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This is Felix Contereras, one of the co hosts of alt Latino, the podcast from NPR music, where we discuss Latinx culture, music, and heritage with the artists that create it.
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This is Planet Money from NPR.
Keith Bussey has had a front row seat to the rise and fall of a great american industry.
That industry, steel.
But back in the early sixties, he was just out of college and working an accounting job in northern Indiana.
He was far from home, didn't know a lot of people.
On the weekends, he'd go for drives.
I used to go up to the sand dunes north of Valparaiso, Indiana, this.
Beautiful stretch of land along the sandy shores of Lake Michigan.
And they were constructing a brand new steel mill at the time called Bethlehem Steel Burns harbor.
Oh, like the big, big old school Bethlehem steel?
Okay.
Yes, that one.
Back then, Bethlehem Steel was huge, the second biggest steel company in the United States.
And the site they were constructing dozens of buildings, many stories high.
It had its own train system, smokestacks reaching up into the sky.
This is what steel mills looked like for most of the last century.
And I remember sitting on the sand dunes, just watching the erection process from the beach and thinking to myself, wow, this is a massive facility.