THE MEN AND WOMEN OF STEEL, COAL, AND IRON
        
              My fondest memories of Labor Day Celebrations occurred when
        I was between the ages of 5-10 years of age.  My father was a
        member or the United Steel Workers Union, Local 1330.  Each year
        on Labor Day, the local would hold its annual Labor Day
        celebration at Idora Park, a really neat amusement park in
        Youngstown, Ohio.  
              We would get up early in the morning and be at the gate as
        soon as the park opened, and then we would ride and ride and ride
        and ride all day long.  Everything was free for the day.  The
        Union paid for everything.  
              In the evening, there would be a gigantic fire works
        display, and thousands of us would cram into the Idora Park
        baseball stadium to watch the Zambelli Brothers, world famous for
        their fireworks displays, light up the skies with their special
        rockets and bombs.
        One year, the finale lasted for nearly 20 minutes.  One man ran
        along with a flare and lit and lit rockets and bombs that
        stretched along the ground for more than a hundred yards.  
              When I eventually went to work in the steel mill in 1972, I
        intimately understood why the people who worked in that industry
        took so much pride in their work.  To this day, I know much of my
        work ethic was formed while standing behind a furnace with molten
        steel flowing beneath my arms (steel flows at 2700 degrees) and
        continued to work to make sure that the steel made it into the
        ladle below and was not wasted.  I was the 13th person in my
        family to work at the Ohio Works, a division of United States
        Steel Corporation. 
              In this Information Age when most of what we do is service
        oriented, I sometimes miss the pure joy of just working hard with
        my back.  Yet, each of the separate jobs that we were required to
        perform in the mill required specific skills, and there was
        always a simple and then a hard way to get the job done.  
              No, it wasn't finesse work, but at the end of the day, I
        often felt a pure sense of accomplishment.  I never once had a
        headache while I worked in all that heat and filth.  The
        strenuous nature of the labor seemed to cleanse the body of the
        humours which cause headaches.
              Those days are long gone now.  We still celebrate Labor Day
        each and every year as if it were the 1950's.  Yet the world we
        live in today is so much different from that which existed way
        back then.  
              I don't lament that we have evolved to a different state of
        being.  In many ways the world is much more enjoyable now.  But
        nothing will ever replace the magical times at Idora Park when
        young boys and girls and their parents could ride the Wildcat,
        the tenth rated roller coaster ride in the country at that time
        until they were so dizzy they couldn't walk away without
        staggering.
              As you celebrate this Labor Day, please don't forget the
        myriad Americans, who by the sweat of their brow and the strength
        of their backs, and the ingenuity that prompted them to always be
        struggling to find an easier way to complete the simplest tasks,
        created for each and every one of us a standard of living that
        still is the envy of the civilized world.
              Thank you all, men and women of steel, of coal, of iron
        work, and the other heavy industrial concerns who gave me a sense
        of what it took to make this nation great.