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4th annual Steam Whistle Blow brings mill sounds back to life
By Sean Barron
YOUNGSTOWN
Mike McCleery’s father, the late Robert McCleery, was able to stand in his Lucius Avenue backyard and instantly hear when a steam-powered shearing device was cutting metal several miles away.
“He could tell that all the way from there because he did that,” Mike McCleery said, referring to one of the duties his father performed at U.S. Steel Corp.’s Ohio Works plant off Madison Avenue on the city’s North Side. “He knew the sounds.”
Some of those sounds also took on a familiar refrain for the younger McCleery because he was part of Saturday’s fourth annual Steam Whistle Blow gathering at the B&O Station Banquet Hall, 530 Mahoning Ave., downtown. Hosting the event was the Mahoning Valley Railroad Heritage Association.
For $1 each, attendees blew steam and other whistles during the five-hour fundraiser, which sought to raise money to develop a museum and to go toward the association’s efforts to preserve its locomotives and mill railroad rolling stock, all displayed at the James Marter Yard on Poland Avenue, noted George Seil, an MVRHA co-founder.
For $20, MVRHA members connected to a steam generator whistles that visitors brought.
The steam-whistle sounds, many of which marked shift changes and were ubiquitous features of life in the Mahoning Valley, have been dormant since the area’s major steel mills along the Mahoning River, Poland Avenue and elsewhere shuttered in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
On Saturday, however, long-ago sounds from the whistles were revived and filled the air, and sparked many people’s memories.
McCleery, an 18-year MVRHA member, recalled his father’s typical ritual of grabbing his shoes, keys and lunch in the kitchen before leaving through the back door for another day at the mill. Robert McCleery’s career at the Ohio Works lasted from the mid-1940s until the operation closed in the late 1970s, recalled the younger McCleery, who has a pin his father was given for having worked 35 years for U.S. Steel.
Mike McCleery brought to Saturday’s event a brass whistle he bought earlier this year that had been blown at the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.’s Brier Hill Works, he added.
Also on hand was Jordan Cavinee of Columbus, who had an assortment of reproduction whistles made by M.D. Whistles of Fairmont, W.Va., which are facsimiles of those common to locomotives.
Examples were a Canadian National 4-Chime and a Reading 6-Chime, the latter of which is a popular passenger whistle produced in Reading, Pa.
“They are the sounds of days gone by,” he said.
Next to Cavinee was Bryan Yosten of Erie, Pa., a sales associate who builds steam engines and who owns about a dozen such whistles, many of which he bought from Cavinee.
Before the piercing and attention-grabbing noises reverberated through the city, Joe Vasko and a few others busily assembled valves on a large hookup manifold to accommodate the whistles, which ranged from 0.75 inches to 3 inches in diameter.
Vasko, an MVRHA trustee and six-year member, spent time attaching pipes to corresponding valves that held the whistles. A large volume of steam was essential to achieve the whistles’ full sounds and effects, he explained.
In addition, one whistle was blown for the first time in nearly 40 years, Seil noted, adding that another one was tape recorded and will be played during next year’s Canfield Fair.
Providing the steam for Saturday’s event was Youngstown Thermal Ltd. Eagle Mechanical LLC provided the hookup for the mainfolds.
For more information about the MVRHA, go to www.mvrha.org.