Bethlehem Steel forge-shop slag-shoveling anecdote

Two bare-chested workers shoveling ~1000°F slag in perfect alternating rhythm across a hot July forge-shop floor — thirty years of practice synchronized them so neither caught the other's throw in the face.

The first time I ever went through the forge at Bethlehem Steel — they had just finished forging and putting some stuff in, and two guys, it was July, it was hot, and two guys bare-chested went in there with shovels and started shoveling the slag off the floor where they'd just done the forging and throwing it in a dumpster. They were throwing this hot slag — probably at that point only 1,000° F, glowing slightly red — just throwing it over their shoulder. As one guy would go down, the other would come up. They were like two cylinders in a two-cylinder engine, going up and down in perfect tandem. One of them, of course, was throwing it over the other guy's shoulder, because the dumpster was over there. I looked at that as I was a twenty-four-, twenty-five-year-old kid, and said, "How can they do that?" The guy says, "They've been doing it for thirty years, so they learn to get in sync. And if you didn't learn to get in sync, you got a face full of thousand-degree slag." So there's incentive to learn how to do it. And never make a mistake.