Sure Pop and the Safety Scouts Part 15

"Those new uniforms are going to be about as good an 'ad' for Safety First as anything we could have," remarked Uncle Jack, leading the way into the big machine shop. He had caught the admiring glances that had followed them from the older people and the longing looks that the boys and girls had sent after them all the way over.

"We haven't done our 'Day's Boost for Safety' yet, though," said Betty.

"I don't know but we ought to do our good turn every morning before we start out on any trip--I just hate not to get my b.u.t.ton right side up till so late in the day!"

"Those girls have pretty neat looking uniforms of their own, haven't they?" said Bob, a little later, as they gazed down a long row of punch presses which were pouring out shining streams of aluminum pin trays.

"What do they wear them for--just to look pretty?"

"You wouldn't have thought so," laughed the forewoman, "if you could have seen how they fought the first caps and ap.r.o.ns we tried to get them to wear. They _were_ homely things, even if they were life savers. So we kept at it till we got something so trim and pretty that the girls would rather wear it than not."

"Life savers?" repeated Betty. "How could caps and ap.r.o.ns save lives?

Oh--by not catching in the machinery?"

"Just so. It's easy for a girl's hair to be blown into the machines, or for a braid to swing against a whirling shaft, you see. Oh yes, we had several girls killed that way, before we tried this uniform. They used to wear dresses with baggy sleeves,--ragged ones, sometimes. Rings and bracelets are bad, too; and even these ap.r.o.ns, you'll notice, are b.u.t.toned back so they can't fly out against the wheels. Yes, the girls all like the idea now. The caps keep their hair from getting dusty or mussed up. Besides, we find it saves a good many girls' feelings, too, having them all dressed so much alike."

The same good sense was shown in the other departments, in the working clothes worn by the men and boys.

"You won't find a man in this room with a necktie on," the foreman told them. "These are the biggest punch presses in our whole shop. A while ago one of the men got his necktie caught between the cogwheels and he was drawn into the machine head first. That was the end of that sort of thing in _this_ shop!

"Now, as you'll see, long sleeves and ragged or baggy overalls are things of the past. If a man does wear a long sleeve, he keeps it rolled up where it can't catch and cost him a hand or an arm.

"Watch the men and boys, and you'll see how careful they are not to look around while their machines are running. Before they start their machines, you'll find them looking all around to see there's n.o.body near who might get caught in the wheels or belt. These workmen are just as anxious to give the other fellow a square deal as anybody could be, once they catch the Safety First idea. It took some of them a long while to learn never to fool with the other fellow's machine--that's always dangerous, you know, just like a machine that's out of order. Our pressmen wouldn't think of starting up a machine which was out of order, or which they didn't understand--they'd report it to me at once."

"What has been the result of all this Safety training--has it got the men to 'thinking Safety,' so you don't have so many accidents?" asked Uncle Jack.

The foreman's face glowed with pride. "Why, it's got so now, sir, that even the youngsters are too wise to scuffle or play jokes on each other here in the shop. They've come to see how easy it is to fall against dangerous machinery or down a shaft or stairway. And as for throwing things at each other, the way they used to during the noon hour--nothing doing any more in that line.

"Would you believe it, we haven't had a bad accident in this shop since a year ago last July. That was when one of the boys on a punch press got the die clogged and tried to dig it out with his fingers instead of using a hook. That's about the last set of fingers this shop has lost; yes, sir. Before that, there was hardly a week went by but we had several hands crippled, and often somebody killed. Oh, this Safety First work is wonderful,--it's making things a lot safer for the working man!"

Uncle Jack told the kindly foreman what the twins were doing in Safety patrol work. Bob and Betty could see how proud the man was of the splendid Safety showing his shop was making. "And it's a fine pair of Scout uniforms you and the little lady have," he called after them.

"More power to you both--and to the Safety Scouts of America!"

"You seem very much interested in everything in these shops, Bob," said his uncle, who could hardly drag him away.

"You'd better believe I am!" cried the boy, warmly. "As soon as I get through school, I'm going to get a job in one of these factories and--well, I'm trying to make up my mind which shop it shall be!"

_One thing you always owe the other fellow--a square deal._--SURE POP

[Ill.u.s.tration]

ADVENTURE NUMBER EIGHTEEN

AN ADVENTURE IN SAFETY

Betty told Sure Pop what Bob had said about getting a job in one of the big mills by and by, and the little Colonel remembered it a few weeks later when he was showing several of the Safety Scouts through the steel mills.

"Do you think it will be one of these mills you'll pick out for your first job?"

"Well, I don't know, now. It's a pretty big, lonesome sort of place for a fellow like me, Sure Pop, and there don't seem to be so many fellows of my own age here as in some of the other factories."

Betty and Joe and Chance followed Bob's eyes around the big steel mill yards. They knew how he felt. It was a lonesome looking place till you got used to it, in spite of the thousands of men who swarmed around them. The queer, raw smell of the reddish iron ore added to the feeling, too.

Away down in the big ore boats along the docks, gangs of big, brawny workmen strained and sweated, filling the iron buckets that traveled up the wire cables to the ore dumps. Others were trucking the ore to the furnaces, while a swarm of little switch engines panted and puffed back and forth over the network of steel rails.

The steel works covered many acres of ground, and, shut off as they were by high fences, seemed almost like another world. The roar of the furnaces and the din of steel on steel made Betty and the boys feel rather confused at first. "I should think all these men just over from the old country would get mixed up, so many of them not understanding a single word of English," said Betty to their guide.

"Yes, we have to be mighty careful," said the man, who was one of the Safety men who gave all his time to making the steel mills safer for the thousands of workmen. "We print this little book of Safety Rules in all the different languages, so that each new man can study it and find out how to do his day's work without getting into danger."

"Wow! what's that?" Joe's black eyes opened very wide as he pointed to a great ball of fire that rose from one of the furnace stacks, floated a little way like a balloon, and then burst into a sheet of flame.

"Just the gas from the blast furnace--regular Fourth of July fireworks, isn't it? I remember how queer those gas bubbles used to look to me when I first came to work here."

He waited while his visitors stared for a few minutes at the fiery clouds, then led the way to the blast furnaces. They went through two or three big buildings, all of them fairly alive with hurrying, sweating laborers. But in spite of the seeming confusion all around them, Bob noticed how carefully the aisles and pa.s.sageways were kept free and clear of anything the hurrying men might stumble over.

"We simply have to do it," explained the steel man. "Before we woke up to the importance of never leaving anything in the way where it might be stumbled over, we had more broken arms and legs every month than you could shake a stick at. Now it's different; it's as much as a man's job is worth to leave anything lying in the pa.s.sageways for his fellow workmen to stumble and fall over."

"I saw some white lines painted on the floor of that last room we came through, the one where all those castings were stacked up in rows," said Chance. "Was that what they were for? Great scheme, isn't it? And as simple as falling off a log!"

"Simple? Sure--most of these things are simple enough, once you think of them," agreed their guide. "It took perhaps an hour of one man's time and a gallon or two of white paint to paint those dead-lines along the sides--and many's the man who has been saved weeks in the hospital by those same white lines."

The five friends followed him into the foundry department. Hardly had they stepped through the doorway, when the clang of a big gong overhead scattered a group of laborers who were piling heavy castings on flat cars.

Five pairs of eyes looked up as the five Safety Scouts turned to see where the gong was. Away up above them on a track that went from one end of the long room to the other, they saw something like an oddly shaped freight engine running along with a heavy wire cable dangling toward the floor. The big, strong cable was carrying a load of several tons of steel castings as easily as a boy carries in an armful of wood. "And with a whole lot less fuss and bother!" said Betty, with a sly look at Brother Bob.

"When a man hears that gong overhead," said the guide, "he knows what it means even before he looks up. That's what is called a traveling crane.

It runs back and forth on those overhead tracks, wherever the crane driver wants to pick up or drop his load. He kicks that gong with his heel, just like the motorman on the street car, and it gives warning to the workmen below just as plainly as if it yelled out, 'Look out, below!

Here comes a load that might spill on your heads!'"

"Sounds exactly like a street-car gong," said Betty.

The steel man smiled. "It ought to--it was made for use on a street car.

Watch sharp when the crane comes back this way and you'll see the gong fastened right up under the cab floor. See? We tried whistles for a while, and automobile horns, too; but this plain, everyday street-car gong beats 'em all. A man doesn't have to understand English to know what _that_ sound means!"

"It must have made a good deal of difference in the number of accidents," said Sure Pop, "with so many men working underneath those cranes right along."

"Did it? Well, I should say so! That's another little thing that's as simple as A B C, but it saves lives and broken bones just the same.

Sometimes I think we get to thinking too much about the big things, Colonel, and not enough about these little, everyday ideas that spell Safety to all these thousands of men who look to us for a square deal."

Sure Pop reached up to say something in Bob's ear as they went on to the chipping yard, where long rows of men were tr.i.m.m.i.n.g down the rough steel castings with chisels driven by compressed-air hammers.

"Did you ever see anything like it, Bob, the way this 'square deal' and 'fair play' idea gets into their systems, once they wake up to the possibilities of Safety First?"

"It certainly does," said Bob. "I thought of that, too. It's what that tailor told the boys in the clothing factory, the day we got our uniforms, and it's just what the foreman in that machine shop told us, too."