Headed for a fall
By the mid 1980s American steel was sinking, and Geneva was sinking with it. In November 1984 the American Fork Citizen warned that the mill was headed for a fall. A BYU professor, Warner Woodworth, ran the numbers: every 100 workers laid off at Geneva would cost Utah Valley $5.2 million a year and the state nearly $6.5 million.
The warning came true. U.S. Steel, the owner since 1946, decided to close Geneva for good. Utah County was about to lose its biggest employer.
A plan people called insane
Joe Cannon thought otherwise. A Utah native and BYU law graduate, he was a Washington lawyer who had held a top policy job at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Reagan. His plan to buy the mill struck many people as financially insane. Cannon believed a privately owned Geneva could sell steel anywhere in the world, win a new deal with its union and cut better contracts with local suppliers.
He and his brother Chris gathered investors, many from the BYU law school, and teamed up with Robert Grow, a Salt Lake City real estate lawyer. Several of the buyers had no real experience in steel. Then a Texas savings and loan pulled out of the financing, and U.S. Steel moved to shut off the gas to the coke ovens. Those ovens had to stay hot. Let them cool and they would crack, and rebuilding them would cost millions.
Midnight
Cannon called Senator Orrin Hatch. Hatch talked with U.S. Steel's chairman, David Roderick, and persuaded him to keep the mill going one more month, a month U.S. Steel said cost it $100,000 a day. It was just enough time. The money came together. At midnight on August 31, 1987, Joe Cannon welcomed the first shift back through the gates. Thirty-three days later Geneva shipped steel again, and about 1,100 jobs had been saved.
The Geneva Wives
Families had fought for that night too. While the mill sat idle, a steelworker's wife named Gwen Miller started a group called the Geneva Wives and pushed U.S. Steel and the union to keep talking. Her phone bills hit $200 a month. Some union leaders told her husband to quiet her down. Three of the wives planned to handcuff themselves to a tower, and Gwen would have joined them if a toothache had not kept her home. Her six year old daughter, Donnie, appeared in a newspaper ad wearing a shirt that said U.S. Steel would not let her dad work. Cannon kept a framed copy of that ad, and every September 1, the anniversary of the reopening, Gwen brought him a cake, until the mill's last year.
At midnight on August 31, 1987, the first shift walked back through the gates.
The workers accepted $20 an hour with profit sharing, against an industry average of $27. Geneva cut the steel it kept on hand from about sixty days' worth to ten, freeing more than $40 million. It made money in its very first month, and it kept making money through 1991.
Faster than ever
Then it got faster. Geneva's old open hearth furnaces, among the last in the country, needed five and a half hours to make a batch of steel. Geneva bought two modern furnaces from an idle mill near Chicago for about their scrap price, roughly $4 million. Five barges carried them down the Mississippi, 92 trucks hauled them over the Rockies, and workers spent 67,000 hours putting them back together. By the fall of 1991 a batch took 45 minutes.
The Wall Street Journal called Geneva a "miracle mill." In November 1990 Forbes listed it among America's 400 largest private companies, with $521 million in sales. Cannon gave the credit to more than 2,500 employees.
The cost and the clock
Not everyone cheered. The mill still put smoke and fumes into the valley air, and critics, BYU students and professors among them, said so loudly. Nearly $300 million went into modernizing the plant, partly to cut pollution, and Cannon said no one could do more short of closing it. Hugh Nibley, a BYU professor and longtime critic, wrote that after forty years of breathing the mill's air, things were better under Cannon than they had been under U.S. Steel. Most people in the county, its history says, accepted the pollution for the jobs.
In 1991 Cannon stepped away to run for the U.S. Senate. He lost and returned as chief executive in October 1992, just as the good years ended. Steel prices fell more than 30 percent that year and Geneva posted its first loss. The miracle of 1987 had bought the mill more than a decade. The rest of the story is the China sale.
