National Works Memories: Sam Laughery

U.S. Steel manager found a new career with a start-up firm

By Jason Togyer
(A version of this interview originally appeared in The Daily News, McKeesport, Pa., in 1997.)

Sam Laughery doesn’t remember exactly how many people left the National Plant on Aug. 28, 1987. Maybe a little more than two dozen.

He knows that, given the chance, he could probably name every single one of them.

And he knows that the future he was looking at was as cloudy as could be.

Laughery, then 50 and a finishing-line foreman in the mill’s electric-resistance weld department, had passed up a transfer within U.S. Steel to the Irvin or Fairless plants or Birmingham, Ala.

“It wasn’t a decision I made hastily,” he said by telephone from his home near Uniontown.

Laughery wasn’t alone. His counterpart on the forming line, Tom Punday of Uniontown, had made the same choice.

“We decided we would take a layoff and roll with the punches,” Laughery said. “I really thought it was a good mill and something would get started.”

Something did. By February 1988, the ERW was alive again under the aegis of Camp-Hill Corp., whose founders, Pat Campana and A.L. Hillegass, bought the line from U.S. Steel in December 1987.

“I knew that mill,” Laughery said, “and I knew the equipment was in good shape and that we made good pipe.”

His buddies didn’t get hired

He started his U.S. Steel career in 1964, applying at National only because he had given two out-of-work buddies a ride there. He had to overcome the resistance of a personnel director who didn’t want to let him take an aptitude test because he hadn’t finished high school.

But Laughery had a message waiting for him when he got home: When can you report back to the mill for a physical? His buddies didn’t get hired.

He spent all his time in the ERW, getting into the shop almost from its inception. Laughery worked his way up from laborer to relief foreman and finally was asked to join management in 1984. He had passed up two previous chances for promotion.

“The way things were going, I was getting bumped back and forth,” Laughery said, adding that at one point he was put in the sanitation crew and wound up cleaning toilets. “When the opportunity came the next time, I said, yeah, I’d be interested.”

To his relief, he found management was right up his alley.

“I was the kind of person who didn’t like to sit around,” Laughery said. “I enjoyed troubleshooting. It was challenging.”

The job wasn’t all gravy, especially with the mill starting to grind to a halt.

‘You do what you have to do’

“At one point we didn’t have orders, and the company sent us down to Mexico” to help out a plant there, Laughery said, “which didn’t make sense to me. But when you were in management at U.S. Steel, you did what you were told.”

He was also put on the spot during the long strike of 1986-87, when Local 1408 members blocked railroad cars to keep the company from shipping pipe out of the idled plant. Laughery and other managers crossed the picket lines to keep National open.

“I didn’t enjoy that,” he said, “but you do what you have to do.”

Laughery and other supervisors spent much of the winter of 1986-87 winterizing the ERW to keep it from freezing while it was shut down. When the strike was settled in January, Laughery and Punday began calling their crews back to work.

Then the other shoe dropped. Workers were reporting for first shift on Feb. 4 when U.S. Steel announced National was “permanently idled.”

“They said, ‘you put everyone you have on loading pipe,’“ Laughery said. “The very last day we worked was in August. We had a going-away party in the garage.”

The ERW stayed in mothballs, and he had to visit a place he hadn’t seen much -- the unemployment line.

But in November, Laughery and a few others were asked to inspect the ERW and see how much it would take to make it run again. They found very little weather damage.

Rolled pipe on the second day

“We were surprised how fast we got it back on line,” Laughery said, and they rolled the first pipe on the second full day of operations in February.

He said conditions are better than they were in the last years of U.S. Steel’s ownership.

“We’re a little more involved in the decision-making process,” Laughery said. “I think the people we have now are a lot more conscientious, and I think a lot of people realize what happened before when the mill went south ó and know how quick that can happen,” he said.

And while Laughery said he doesn’t even pretend to know what the future holds for Camp-Hill, he’d like to see it operate “for many, many years down the road.

“It’s a good facility, it’s a good operation, and they make a good product,” he said.

Written by Jason Togyer from interview conducted October 1997

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A version of this interview originally appeared in The Daily News, McKeesport, Pa., in 1997. Comments, corrections and additions are welcome! Write to Jason Togyer at first initial and last name at gmail dot com. This article is from tubecityonline.com/steel, the Steel Heritage section of Tube City Online, P.O. Box 94, McKeesport, PA 15134.