When Harry Cassayre started at Basalt Rock in the 1930s, it was merely a sand and gravel operation, but founder Al Streblow wanted more.

"Streblow was no dummy," Cassayre said. "He got into everything. We were just a bunch of country hicks. It just built up."

When Streblow got a contract to build Navy barges in 1941, Cassayre switched over to the steel side and never left. "One thing led to another," he said. Soon Basalt was making small oil tankers for the Navy.

Cassayre, now in his late 80s, became an estimator. "Anything made out of steel we bid on," he said. Oil refineries. Hydroelectric power plants. Basalt and its successor, Kaiser Steel, did it all, he said.

"I had never seen a ship, except in pictures maybe," said Obediah "Swede" Johnson, who worked as a quicksilver miner in Lake County prior to WW II. Joining Basalt in 1942, he found himself building plenty of ships.

Napa Pipe's closure reminds Johnson of an earlier shutdown -- the decommissioning of Mare Island Naval Shipyard in 1996. The loss of Mare Island and Napa Pipe signals the end of an era, he said.

"It's sad. It's the progress of time," said Johnson, who searches for an explanation.

Kaiser made pipe milling equipment in Napa for companies in Canada and elsewhere. Is that foreign competition coming back to haunt Napa? he asks.

"A lot of people said the union is what broke Kaiser," said Johnson, who is pro-union. "The union made the blue collar people powerful. I don't think we'd have a pension plan without one."

Bud Williamson, who retired in 1996 as Napa Pipe's manager of engineering, started at Basalt in 1940, straight out of Napa High.

He remembers Basalt founder Al Streblow "turning a bunch of us high school kids loose on a project that might have sunk his company."

The assignment: Develop a prototype pipe mill. Basalt came up with a technique for making large diameter pipe that became the international standard.

"It was really a unique company," Williamson, 80, said of those early years. "We were just a can-do group."

Hailing from Crumwell, Okla., Thurman Mount, now 76, lived in Shipyard Acres, a government-sponsored subdivision, while his father worked at the adjacent Basalt shipyard during World War II.

When he turned 18 in 1947, Mount signed on as a machinist helper, earning $1.35 an hour. He stayed for 48 years.

"I had my best years out there with Kaiser Steel," he said. "Everybody was treated the same. We were just a happy bunch of people. We made jokes with each other. We did the work."

Helen Freeman, then 26 years old with a child at home, left her job at JC Penney to hire on as a wartime electrician's helper at Basalt shipyard.

"That was a pre-hard hat time. You wore a bandana like Rosie the Riveter. We were all various versions of the classic Rosie," she said.

The shipyard south of Napa was going full-tilt during WW II, with some 3,000 workers from across the U.S. "It was all very dramatic," Freeman said. "You had to live through it to understand."

Freeman, now 86, would help welders working in tight quarters aboard ships under construction. Red hot slag would rain down. She still carries the scars.

Leona Watts, 81, was living with her son in her mother's house in Napa when she got hired at Basalt shipyard in 1943. Her job: install cork insulation and prepare ship interiors for painting.

"It was more than we ever made," Watts said. "It started out at 90 cents an hour. We got up to a dollar and one cent."

Watts was 20 when she went to the shipyard. Her sister, 18, joined her. "We had a lot of fun. We were about the youngest (women) at the shipyard. Everybody kind of spoiled us and looked after us," she said.

She remembers how abruptly the shipyard downsized in 1945 when war business ended. "We'd just finished up a boat, then our department was no more. It just wasn't there," she said.

"When they closed it up, it was dead. No jobs. People started going back to wherever they lived -- Oklahoma, Tennessee, those states," she said.

Jane Millhouse, a retired Realtor, worked for two years at Basalt during the war as a time checker. Every worker had to be physically accounted for twice a day to make sure they were earning their paycheck. For a Napa girl, this was stepping out into the world.

"For me, it was exciting," she said. "I met all kinds of people. They came from everywhere, I mean everywhere. All over the nation."

In 1945, Millhouse had the honor of blowing the shipyard horn to signal the end of the war. "I think we went home that afternoon," she said.

"We were just a bunch of prune-pickers. We didn't know nothing," said Attilio "Tilly" Musante, who joined Basalt Rock in 1936 straight out of Napa High School. He retired from Kaiser Steel 47 years later.

When Basalt began building ships in World War II, Musante found himself etching the designs into the wood flooring of the mold loft. From such etchings, patterns were made and steel cut.

"In the later years computers took over everything, and did it perfectly too," said Musante, now 88, who went on to design off-shore drilling rigs and other major steel fabrications.

Musante, who met his wife at Basalt during the war, liked managing the mold loft. "It was nice and clean. Nobody bothered me," he said.

Renaldo "Babe" Grimoldi, Napa High Class of '42, started out as a draftsman during WW II. When the war ended, he helped design the pipe mill that would safeguard the plant's future.

"We built our own pipe mill right here in Napa," Grimoldi said. "We came up with some pretty unique designs, some simplified ways of making this pipe. The word got out all over the world. It turns out we were second to none.

"The Japanese were here. The Germans came here. We build pipe mills all over the world," said Grimoldi. He worked 43 years for Basalt and Kaiser.

During the heyday of the fabrication plant in the 1960s and '70s, "everybody had their input. Nobody was so high up in those days. We listened to anybody in the shop. Nobody knew it all, but together we came up with a hell of a design," he said.

Carl Bunch, who went on to become a lawyer, worked two summers at the steel plant in the late 1950s. He once labored for 16 hours straight inside 20-inch diameter pipe, grinding welds so they were flush.

The incident he remembers most: "I was a matter of yards away when a welder was killed by an overhead crane," he said.

David Margolis worked at Kaiser Steel from 1973 to 1977, checking pipe for defects. "There was a lot of camaraderie, a lot of horse play," he said.

"The pay was $10 plus full benefits. It was good money," he said.

A pipe mill was also "a very dangerous place to work," he said. Pipe would be tested under high pressure water. "There were times when a gate would blow. When I say blow, I mean blow."

He might have made a career of it but he kept getting laid off. That made it tough to raise a family, he said.

Dan Orchid worked for Kaiser from 1972 until 1987. He remembers the job uncertainty. "Every time you turned around, it was 'Oh my God, we're all going to be laid off,'" he said.

Although he earned a solid paycheck, frequent layoffs made a bank reluctant to loan him money to buy a house, he said.

The mill would periodically flood, but veteran employees took this in stride, Orchid said. Once when a flood warning was issued, everyone kept working. "The old man would say, 'Keep welding. We got time.'"

Dan McCabe remembers Kaiser going great guns when he hired on as a welder in 1966. "The pay was so good, I decided not to go to school," he said. "In those days you could get married, buy a home and raise a family on Kaiser wages.

"We became a family," McCabe said of his Kaiser years. "We were local kids mainly. We all grew up together down there. It became more than a workplace."

He will always remember working on the BART tunnels and the Eureka, "the largest oil drilling rig ever produced on the West Coast.

"I welded on the leg section," he said.

Lavery Ruth, 85, a native of Oklahoma, worked for Kaiser from 1956 to 1984 as a forklift operator. "I was making damn good money," said Ruth, who worked as many as 600 hours of overtime in a year.

When he got married, he insisted that his wife stay home and raise their children. "If we needed more money, I worked more overtime," he said.

Steve Johnson remembers working on several top secret projects, "things we couldn't even talk about." In 1985, he fabricated "weird-shaped sections" for Lockheed. "We didn't know if it was for outer space or what," he said.

Two years ago he learned that it was part of a stealth boat for the Navy that wouldn't be picked up on radar.

When Kaiser went under, Johnson jumped to Napa Pipe. He worked up until this fall in security. Now 57, he expects to look for work again.

Mick Doherty is vice president of sales for ScanAlert, an Internet security company located in Napa Valley Corporate Park, a stone's throw from where his grandfather, Karl "the Blacksmith" Kremesec, worked for Basalt and Kaiser from 1940 to 1963.

"He built these enormous things," said Doherty, who inherited his grandfather's retirement scrapbook. The book features black and white photos of steel fabrications -- tunnel liners, bridge piers and oil refineries -- that tower over the workers who built them.

Maybe it's a good thing that his grandfather retired before Kaiser collapsed into bankruptcy in 1987, Doherty said. "He would have been astounded that that happened to Kaiser."

Today's Napa would be equally shocking to this Hungarian immigrant who only knew a welder's life. Karl the Blacksmith would not relate to a Napa that is "being gentrified and going upscale," he said.

Ben Desrosiers put in nearly a full career at Basalt and Kaiser, becoming a "layout man" in the fabrication plant. "I got a diamond stick pin for 30 years. I got a diamond watch for my 35 years, and a layoff notice for my 36th year," he said.