Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Pennsylvania (17 page)

Until the mid-20th century, Pennsylvania was a manufacturing powerhouse, and Bethlehem Steel was one of the companies that dominated the state's industrial landscape
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In the early 19th century, Bethlehem Steel was the second-largest steel producer in the United States. (Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel was first.) But it began humbly in 1860 when a group of businessmen from the Lehigh Valley Railroad bought a paper company and turned it into an iron manufacturer. The company's first manager was John Fritz, well known as a skilled ironmaster and mechanical engineer. It was a good match—Fritz brought with him a patent for mass-producing wrought-iron rails that brought the first big money to Bethlehem Steel (then called the Bethlehem Iron Company). It also brought the first military contract: the company produced rails for the Union to replace supply lines that Confederates destroyed during the Civil War. And Bethlehem produced 65,000 tons of rails for the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Over the next 40 years, as other companies got into the rail-making business, Bethlehem was forced to evolve. In the 1880s, it started making warships for the U.S. military and built the largest defense manufacturing plant in the world. Then, in 1901, the company's owners sold the business to Pennsylvania-born businessman Charles M. Schwab (no relation to the Schwab discount brokerage company). At first, Schwab thought he'd concentrate on shipbuilding, but when that failed three years later, Schwab decided to turn Bethlehem into a steel company that would compete with his former employer, U.S. Steel.

The first seven decades of the 20th century were successful for Bethlehem Steel. Under Schwab's guidance, the company developed especially strong beams that made it possible to build higher buildings and longer bridges, including the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Bethlehem also got some important military contracts during Word War I; Russia, Great Britain, and France all contracted with Bethlehem Steel long before the United States got involved in the war. Then, during World War II, Bethlehem was the United States' largest defense contractor, making ships, shells, and other military equipment. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Bethlehem continued to prosper, even building a 21-story tower to house the company's corporate headquarters.

In the 1980s, though, Bethlehem began a slow downturn. The market for American-made steel was diminishing as foreign steel prices dropped, and Bethlehem couldn't compete. By 2001, the company had filed for bankruptcy, and a year later, the International Steel Group of Ohio bought the company. Bethlehem Steel was no longer an active company, but its effect on Pennsylvania was undeniable. In its heyday, the company had employed more than 200,000 people, produced 23 million tons of steel annually, and helped make Pennsylvania one of America's most industrialized states.

To read about the Pennsylvania Railroad
,

turn to
page 209
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One of football's most celebrated quarterbacks, Joe Montana learned how to throw a tight spiral in the backyard of his Monongahela home. Here's a chance to learn more about his boyhood in the Keystone State
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By the time he was eight years old, Montana wanted to play organized football, but there was a problem: Monongahela's local peewee league didn't allow players to suit up until they were nine. So Joe Sr. lied on his son's registration form and enrolled the boy a year early. Despite being younger—and smaller—than most of his teammates, Montana was named the team's quarterback and quickly impressed his coaches with his confidence and accuracy.

Montana's high school coach, Chuck Abramski, thought the 165-pound quarterback was too skinny to withstand the physical grind of high school football, and he ordered the young man to hit the weight room. Montana refused because the training would interfere with his other sports—he also played baseball and basketball—so Abramski benched the future Hall of Famer. “He was a fired-up, gung-ho coach, but he never got over the fact that I
didn't take part in his summer weight program,” Montana recalled. Montana finally cracked the starting lineup during his junior year and was named to
Parade
magazine's All-American team the following season.

Although he's best known for his exploits on the football field, Montana was an accomplished all-around athlete whose first love was basketball. “I could practice basketball all day,” he said. By the time he was a high school senior, he was playing guard and leading the Ringgold Rams to the 1973 regional championship. College recruiters were so impressed with Montana's skills that he was offered a basketball scholarship to the University of North Carolina. Montana ultimately turned down that offer in favor of a football scholarship to Notre Dame. But in 1977, he was a member of the championship team in Notre Dame's annual Bookstore Basketball Tournament.

One of the reasons Montana chose to attend the University of Notre Dame: it was the alma mater of his boyhood idol, Terry Hanratty, a Butler, Pennsylvania, native who won two Super Bowl rings as a backup quarterback with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Montana became a fan of Hanratty at an early age and even honed his skills by throwing footballs through a swinging tire in his backyard after hearing that Hanratty had used the same technique.

Monongahela's Ringgold High School honored its most famous alumnus at the beginning of the 2006 football season by changing the name of Ringgold Stadium to Joe Montana Stadium. Montana was on hand for the festivities and was later inducted into the school's hall of fame along with Major League Baseball legends Stan Musial and Ken Griffey Sr. and former National Football League kicker Fred Cox.

 

From our archives: here's a story you'll relish. It's about the Pennsylvania man whose name became synonymous with a condiment so popular it's now found in nearly every American fridge
.

Henry John Heinz always had a head for business. Born in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, on October 11, 1844, he started selling vegetables from his family's garden when he was eight years old. By the time he was 12, the boy was selling his mother's homemade horseradish sauce door-to-door in his neighborhood.

Thirteen years later, he had a burgeoning condiment business and a partner, Clarence Noble. They bottled their horseradish sauce (and pickles, sauerkraut, vinegar, and so on) under the name Heinz and Noble and delivered their goods by horse-drawn wagon to grocers in and around Pittsburgh. Heinz peddled his wares in clear glass bottles so that his customers could be assured that the products were fresh and were what they advertised. His motto: “Always remember to place yourself in the other person's shoes.”

Business was good until 1873, when a banking panic caused a widespread depression in the United States. Two years later, Heinz and Noble was forced into bankruptcy, but Heinz (with his brother and cousin) bounced back. In 1876, he introduced the product he became known for: Heinz sweet tomato ketchup.

Heinz didn't invent ketchup. The condiment had been around in some capacity for hundreds of years. The ancient
Chinese used the brine from pickled fish as a dipping sauce and called it
ke-tsiap
. From there the sauce made its way to Malaysia, where the name was modified to
kechap
. In the 1680s, Dutch and British explorers brought the concoction back to Europe, where the upper classes spiced it up with pickled mushrooms, anchovies, kidney beans, and walnuts. Eventually, the British bottled that and called it “catsup.” By the late 1700s, the recipe found its way to New England, where tomatoes were added to the mix. In the mid-1800s, entrepreneurs exploited the American taste for sweet food and started selling catsup made with tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, cayenne, and salt.

What Heinz did was make ketchup accessible and affordable to the mainstream public. Once an exotic condiment, ketchup became a staple in American households, thanks to Heinz.

Throughout the late 1800s, Heinz expanded his product line to include everything from apple butter to pickled onions to the first sweet pickles (and sweet pickle relish) ever to hit the market. He also expanded his company and, in 1890, opened a new, bigger manufacturing plant in northern Pittsburgh. By then, he was producing more than 60 different products.

Heinz still wanted to increase his customer base, so he employed what turned out to be an ingenious publicity stunt. For the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, he gave attendees cards that promised them a free pickle-shaped watch charm if they came by his display. The stunt was a huge success. According to a news report of the time, “It has just been discovered that the gallery floor of the Agricultural Building has sagged where the pickle display of the H. J. Heinz Company stood,
owing to the vast crowd which constantly thronged their stand to taste their goods or procure a watch charm.”

The charm, of course, clearly bore the name Heinz, and when the attendees headed home with their trinkets, the company got an enormous amount of nationwide advertising. And to make sure that the pickle symbol became synonymous with the company, Heinz used the image on his logo and later commissioned a 40-foot-high pickle (lit up with 1,200 brand-new electric lights) to be put on display on New York City's Fifth Avenue.

What Heinz still needed, though, was a catchy slogan. That came to him during an 1896 trip to New York when he saw an advertisement for “21 styles of shoes” on the side of a train. He liked the idea of many different varieties, and thought the ad conveyed what he wanted for his company: to show that Heinz had so many foodstuffs, customers needn't go elsewhere. He fiddled around with the numbers and eventually settled on 57 varieties, even though the company had more than 60 products. Why 57? Legend has it that five was Heinz's lucky number and seven was his wife's. But some people claim Heinz just liked the way the numbers looked together or that he'd miscounted his products.

No matter. It worked. Heinz put “Heinz 57” on every magazine ad, television commercial, and bottle of ketchup his company sold. Within just a few years, Heinz's “57 varieties” was one of America's most recognizable marketing slogans.

Besides being a savvy businessman, Heinz was (by all accounts) a
generous boss. At a time when long hours, poor working conditions, and low pay were the norm for urban American workers, Heinz believed that they should be treated well on the job. Over the years, the company won many awards for its working conditions, and one union leader even called Heinz's plant a “utopia for working men.”

Heinz also liked to give his workers a bit of fun. At one point, after seeing alligators on a trip to Florida, he set up an enormous tank atop one of his buildings and brought in a live, 800-pound alligator just so his workers could see it.

Henry John Heinz died of pneumonia in 1919, but the company and brand he created in Pittsburgh flourished. Today, Heinz is a $10 billion company and employs more than 32,000 people around the world. And never forgetting what first brought it mainstream success, the company continues to sell about 650 million bottles of ketchup a year.