A collection of short stories by men and women who grew up in the soot and smoke—and now, ruins—of America’s great industrial complexes. The steel corporations were the engines, the dynamos, that set the mill towns going and kept them spinning for decades. You smelled the mill, you tasted it on your tongue, you went to sleep hearing it, and you felt your bed shake and your windows rattle when the trains bowled down the valleys. The mill owners built the houses and the schools, they owned the municipal government and the police. Here are the heartfelt tidings of lives lived in joy and anguish in those communities, in loving, intact families and in disintegrating families, at weddings and funerals, in schools and dance halls, sometimes sober, sometimes not, always proud of their backgrounds. The collection was assembled and masterfully edited by Gloria Ptacek McMillan, who prefaces the anthology with an introduction.