Terry "Muffin" Caldwell

Terry Caldwell, who goes by Muffin, first worked at Lodge as a summer job in high school. A few years later in 1982, he came back to Lodge permanently. He was following in the footsteps of his dad and uncles, who also worked at Lodge. Like many newcomers, Muffin’s first job was removing the castings from the sand molds, very hot and dirty work. Since then, he has moved on to other things, including working on the sand machines, pouring iron with the hand ladle (back when it was done by hand!) and maintenance.

Muffin remembers one of his overtime jobs back when Lodge still used a cupola furnace. “The cupola put so many cinders out, like a smokestack,” he recalls. “So we’d shovel the roof off to keep the roof from falling in. There’d be people up on the roof with wheelbarrows and shovels. They’d leave the wheelbarrows up there all the time.” Muffin also remembers the cupola burning out a few times, something that would cause a small explosion. “There’d be a little string of orange coming out the bottom of it, and somebody’d say ‘Get out!’” he remembers. “And you run. Everybody would just leave. The dust would fall off the ceiling and you couldn’t even see. It’d be like midnight in there.”

Muffin now drives the truck that takes pallets of packaged product from the foundry to the warehouse just down the road. His son started working at Lodge a few years ago, making him the third generation in the Caldwell family to work at Lodge.

Thanks for all your hard work over the years, Muffin!