Acme Steel, Chicago Coke PlantA deep dive into some of the thousands of historic documents I have recovered from the coke plant, brought home and scanned.
I have accrued a number of safety manuals in my archeology. While the content is similar, they span a variety of time periods and formats: I found this one very early on during my visits. I didn’t really review it at the time, I was so excited to find it. But the contents were boilerplate […]
The BP office is the last area of the plant where documents can still be found. But so many are waterlogged and it seems like the majority are of little interest anyways. But somewhere around my 50th visit (recently) I poked around a bit and I found something interesting. A speech from the desk of […]
The mystery of TQI/TQIP began with a brief mention in the training video I found sometime ago. After that, I found a number of relics (including duplicates), all of which needed to be restored, and with each I found another small piece of the puzzle. But here, I have found the Rosetta Stone. You can […]
24 hour circular charts were the recording medium of choice at Acme. These charts were used to record a variety of metrics both at the batteries (where recording was done in the coal bunker ground floor) at the BP Plant (charts were stored in the BP Office). BP Plant Charts In the BP office a […]
I have retrieved countless documents and artifacts from the plant but the amount of video or audio evidence is limited. Luckily, I have located some of each and all have proven valuable if not priceless. First up is the ovens department training video. This easily is the best evidence of the plant that exists today. […]
Besides a good salesman, nothing sells a product quite like a fancy brochure. It was three such glossy, elegant brochures that caught my eye during a document retrieval back in the winter of 2021. Only a few pages long each, but printed on high color, heavy card stock, their beauty was too much to pass […]
When I first started retrieving documents from the plant in the autumn of 2020, I would only scan what was worth saving, and then discard. Soon after I began to realize that this was a mistake and I ought to save some of them for posterity. I have a laminator at my disposal and no […]
During my last visit I made a stop at Dr. Lin’s office. I’ve been in there many times before and picked up a few things, but this time it seemed different. Did the wind create some upheaval of documents? Other explorers perhaps? Or maybe it is all just my perception? At any rate I got […]
In months of recovering documents, I have been lucky to find some really interesting information. Plenty more went directly into the trash, if I didn’t reject it while initially vetting it when I was still at the plant. It is rare that I come across something that could be personally damaging to an employee. I […]
Some time ago, I came across a substantial pile of expense reports from the assistant division manager. These were notable as they included hotel and restaurant bills and detailed explanations for some expenses. I have yet to add the scans to the document archive because after long thought, I feel that it is somehow too […]