Fontana

Soundscape: Fontana, 2024

by Henry Apodaca and A People’s History of the I.E.

Narrators

Voiceover, Military Newsreels, issue 14, 1943.

Raymond Robinson, interview by Robert Collins. Ontario City Library, 1977. Robinson was the communications and public affairs manager for Kaiser Steel starting in 1948.

Dennis Green, interview by Catherine Gudis. A People’s History of the I.E. Nov. 28, 2023. Green’s family lived in San Bernardino’s Valley Truck Farms, a primarily Black community, for three generations. He and many generations of his family and neighbors worked for Kaiser Steel Fontana.

Chauncey Luther Mann, interview by Aaron Brown and Jennifer Tilton. Bridges That Carried Us Over Project. July 7, 2022. Special Collections & University Archives, Pfau Library, California State University, San Bernardino. C.L. Mann moved to Ontario, California, from North Carolina in the mid 1950s after military service and work in highway construction. He was hired by Kaiser Steel Fontana in 1959, and left in 1980, three years before it closed.

Transcript

Military Newsreel Voiceover/Kaiser Steel [00:00:06] 150 tons of molten steel pour from an open hot furnace at Henry J. Kaiser's new steel mill in California.

Raymond Robinson [00:00:15] The general Fontana area, or at least from San Bernardino west, is the first point of convergence of the major rail lines. Labor supply has to be there. The traditional agricultural labor reserve that existed in this area promised a good labor supply. One of the other requirements for the location of a mill is that, of course, the land can't be too expensive. That particular location was the location of the biggest pig farm reputed in the state, and maybe in the whole country, I don't know. But in the old days, Los Angeles shipped its garbage in railroad cars out to that Fontana area. They fed the pigs.

Raymond Robinson [00:00:57] The Eagle Mountain deposit was known, and it was, from the beginning, envisioned as the long-term supply source for the Fontana operation. The Southern Pacific Railroad owned it, and Kaiser Company, incorporated at that time, bought the claims from the Southern Pacific Railroad and then invested the money to develop the iron ore deposit. The first iron ore from Eagle Mountain came to the Fontana plant in 1948, and it has been the major source of ore since that time.

Dennis Green [00:01:32] Now, back in the day, they generally gave our kind of people dirty, nasty jobs. And so you had to endure those. A lot of us went to the different mills and then some wound up over in those coke ovens and blast furnaces and the conditioning yards where you did not want to be. That's where the fire would jump off. You had to wear wooden shoes to walk on top of the furnaces to keep your feet from burning off. And what was called a conditioning yards, where the red hot steel slabs were produced. And they came and you had to cut out the spoils out of them with torches. In these hot red hot steel. They had to hire what they called at the time minorities in nontraditional minority roles. But the one thing about it, union security and union seniority kind of prevailed. And so you got to move up according to your length of time on the job. And so you had a chance to go into other departments where they were not quite as challenging work environment.

C.L. Mann [00:02:42] When I hired in, they had 8000 employees, no Black supervisors. I was among the first of the Black supervisors. April 16th of '68. I became a shift foreman. And of course, it was shaky at first because no one thought a Black man would be able to do that work.

Dennis Green [00:03:05] Then you had the challenge of the union and working around people that for years had sat in the same seat, and you come in the new department, and all they heard about was you're there because of affirmative action, not because of your skills or your mental abilities. And so you had to learn to navigate the system because if you destroy the system, you have nothing to change. I learned how to change the system and make it work for me.

Raymond Robinson [00:03:33] In 1948, the Fume Investigation Department was formed. And those are the actual semantics of what I think is the first full time environmental quality department formed anywhere in the steel industry in the nation. A steel mill, by its very nature, is the epitome of industrial pollution. A major problem in a steel mill is particulate matter. It always has been and still is in the main, and that is simply the dust, the particles in the smoke.

Raymond Robinson [00:04:04] In 1959 was the 100 day strike. As a result of that strike, the Japanese got a strong foothold in our steel market. Prior to that time only, about, let's say, 2% or so of the steel consumed in the seven western states, which is what we consider our market area, came from overseas. During that long period when our customers couldn't buy steel, they began to buy it from the Japanese. And that's where it got started. The problem of imports and the problem of the environment are the two critical problems that face the steel industry right now.