Dwight's first night back on the job came with a shock.

My step-father lost a year to skin grafts, surgeries and agony after a boiler exploded at US Steel's QBOP and burned most of the skin off his feet.

The QBOP? That's where they add oxygen to molten ore to make alloy steel. Two men died in an explosion there last year.

Between sips of a Miller High Life, Dwight told me of the surprise that waited for him when he got back to work.

"That entire time I was gone, they never once stopped making steel in Fairfield."

Amid news of layoffs at the steel mill, and its counterparts nationwide, one has to wonder if they will one day stop making steel in Fairfield. The company has announced 1,800 layoffs at its Fairfield plant and said it would idle production until orders picked up. In all, 4,000 layoffs are expected at US Steel facilities nationwide.

Though I have never stepped foot in the Fairfield mill, it is has helped shape me into the man I am, just as its presence shaped Birmingham into the city it is and the steel built there shaped America into the country it is.

After serving in World War II, my grandfather, Loran, put in more than 33 years - more than half his life -- as a millwright and union leader there. My father worked there one summer while in college.

I think of them as I drive along Interstate 20/59 and see the flames shooting from the towers.

The arduous work they and tens thousands of others put in there and at other steel plants turned Birmingham into an industrial center. The steel they made built America's skyscrapers. The money they earned gave many generations a chance to pursue their dreams.

That I can make my living sharing the news is due in no small part to the sweat and blood my family left behind at that mill.

And for those of us who don't remember what it was like before the 1980s, when the plant temporarily shut down completely and thousands lost their jobs, there was a time when Birmingham was known for something other than UAB and fancy restaurants and beer.

We were a steel town. And, at its peak, US Steel was Birmingham's largest employer, putting roughly 15,000 people to work here.

"Fairfield Works is really our last big steel works in Birmingham, and it's been much reduced," Richard Neely, a history teacher at Indian Springs School and a former history professor at Samford and Judson universities, told reporter Kelly Poe. "I'm really surprised they're still plugging away with the international competition."

Karen Utz, the curator of Sloss Furnaces, said we may never completely lose our steel industry, but awareness of what the industry means to the city seems to be slipping away.

Utz occasionally runs into miners and steelworkers in Hueytown and Pleasant Grove. They share the same fears of injuries and layoffs as those who worked there decades ago. Only now, there are far fewer people who understand the work they do and what it means to the region.

"They feel like a forgotten society on the fringes of Birmingham," Utz told me. "They are the ones keeping our history alive and when they are gone it will just be a memory."

The significance of the latest layoffs, she said, should be of great concern to the city but, aside from the steelworkers and their loved ones, no one seems to notice.

"Birmingham no longer recognizes this base," Utz said. "They (steelworkers) know nobody cares, but we need to care because they are keeping alive what put Birmingham on the map."

Birmingham is in danger of losing part of its spirit, a driving force in the city that has been with us for more than a century.

"You have caught the spirit of your opportunities and are determined to force them to a point where you shall make yourselves certainly the Pittsburgh of the South and one of the great industrial centers of the world," President William Taft said during a visit here 105 years ago.

"What one sees in Birmingham one also sees in a less degree in every town and state of the United States. It is a spirit of progress and determination to overcome the obstacles that present themselves."

Let's hope that is true today.

They didn't stop making steel in Fairfield while Dwight recuperated or after my grandfather died.

Let's hope they never stop.