South Haven North

“Remember,” Dagny’s father wheezed, “the lower you are on your boss’s food chain, the more you must kowtow.” As always, she listened attentively to her father because of her love for him.

“Yes, Daddy, I know,” she said solicitously. Their conversations were difficult because he had succumbed to fibrotic lung disease and lately, he’d been limited to a very few words at one time because of the oxygen generator. He could barely draw breath and often his words came in explosive and occasionally unintelligible bursts.

Dobroslav or Doby as his friends at US Steel called him, had all been exposed to asbestos for so long that most of them had contracted a condition similar to Black Lung. Back in the day asbestos was a miracle agent whose tensile strength surpassed that of steel, had tremendous thermal stability and most importantly, was non-flammable. The heat abatement property of asbestos made it perfect for the extreme heats associated with the steel industry. Unfortunately for Doby and his co-workers was the fact that any abrasive activity around asbestos released ‘fibrils’ into the atmosphere that coated the lungs of any laborer who did not wear a respirator. In the end the result was slow death by suffocation. There were very few places in the steel plant and blast furnace areas that weren’t covered with a thick coat of the stringy fibers. The good news, if one could call it that, was that US Steel retired Doby in 1967 with full pension. Several years later he joined as plaintiff in a class action law suit lodged by a group of wrongful death attorneys against the manufacturers of Asbestos. The Lawsuit also included US Steel and when the unprecedented settlement was reached in the courts it meant that Doby would have no financial hardship for the remainder of his life and all of his medical needs would be met as well.

“Captains of industry,” Doby continued, “or the people who own most of the large businesses in America hold tightly the reins of power, are not well skilled in the trades and most, due to their privilege, have never worked a day in their lives.” Anger revealed itself in the tightness around Doby’s eyes and an almost imperceptible redness in his face, but he continued. “Moreover, they are financed by family money from the old country and feel that their inherited wealth is somehow ordained by God. As a result, they feel a sense of entitlement about their success and wealth. They are resentful and often paranoid about the skilled underlings who are responsible for their success and are miserly when it comes to benefits and compensation. They make up the rules as they go along, abandon them with impunity, and employ them against you when convenient.” Dagny learned that management and owners who were predominately men knew of the dangers posed by asbestos since the early 1930’s. As a result, and in spite of her devotion and love for her father she did not trust men, was suspicious of their intentions and hated most of them because, after all, they were killing her father.

“I hear you, daddy,” Dagny declared as she helped her father to a chair in their modest home, “Sit down and rest awhile, Pop.” “but really,” she went on, “in my meager position within the accounting department I am rarely required to grovel or act in an obsequious manner. I just do my job, have few friends and keep my head down.”

Dagny was born in 1946, four years after her mother and father, Dobroslav and Helena Dombrowski arrived in Gary, Indiana. Helena died in childbirth and Doby struggled to single-handedly raise Dagny while toiling at the steel mill as a production helper. When people would ask Doby where they were from, he would tell them that they had migrated from Poland. This delighted Helena because even with her imperfect English she knew that migrating made them sound as though they were a flock of birds.

“Now, father,” she said just before she died, “I believe you mean to say that we emigrated from Poland,” and Doby, not wanting to rile Helena or create a problem, was fine with the reprimand and would play along. Both he and Helena had struggled for most of their lives as day laborers in the old country and set aside as much of their meager wages as they possibly could. The degree to which Doby was able to participate in the great American dream, the reason he was able to get ahead, was due almost entirely to his shrewdness with the little money he had and the fact that he was unafraid of hard work. His iron will and his strongly held Roman Catholic beliefs were the traits that helped him the most in raising his daughter. In addition, the strength of both Doby and Helena helped them to survive the difficult economic and political atmosphere of 1937 Warsaw. In spite of a unified and horrific worker’s strike referred to as the Great Peasant Uprising, the Dombrowski’s were able to escape by booking passage to New York where they resided for a time with relatives before resettling to the Midwest. In Gary they, like many others, lived in the shadow of row upon row of grimy smokestacks owned by US Steel. The mills were reminiscent of the industrial revolution and were the sweat shops of the day. The tall stacks, standing like sentry’s guarding the landscape, turned the air into a putrid miasma of dark gray, stinking vapor that blanketed the entire end of Lake Michigan. The sun barely penetrated the atmosphere, and at noonday the escaping fiery gas made the tall stacks appear like cigarette ends glowing in a darkly lit room. Doby thought that Indiana looked like what hell would be when he got there.

Dagny’s father’s attempts to influence his beautiful daughter did not depend solely upon the negative aspects of working in an oppressive environment. No, he spoke often of the importance of having a dream for yourself, something you can call your own, and that dream must, if possible, involve doing your own thing. Dagny was sure that the thoughts she had been nurturing and keeping to herself for the past several years were not just a dream. Moreover, her thoughts were fanciful daydreams and they were definitely part of her plan to escape, and this could not be shared with her father. Doby had helped Dagny get her bookkeeping position at the steel company that was largely responsible for the strong local economy. Her father took pride in how self-sufficient his daughter had become over the past decade but did not know that Dagny had been engaging in an uncomplicated subterfuge for siphoning money from the steel company. She was proficient in her work and many of the skills learned at Gary Emerson High School and community college made her work easy. Utilizing accounts payables, she established a number of dummy businesses to which she held pass books that allowed her to withdraw the monies generated by creating bogus invoices every month. The amounts were consistently small and the regularity of the transactions gave Dagny confidence that she would avoid detection.

Being a white-collar criminal barely registered on Dagny’s conscience. In spite of the rationalization she considered it pay back or getting even for all of the hot coals that had figuratively been heaped on her and her father’s heads; the things that her father had cautioned her about the behavior of the privileged justified her criminality. But the single biggest disappointment that would register with her father was that every night for the past ten years Dagny had worked at the Landing Strip, a gentlemen’s club near the airport. Parked in the club car lot each evening she would arrange her silver white hair in braids that began at her temples and were then drawn along the sides of her head where they wrapped exotically around long straight tresses which she allowed to cascade down her back. The new personality fit her perfectly. With her long legs and slender torso, she possessed the beauty of a Norse goddess. She had a sexy body and a beautiful mind and Dagny turned heads wherever she went.