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Donald Kellner, the President of the Steel Workers United and Retirees, local 4977.
I was born and raised in Baltimore. We’ve lost our basement employment, and the biggest
thing we’ve lost is the hope and the future of a lot of young people. I just think it’s
sad, I go down to the point a lot; I ride by it and it brings tears to my eyes to believe
that this is what happened after all of the years that we put in. Sparrows Point was the
life of Dundalk. It was the hard bone of Dundalk. Everything we did centered around Sparrows
Point. You know, the events, we had the steel bowl game, football games each year. Everything
we did, the community did, we did it as a whole with Sparrow’s Point.
I believe the only salvation of the American public is a union. No matter what you think;
and unions sure as hell have their faults. But if it isn’t for a union, young men and
women don’t have a future in this country. You can’t all work at McDonalds, you can’t
all work at stupid paying jobs and you can’t all become lawyers. You need a manufacturing
and industrial job. If we don’t fight for some manufacturing bases in this country,
there ain’t gonna be any left.
Sparrows point was father to son, and son to son, and son to grandfather; it was repetitive
family tradition. You know, if you went down there and your dad worked down there and you
went down there; some of these guys got half of there relatives working down there, and
that’s the way it was. That’s the way it was at General Motors and [West] Electric,
it was a great plant to work. And we just became hung up in manufacturing, and we just
couldn’t get out of it.
We had the first and last strike that the plant has seen since 1959, we struck for 116
days. My son was born the day we went back to work, and I went back to the plant to go
back to work, got called back home again. So, it was tough, it was tough on a lot of
people, 116 days. And yes it worked, we went back to work poor but we had our benefits.
We’ve asked all the steel workers to bring out, active and retirees, to bring out things
that show a history of the steel workers. The strike, a hat, a document, whatever it
is, and were going to put it together and have a museum of them. Its going to be a sad
day when it opens, I’d wish it would never open actually, but at least we’ll have something
to remember them.