There was a time in this city when Stelco and Dofasco went around to high schools and said, "Would you guys mind filling out an application?" Please and thank you.

Barry Gair didn't mind. He graduated from Orchard Park Secondary School on June 22, 1976, age 18. Six days later he was working for Stelco at the sweet rate of $5.35 an hour.

They sent him to the No. 2 rod mill, out in the wilds north of Burlington Street, between Kenilworth and Parkdale. About 300 men worked there then. Tough guys, some of them.

They would send a freshman such as Gair on missions. "Go get me a bucket of steam." "Kid, get me a hundred feet of waterfront." Ha ha.

"I saw it break some guys," Gair says. The place was cold in winter, a steambath in summer, noisy all the time, and real men didn't wear earplugs.

Gair survived and rose to become maintenance supervisor at that big plant.

Now his job is to help tear it down.

When the rod mill opened in 1966 at a cost of $30 million (nearly $200 million today) it was designed to be the fastest and most modern in the world.

Stelco had come up with a new process for the controlled cooling of steel rod in rolling mills, one that it licensed to mills in the U.S. and across Europe.

The plant reached its peak about the time Gair signed on, shipping 700,000 tons of product a year, with round-the-clock shifts.

The steel arrived in 26-foot rods, about 4 1/2 inches thick, was superheated in a jumbo oven and then rolled to make wire, nuts, bolts, screws, nails, reinforcing bar, chain-link fence.

The plant once shipped a lot of product to Michelin Tire, which in turn reduced the steel rods to the thickness of a strand of hair.

"If you could supply Michelin, you could supply anybody," Gair says.

But time and the competition caught up to the plant. Customers began to demand ultra-precision in product, and the aging No. 2 rod mill couldn't meet the strict specifications.

"We would ship to Michelin and only one out of 10 orders got accepted," Gair says. "The other nine came back."

Stelco decided it had too many product lines anyway. In 2004, it shut the place down.

Gair was reassigned, but that was not the end of his rod mill days. For insurance purposes, the place had to be checked out a couple of times a week. Alone, no radio, no security, just a flashlight, wind howling through the stacks, snow blowing.

It's a lonely place up there, where coyotes run through the bush. And there was the time two beefy electricians jumped him in the cavernous dark for a gag, which left him chronically spooked.

Last summer he retired.

Then the Hamilton Port Authority came knocking. It bought the 41.7-acre site from Stelco for $17.5 million. The plan is brownfield development.

A new dock wall has been completed. Now the Port Authority will prepare the land for new industry.

There have been environmental concerns here. First, there's Hobson Pond, a murky piece of water that's home to the biggest snapping turtles you've ever seen. Some are afraid redevelopment will ruin that.

But Marilyn Baxter, the Port Authority's environmental manager, has vowed that won't happen.

There's also the matter of bringing down the building, a project that has its share of environmental hazards. Asbestos, for instance. But where is it?

So the Port Authority hired Gair part time to be its eyes on the demolition project. Baxter says he has worked out great. "Barry understood the drawings and labelled 60 suspected asbestos spots for us."

Murray Demolition, the same outfit that wiped the enormous Camco facility from the landscape, will have the rod mill flattened and carted away by year's end.

Then Barry Gair's time with the factory that claimed his entire working life will be well and truly done.

StreetBeat appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

pwilson@thespec.com

905-526-3391