Life Before Tweets

      Life  Is Too Short For A Long Story 

When Andrew Carnegie sold his mills for half a billon dollars, non-union steel workers in the area had the highest death rates in the country because of wretched living conditions.

I pick  up on this story  in the 1950's  after FDR changed the balance of power and mill towns prospered.  Elm Street in our town looked like a Norman Rockwell painting.  And on the 4th of July  Grandfather rode his bay mare and carried  the stars and stripes to lead the band up the cobble stone street.

At night  carbon flakes glittered  like diamonds in the night sky only to show up in the morning black and thick on window sills.  At 18 I went to the mills and encountered the heat, dust, monster machines and the searing  bite of super heated air that open hearth men did not seem to notice.  After college I saw the scene from the cool management perspective  of profit and loss.

By 1960 the Elm trees died, the band quit playing and between steel imports and the shift from  beer cans now made of aluminum instead of steel, the mills were in trouble.   So I circled out from home hoping to make sense of  a word in flux.