Lynd: I think the entire steel industry took for granted its worldwide dominance. In Germany and Japan, where Allied bombing had destroyed the steel industry, they went with new technology after World War II, using basic oxygen furnaces, so by the 1970s, you could ship steel to the United States from overseas and even with the cost of transporting it, it could be sold successfully in markets in this country. There was concern about the American steel industry as a whole, but people in Youngstown weren’t prepared for a shutdown.
Dickey: The thing about being a locally-headquartered company like that, you had neighbors and friends who worked everywhere, so you heard a lot of stuff and you didn’t know what was rumor and what wasn’t. So you’d hear things about them having trouble paying their bills, but you’d try not to lose sleep over it.
DeSimone: We were cash poor because of what the Lykes Corporation did to us. They borrowed something like $50 million so they could buy a controlling interest, and when they did, they went into the company coffers and took the money out and paid the debt. They walked away with a company that had no debt and $500 million in revenues. We essentially paid them to buy our company.
Sheet & Tube always paid their bills within 30 days, and our bills ran about $50 million a month. They came in and said to our suppliers, “We’re going to pay you in 60 days.” They took the money out of cash flow and used it to pay down the debt. It was terrible what they did to our suppliers. We saw what was happening. We were holding the mill together with baling wire and tape, and they did not care to put money into the facility. We saw we needed BOFs, but the money went to Lykes and we were left with the open hearths.
Lynd: There was a metal processing company called General Fireproofing. They made a lot of steel office furniture. They had broken ground in the spring of 1976 to build a new plant here in Youngstown. The local steelworkers union went on strike and as a result, the company canceled its plans to build here in Youngstown and announced it would do new construction in Tennessee. That was the canary in the coal mine.
Dickey: Sometime in August 1977, the union representatives from the five local unions that represented Sheet & Tube had a lunch meeting, and I went. They were buying us lunch, and that didn’t happen, and they took us into the superintendent’s lunchroom in the back. We didn’t even know it existed. When we were done, the district manager said, “We’re just bringing you in to reassure you it was going to be all right,” I guess because of all those rumors. We left the meeting and we kind of joked, “Well, if they’re saying that, we’ve got to be in big trouble.”