VINEYARD, Utah County — Perhaps no one else saw the Royal Princess moored on the east side of murky Utah Lake all these years.
Most people saw an ugly smoke-belching, fire-breathing monster mucking up the sky. Gwen Miller saw the crown jewel of the high seas.
Miller and her husband, Chip, used to steal away after sunset to a field near the lake when they needed a break from the kids. Their favorite spot was under an old maple tree just off the road. They'd sit there talking and watching the rows of flickering lights and smoke wafting from the stacks.
At night, when it was all lit up, Geneva Steel looked to her like a big cruise ship.
Nearly everyone close to her — father, husband, father-in-law, mother-in-law, brother-in-law, daughters — worked, at one time or another, aboard the ocean liner in her mind's eye.
The Millers don't drive around the backside of the mill anymore, now that the nighttime glow is gone.
Geneva hit an iceberg of imported steel and debt. And its demise ended an era in the steel industry for four generations of the Miller family.
Gwen Miller can't quite bring herself to jump overboard yet. "I don't want to say this is the end of it."
Maybe her father-in-law, 82-year-old Art Miller, summed it up best.
"My head tells me yes," he said. "My heart tells me no.
With apologies to poet Joyce Kilmer, he said, Art Miller wrote an ode to Geneva Steel based on Kilmer's poem "The House with Nobody in It."
Whenever I walk to Orem
Along the D&RG track
I always pause a minute
Then I stop and I look back.
Members of Art and Jackie Miller's immediate and extended families spent the better part of their lives associated with the mill the federal government commissioned during World War II.
They lived through good times and bad. They, especially Gwen Miller, scratched and clawed to revive the plant when it came within hours of closing for good 16 years ago.
Says company chairman Joe Cannon, "They've got Geneva in their blood, there's no question about that."
In all, the four generations put some 160 years into the Geneva and Columbia steel mills in Utah Valley, enduring layoffs, injury and illness, shedding blood, sweat and tears.
There was a time when a working man couldn't do better than Geneva. The pay was good, the insurance and benefits better and there was plenty of overtime to be had.
"Back in '73, it was the place to work," said Ron Miller. "That's where the money was."
It's not that way anymore.
It hurts to see the crumbling stacks
And buildings falling apart.
The walkways are broken
And paths filled with cracks
Dean Hardy, Jackie Miller's father, who once severely burned both legs accidentally stepping into a pool of molten metal at Columbia, was first in the family line of steelworkers. He joined some 10,000 laborers building Geneva in 1942.
Gwen Miller's father, Wendell Watkins, put in 36 years at Geneva, starting when the first steel plates rolled out of the mill to build Liberty ships bound for the front lines in World War II.
Jackie Miller put in a couple of years in the payroll department after the war.
Art and Jackie Miller's two sons, Ron and Chip, followed their father in the late '60s and early '70s to what was then U.S. Steel. Ron Miller lost his job in the recent shutdown, while Chip Miller took retirement. The brothers, both in their 50s, are now trying their hand at taxidermy to pay the bills and put food on the table.
Two of Gwen and Chip Miller's daughters, JJ and Donnie, did stints as the company receptionist. Even Gwen Miller logged some hours at the front desk prior to the closure in November 2001.
"It's supported me my whole life. If it wasn't for Geneva, I don't know where I'd be," Gwen Miller, 57, said. "It gave me everything I had."
But it also took away.
But within those rusty buildings
Were fulfilled some mighty dreams
The need for basic steel was there
Just waiting for some schemes.
Art Miller spent 18 years as a heavy-duty machinist at U.S. Steel-Geneva Works, retiring in 1983. He was diagnosed with lung cancer last May. His booming voice belies the 37 strength-sapping radiation treatments he has endured. But he has weakened lately. Chemotherapy now looms.
He says there's no question in his mind working at the mill made him sick, but he harbors no ill feelings.
"Geneva was very good to me, to our family," he said, tethered to an oxygen tank in his American Fork home. "I got asbestosis out of it, but it was a good living while we were 'quote' growing up."
It took 55-year-old Chip Miller a while to grow up. He figures he worked only 10 of the first 15 years he was at the mill due to periodic layoffs and his own irresponsibility. He simply blew off work some days.
But he righted himself, missing a scheduled shift just once in his last 15 years.
Besides responsibility, Chip Miller says the greatest thing he learned in 35 years in central maintenance was caution.
"Safety went home with me," he said. "Your 10 best friends are right here," he adds holding up his hands, digits intact.
That doesn't mean accidents don't happen.
About 10 years ago, Chip Miller became pinned between a street sweeper and a water wagon. He had put out both hands to break the impact but the force crumpled the bones in his right arm. He remained there, feet off the ground, gasping for air, until his stunned co-worker reclaimed his senses enough to back the machine away. It was Miller's first week back from open-heart surgery to repair a leaky aorta.
In addition to the stitches holding his chest together, he had steel rods inserted into his splintered arm. He went back to work a short time later.
"I have a high threshold for pain," he said, "other than a toothache."
So as I stop and ponder
About days gone by
This time in life a fleeting bit
And yet I wonder why
It was an aching tooth that kept his wife, Gwen, from pulling one of the craziest stunts of the 1986 shutdown.
Gwen Miller's bond with Geneva might be stronger than anyone else's in the family. Her love affair with the plant started when she was young.
Her father always had candy tucked in his lunch box for her when he returned home, a tradition her husband, Chip, continued with their children.
The Orem homemaker had too much invested in the big ship to watch it grow cold, watch its lights go dim.
Gwen Miller mounted a bulldog campaign to get USX and the steelworkers union to the bargaining table during what the company called a strike and the union called a lockout. Neither side liked her and the Geneva Wives support group she organized. Union leaders even told Chip to "muzzle your wife."
But she and others persisted, doing anything and everything to keep Geneva in the limelight during the 13-month work stoppage or "strike out." They marched with signs, wrote dozens of letters and made countless telephone calls — her monthly bills reached $200. They stood in front of loaded freight trains to keep USX from shipping stockpiled steel.
Three of the wives hatched a plan to handcuff themselves to the top of a tower until the impasse was broken. Only a bad toothache kept Gwen Miller down that day. "I can't believe the stuff we used to do," she said.
This little valley blossomed and green
So many friends long gone yet
Many more are new
Such memories do I hold
So dear, so fond, so true.
At 56, Gwen Miller says she and her Geneva Wives support group are too old to fight for the bankrupt plant.
"Somebody else has to do it," she said. "I wish there could have been some new blood."
No doubt her daughter would be out there battling had she seen any hope for the future.
"Ever since I was little, I can remember fighting for the place," said Donnie Cook, now 22 and married, who was the company receptionist just before it closed in November 2001.
A June 19, 1987, full-page newspaper ad shows a then 6-year-old Donnie clad in a T-shirt bearing the words "USX won't let my dad work." The cute little girl holds a hand-written poster reading, "USX won't let my daddy work but BMT will."
The black-and-white advertisement urged union steelworkers to vote in favor of a contract with Basic Manufacturing Technologies, the company brothers Joe and Chris Cannon and other investors formed to buy the idle mill 15 years ago for $40 million.
Cannon has a framed copy hanging in his office. Gwen Miller, he said, played a "huge" role in Geneva's revival.
Gwen Miller brought a cake to Cannon each Sept. 1, the anniversary of the plant reopening in 1987. She didn't bring one this year.
Those memories that I hold
Keep me from feeling blue.
So whenever I go to Orem
Along those steel-laid tracks
I'd like to take the foreign steels
And give them forty whacks.
The November 2001 shutdown left the Millers disappointed and somewhat bitter, not so much with Cannon but with everything that led to the company's demise.
"I really thought they'd go back up," Ron Miller said of the once resilient company. "They always pulled it out in the past."
Chip Miller cried as he took one last look around the plant before the 1986 closure. But he couldn't wait to leave when things went downhill again in the late 1990s. The specter of layoffs and closure was too much of a roller coaster ride. The guys wanted it over with, one way or another.
"On my last day there were no tears in my eyes. I was glad to get out of there," he said. "It was a hellhole the last couple of years out there."
After toiling more than half his life in the mill his grandfather helped build, Ron Miller didn't quite make 30 years, the magical number at which retirement benefits kick in. The shutdown left the long-whiskered Santaquin man nothing.
Job prospects in Utah Valley are bleak for 57-year-old ex-steelworkers. No one wants to hire them because of their age and the notion that they'd bolt back to Geneva should it surface again.
Potential employers haven't said as much to Ron Miller, but "you kind of see the looks on their faces."
Avid hunters, Ron and Chip Miller recently spent two months at a taxidermy school in Montana courtesy of a government job-training program. The results of their new craft — the heads of a bull moose, two bucks and an elk plus ducks and pheasants — stuff the living room of Ron Miller's pre-fabricated home where the twice-divorced man lives alone. The brothers started their own businesses but not in time to get an ad in the current Yellow Pages.
"It ain't panned out too good yet," Ron Miller said. But, he notes, "there's no age limit on doing taxidermy."
Cause the thing that hurts the most of all
The thing we did not start
I feel that USX/Geneva
Died with a broken heart.
Though a year younger than his brother, Chip Miller had five more years in at Geneva. He retired just before the closure, qualifying for a pension that "isn't all bad."
But it's not enough to keep his wife from having to take a job as a travel agency receptionist after years of being a homemaker.
"We still don't know what's going to happen," Gwen Miller said. "We're really starting to feel it. I don't know how we've hung on this long."
Geneva Steel is officially on "cold idle" status, meaning permanent closure hasn't been announced. But unless the "miracle mill" can live up to its nickname one more time, that word will eventually come.
Gwen Miller doesn't want to think about that. She can't even bear to look at the dark and dreary plant. She averts her eyes whenever she drives near it. The lights are out on the big cruise ship.
E-mail: romboy@desnews.com