Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Q: When did you start thinking about where you night study law?
A: I guess maybe my junior or senior year. There was a professor there who
was a graduate of Drake University, Mr. Eppse, and we had had one or two or
three of our graduates to go to Drake law school in Des Moines. So probably
that was where it focused on and they got me a scholarship to go there. Then
someone in the business department had gotten me a scholarship to go to Cornell
to go into a masters in business. Actually, what they wanted me to do was go
up there and get a masters and come back and work at the university in the
business area. In the meantime, I just frankly decided that I didn't want
to go to Des Moines. Because I came from a small town in Arkansas, I wanted
to go to a big city. I had been up in this area a couple of summers working
in a steel mill out in Joliet and then I had worked in Chicago one summer. I
liked Chicago and I decided I'd try to come to Chicago. After we made the
arrangement through the State of Arkansas for the tuition, then I had my
choices and I came to Chicago instead.
Q: You say you worked summers in a steel mill in Joliet?
A: Yes, I was at what is called a coke plant, Carnegie Illinois coke plant.
I became a member of the Steelworkers of America out there and worked there in
the summer, back in the early forties, at five dollars and eighty cents a
day. Big money.
Q: What kind of work did you do?
A: I was what was called a luterman. When slack coal is cooked and heated,
it's done in ovens, large, large ovens and at the end of every oven, there
is a large door, like this door except larger. (points to door of the office)
It's made of metal and the cracks around there, you take fire clay and seal
it. You take a trowell, you know, like a bricklayer, and seal those cracks.
That was my job, what's called a luterman. Seal it so that while it cooked,
there would be no air coming in or out. Then you would take the door off and
they would push it through with a big metal coke oven pusher, they called it;
push it out into railroad cars. Take it off and then they would quench it
with water, you know, and make the coke.
Coke was used, I suppose, in steel mills in lieu of coal for making steel.
They would put these cokes in there, they got hotter and stayed hot longer.
So this was a coke plant for--you made the coke for use in steel mills
generally.
I worked out there two summers. Had an industrial accident out there. I
almost lost my right leg, which caused me to be given a 4-F status. I missed
school one year because of that. 1 didn't get back to being out of the
hospftal until around November.
Q: What happened?
A: Fellow who ran the door machine, just through inattention, ran the door
machine into my leg and I had an iron rod that went just about six, five or