re: #359 wheat-dogghazi-mailgate

This is not the reference I recall reading, but it agrees with my memory of it.

worldhistoria.com

…snip

If you’ve ever seen footage of high iron workers back in the day, it’s just amazing. It’s not just the guys walking nonchalantly along a foot-wide girder hundreds of feet in the air. The rivets used to join the girders together had to be red hot, and were hammered into place. One or two guys would heat the rivets in a furnace till red hot, then toss them with tongs to the riveters, who would catch them in a small bucket. Like baseball practice, but somewhat more dangerous.

That was a frequent image in the comic books and cartoon humor of the 1950s, and would make little or no sense today.