Iron Man of the Month: Harold Fleisch
(Page 2 of 5)
July/August 1971
Joe Fahnestock
If I asked him about the giant shop lathe, he immediately assumed the typical shop-man’s pose for his picture.
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If I queried him about the giant one-cylinder Rumely OilPull which towers above all the other machinery in his spacious shop, he climbed up on it like a squirrel affronts a tree, to show me the answer to my inquisitiveness.
When I invaded the dark and ancient office, instead of seeing a pretty young miss attired in a mini-skirt, there was a stolid-looking man with his hat still on, sitting like the legendary Scrooge at the old roll-top desk. But, instead of screaming at me like a Scrooge for invading his privacy, Clifford Neff was most congenial and soft-spoken.
The photographer’s art was not needed here. These men didn’t need instructions how to “pose for their pitcher and look at the birdie and say ‘cheese.’” They all knew their work and did it, while all I had to do was snap the shutter. (Boy, was that a relief!)
“I was a farmer till I was twenty-nine years of age. I farmed over near the Indiana-Ohio state line,” said Harold Fleisch. “Just as I was planning to get married, I was at my girl’s house one Sunday and the phone rang. It was Mr. Pence, asking if I could come to work for him Monday morning. I’ve been here ever since.”
The multifarious sounds of shop machinery were resounding omni-directionally from every nook and cranny of old Pence Machine Shop, located down by the Penn Central tracks on E. Third St., in West Alexandria. What a symphony of air-compressors, grinders, riveting hammers and sputtering gas welding torches it all made, sufficient to warm the cockles of any steam engineer’s heart.
“I had to put about twenty-five new flues in this engine,” said Fleisch, peering into the smoke-box of an old 22 horsepower Frick. “I had to cut out about half of the old flue-sheet and weld in a new piece.”
“Ought to work like new,” explained Fleisch. “Fellows often used to neglect cleaning out the smoke boxes, and the soot would gather moisture and rust out the flue-sheet.”
“Looks like a pretty good job,” said I, casting an inquisitive look at the finished masterpiece. “But just how do you know where the rust ends in an old flue-sheet, and exactly where to cut it out so it can be replaced with new metal?”
“After a while experience tells you where the soot-line has been,” replied Fleisch. “Years ago I used to rebuild flue-sheets right out in the fields. Did it all by hand then. A job like this would take about three days of steady work.”
I looked at the jagged curve where the old and new metals had been welded together, and at the newly-flanged flues just replaced. Then I pondered a Biblical parable over in my mind, warning about sewing new cloth onto old, wondering the wisdom thereof. But I knew that Harold Fleisch knew what he was doing and was much more conversant with the whims and wiles of steam-engine knowledge than I.
Then I asked him, “Will it hold up under pressure just like when the engine was new?”
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