's forsaken promise of retraining for the plant's
> dispossessed; filing into the auction office to remit $5 for the
> two-volume catalogue of items for sale. Old friends greeted each other
> with that mixture of pleasure and sorrow that usually reserved for
> funeral reunions.
>
> Toronto-based Trans-Canada Liquidations, a crisply professional crew
> in navy blue jerseys bearing an understated corporate logo, had
> divided the flotsam and jetsam into eight clusters, each with its own
> building or section of the yard.
>
> Office equipment -- a sorry collection ratty metal desks, dented file
> cabinets, and dated computers, each bearing a yellow TCL lot tag --
> filled the auction headquarters. One laid-off steelworker hoped to
> pick up a computer for his daughter, but the smart money said he'd do
> better in the <I> Bargain Hunter. <N>
>
> If anyone ever cared about Sysco, you wouldn't know it from the
> derelict vehicles scattered about the yard. Beside the Electrical Shop
> stood a quintet of 22-ton Euclid, Terex, and Scott dump trucks,
> encrusted in soot and rust. A would-be buyer tried to start them up,
> but the only one with a battery didn't even flicker when the key was
> turned.
>
> A 3/4-ton Chevy cube van minus its left-rear wheel tilted helplessly
> toward the missing running gear. Next in line, lot 3304, a blue,
> one-ton Chevy flatbed of undetermined vintage, lay beaten and bruised.
> A prankster had supplied the missing letter to its dented Nova Scotia
> licence plate: FUC 849. A back hoe in seemingly reasonable shape was
> rumoured to have a seized engine, but who knew for sure?
>
> Stepping into the Machine Shop, auction area three, was like entering
> an industrial museum. Lathes, huge and ancient, stood bolted to the
> concrete floor. The largest of these, lot 342, a
> direct-current-powered Stamets, capable of turning a cylinder of hard
> steel 15 feet long and 56 inches in diameter, would sell the next day
> for $550.
>
> "Isn't this a sin," said Bob Bartlett of Leitches Creek, who spent 34
> years winding armatures in the Electrical Shop.
>
> With his friend Joe Elsworth, a veteran of the Devco Railway,
> Bartlett surveyed a massive, 70-inch boring mill manufactured by the
> King Machine Tool Company. The name was permanently cast into its
> elegant antique frame.
>
> "That goes back to the days of Forman Waye," said Elsworth, invoking
> the name of a legendary union leader and working class politician from
> the 1930s and '40s.
>
> At back of the Machine Shop, spanners, box-end wrenches, and sockets
> -- most far too big to interest home hobbyists -- lay alongside grease
> guns, oil cans, pry bars, and drifts. At the Steel Fabrication Shop, a
> sea of arc welders filled half the floor. Fifty mammoth electric
> motors gathered dust in the Electrical Shop.
>
> Vices. Anvils. Boxes of half-moon keys that keep gears fixed to
> spinning shafts. Micrometers. Strain gauges. Jacks capable of lifting
> houses. Foul weather gear.
>
> In the Warehouse, shelf upon shelf of equipment never deployed: coils
> of shiny new wire, cable, and chain; brooms; shovels; wheel barrows;
> step ladders; bolts; bearings; electric motor fields; pumps; seals;
> couplings.
>
> "You know what this is worth!" cried auctioneer Norman Jacobs as he
> came upon lot 328, a massive Wadkin wood planer. The machine's
> 550-volt power requirement would render it useless to most buyers.
>
> A generation of steelworkers and taxpayers, contemplating an infinity
> of accident-free days stretching into the future, silently nodded
> their heads.
>
> <I> Copyright (C) 2001 by Parker Barss Donham ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). All
> rights reserved. <N>
>
>
> --
> Parker Barss Donham
> 8190 Kempt Head Road, Kempt Head, Nova Scotia, B1X-1R8
> Phone: (902) 674-2953; Halifax: (902) 423-7714
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