My father made iron things - tooth gears and turnbuckles, flanges and valves - thousands of cast-iron parts for machines and manufacturing systems in dozens of factories during the height of post-World War II industrial production.
He and his band of foundry brothers took pride in all that. It was hot, dirty and heavy labor, but every foundry man I knew took a moment now and then to admire a perfectly cast, clean-grinded widget needed for a growing American economy.
Of course, most of those cast-iron things are probably gone now. A lot of the machinery for which my father made parts became obsolete. His customers closed factories or shipped operations elsewhere. A wholesaler can now order "U.S.-like turnbuckles" via the Internet from Qingdao Xiangda Hardware Co.
Even so, back when business was good -- in the quarter-century between the Truman and Nixon presidencies, my father's foundry floor produced useful iron things every day. And while much of the work was drudgery, the guys still felt pride in a job well done, a thing well made. It wasn't just about the paycheck.
A lot of men and women care not a whit about the workmanship thing. They find their jobs uninspiring and dreary. They find their bliss elsewhere. But many more, though they seldom express it, take considerable pride in what they do.
When I met Bob Miller in 2002, he was still beaming about his role in the construction of the first Chesapeake Bay Bridge, 50 years earlier.
My father would have envied Mr. Miller. While Joe Rodricks could not point to anything public he had a hand in making, Bob Miller could drive to Sandy Point and tell the passengers in his car all about his first job out of college.
Bob Miller, a former coal-mining kid from Cowen, W.Va., got a job testing rivets on the bridge, and he might have tested every last one of them. In the kitchen of his home in Carroll County, he showed me the wooden-handled hammer he'd used to tap the rivets. He'd kept the hammer all those years, the way combat veterans might keep a knife or bayonet.
Work already had begun on the Bay Bridge when Bob Miller, on a field trip as a college senior in 1950, saw the Chesapeake for the first time. "It was the biggest thing I ever saw," he told me. "I couldn't believe it was just the bay and not the ocean."
Mr. Miller felt a surge of excitement at the barges between Sandy Point and Kent Island, and construction crews building the footings for the bridge and driving tons of pilings into the bay floor. He wanted to be one of the thousands who had a hand in building it.
