David Houck worked for Big Steel all his life -- until the mill shut down. . .
From the end of Ohio Avenue, on a rise overlooking the old steel mills, the village of McDonald, Ohio, looks quiet. Not deserted: The homes of the steelworkers in this industrial suburb of Youngstown are still pristine, and Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church still draws housewives to its 8 a.m. Mass. But signs of economic vitality are rare. Down the street, Austin's and the Starlight Lounge no longer fill with thirsty workers at the end of each shift. The union hall -- Local 1307, United Steelworkers of America -- is empty. "USS Industrial Park . . . Now Leasing" announces a billboard at the entrance to the former McDonald Works of United States Steel Corp. " 1,100,000 Sq. Ft. Buildings on 172 Acres." Beyond the sign sprawl the hulking structures of dark brick with corrugated steel roofs, surrounded by endless parking lots that, even on a weekday morning, remain virtually empty.
The Youngstown region's quietude--the shut-down factories, the area's 40,000 or 50,000 unemployed steelworkers -- has, in the past several years, become a sign of the times, a national symbol for the decline of American heavy industry. It has also become the focus for flurries of rhetoric and political activity. Candidates for the Presidency speak stirringly of the neglected responsibilities of big business and big government, of the need to protect and revitalize the domestic steel industry. Civic groups petition corporations and public leaders; unions decry the inaction. All demand that steel be returned to its position of preeminence -- and that Youngstown, rooted in the steel industry, flourish with steel once more.
David Houck is a symbol of a different sort. A steel man for 29 years, a witness to the closing of the Campbell, Struthers, and Brier Hill works of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., and the Ohio and McDonald works of U.S. Steel, Houck is going about what is now an unusual business in Youngstown: making steel. The company he conceived of and more or less willed into existence, McDonald Steel Corp., has been in operation for close to three years now. In that time it has expanded from one mill to two, put well over 100 people back to work, and this year should do some $28 million in sales.
But if McDonald is a symbol of Youngstown's potential for the future, it is a future that will look quite different from the recent past. For one thing, the modest achievements of Houck and other Youngstown residents in recent years have not been the product of placards, or community groups, or campaigning politicians, or federal funds. Houck and two local venture capitalists, a handful of investors, and a host of enterprising steelworkers willing to live with concessions created McDonald Steel through a kind of hands-on cooperation that has been rare in this embittered economic no-man's-land. For another, no one involved in the venture -- least of all Houck, who probably knows the difficulties best of all -- proposes reviving the old mills in all their overbearing glory. The vision of a revitalized Youngstown that is emerging from the work of people like Houck and his backers rests on a hundred small ventures taking the economic place of every silent giant.
"What we're talking about is going back to the free enterprise system," observes Houck. "For 200 years, it worked pretty damn well."
Seated in his office, a framed sampler reading "Ain't it fun to be in business for yourself" hanging on a nearby wall, Houck is explaining his provenance. He hails, it seems, from a Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. town called Aliquippa, in western Pennsylvania. It further seems that the town is named after an Indian queen for whom George Washington is said to have felt a certain fondness. "Now," he concludes with a smile, "you'll never forget Aliquippa."
You are also, thanks to the offbeat story, less likely to forget David Houck. At 55, he shows the wear and tear of the battle to reopen McDonald: He is overweight, with silver-white hair, an aging executive. His voice and enthusiasm, however, take a good 10 years off his age. When the steam whistle sounds in the plant adjacent to his office, signaling that 2,000 degree F steel is about to move on the 14" mill, his flesh and soul somehow seem revived. He listens, and sits up a bit straighter. Then he resumes the story of how, reluctantly, he became not only an entrepreneur, but a symbol of hope for Youngstown.
In 1947, when he was 17, Houck went to work in a Jones & Laughlin pipe mill. Later, after earning an industrial engineering degree, he joined U.S. Steel in Youngstown. "I never questioned what I should go into, he recalls. everybody in my town had worked in steel." His other reasons were eaually conventional: The industry offered an excellent training program, good money, and job security.
At the time, of course, steel was an unchallenged giant. U.S. mills were churning out metal for skyscrapers and automobile assembly lines and were contributing to the rebuilding of Germany and Japan. Growth continued right up to 1973, when the industry hit its peak of 151 million net tons of raw steel a year. Back then, better than half a million people worked in steel, and the industry earned a 4.5% net return on sales of $40 billion. Imported steel accounted for only 12% of the market.
Since mid- 1974, the numbers have been all downhill, with nearly 500 steel facilities closed in the interim. Last year, production dropped to 85 million net tons, employment sank to under a quarter of a million, and the industry suffered losses of 7.4% on sales of $48 billion. Imports--from Europe, Japan, Canada, Korea, Brazil, Mexico -- accounted for 21% of the market, and were growing. A few domestic minimills, producing steel from scrap metal with electric furnaces and continuous casters, have kept the news from being entirely bleak; these mills now account for some 20% of all U.S. steel production. But the era of the large, integrated steel mill has, for a decade, been coming to an end.
In 1955, when Houck arrived in Youngstown to work at the Ohio and McDonald works, the barroom talk was upbeat, the atmosphere one of invincibility. Youngstown and the other towns that lined the Mahoning Valley -- McDonald, Girard, Campliell, Struthers -- were 20 miles of huge mills, mountains of coke, thundering blast furnaces, tangles of railroad track flanking the meandering river. Some individual buildings were a mile long. If there was any indication of hard times to come, it was betrayed only by the age of the buildings: The Ohio Works, which produced raw steel, dated from 1895, and the McDonald Works, which milled steel into special shapes, from 1917. "My impression," recalls Houck, "was that they were marginal operations, but that we'd spend some money and modernize them. We never did. Still, I never imagined that I'd see them shut down."
