Harry Evans, a third-generation metal founder, talks about his craft and his heritage in an interview by Ralph Rinzler.

"It was the iron, I guess, and the glow and the white-heated iron--pouring it in all these molds. It was sort of a magical thing--to see all these piles of sand, literally like so many statues--pour all this liquid iron in and a few minutes later take out a casting that could be used. Just continued to fascinate me.

"I went to school in St. Michael's--we were only just a block or two away from the foundry--I'd go by and see the steam coming out of the windows; that meant that he had just poured and they were shaking the castings out of the sand, you know. I was very useful, I guess, as a little boy to carry off their jackets and the flasks that they were poured in and pile them up outdoors or whatever because they wouldn 't let us fool around the hot castings. It just continued to boil over in me.