“If you ever want to amount to anything,” Deborah McDowell's grandmother told her repeatedly, “you have to break out of Pipe Shop.” And break out she did; first to her grandmother's world of “semi-privilege” in the hills above her steel town home, then to college at Tuskeegee, and eventually to graduate school and a professorship at the University of Virginia. And yet, she never fully left the Alabama village that surrounded U.S. Pipe and Foundry, where the men of her family had worked since her “ancestors had yoked their prospects for survival to the might of steel” in 1905. Born in 1951, McDowell grew up during the heyday of steel production in the United States, which accounts for her many fond memories from those years and also for her ability to escape the industry that took a crippling toll upon her father, her family, and her community.