Workers Memorial Day Stirs Memory
#WorkersMemorialDay, a day to remember workers killed on the job, came and went on April 28, but I still want to remember a key event from my childhood.
I never worked in a factory, but I grew up in a factory town — Waterloo, Iowa — where the largest employer was John Deere Waterloo Tractor Works.
My Dad worked at Deere’s, not on the assembly line but in a special department that built and maintained all the complex machinery in the sprawling factory. In the days before computers, Dad carried in his head intricate knowledge of every machine in that huge factory.
Deere’s dominated Waterloo, with some 15,000 employees. When it shut down for inventory every August, most everybody was on vacation. In the summer, every boy in town played baseball through the Waterloo Parks and Recreation Department and wore a tee-shirt that said “UAW Local 838” because the Deere local paid for them. At Christmas, you went to a UAW Local 838 party, saw Santa Claus, and got a sack of hard candy and an orange. When you graduated from high school, you could get a good-paying job at Deere’s.
The dirtiest, hottest, most dangerous jobs were in the foundry, where molten steel was poured to create tractor parts. That’s where many young boys started out.
Mostly, the Deere factory hummed in the background of my life — until May 16, 1966.
Three men were working in the foundry when a huge bucket rotated toward them and poured molten steel into the cherry picker where they were working. Although they were rushed to University Hospitals in Iowa City, they died horrible deaths from unimaginable burns.
By the time I got home from school that day, I already knew. Big, black headlines on the Waterloo Courier’s front page blared the news of the tragedy. The stricken faces of my parents drilled it home. One of the dead was the 23-year-old son of friends.
A few days later, we visited the parents. They were sunk in deep grief and shock.
The tragedy shook the community.
OSHA did not exist. The task of investigating the accident fell in part to my Dad. The machine had not malfunctioned, but there was no guard to prevent it from pivoting in the direction of workers. It went down as operator error, he told me years later.
I never forgot that accident. When I hear employers rail against work place safety rules, this is what I think about — three workers incinerated by molten steel.
Wanting to protect tragedies like that one is part of the reason I’m a Democrat. And those three men are who I am remembering on #WorkersMemorialDay.
