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Steel industry's navigating its own bumpy route 66.

Article Excerpt
Editor's note: Consultant Glenn Kidd, former director-market research and analysis at U.S. Steel, offered the following historical perspective on the steel industry at the recent FMA Toll Processors Conference in Orlando, Fla. Kidd can be reached by e-mail at gckidd@nauticom.net.

ROUTE 66, known nostalgically as Main Street America, has oft been romanticized in story, song, TV and film. Last month, the nation's Mother Road was even the subject of a steel market lecture.

Economist Glenn Kidd, who recently retired from a long career at U.S. Steel, drew an apt analogy using the evolution of the nation's interstate highways and the displacement of communities along old Route 66, comparing it to the evolution of the U.S. steel industry, which is similarly bypassing some players and leaving ghost towns where steel towns once thrived.

Bringing some historical context to the subject of steel industry consolidation, Kidd explained how in the middle of the last century construction of the interstate highway system transformed a patchwork of local and regional roads, which wound from community to community, into straight, multi-lane strips of concrete that expedited travel by eliminating stops and bypassing the commercial areas that had grown up along Route 66 and other thoroughfares.

"Route 66 went through every town. Entrepreneurs along the way made a living by providing travelers with food, shelter, gasoline and auto repairs. Main Street America became prosperous. It was...

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