Peter Treiber spent just six years at Bethlehem Steel, a blink of the eye at a 99-year-old company that employed thousands of workers and their descendants from their cradles to their graves. But the 65-year-old photographer has fond memories of working for what once was America's second-largest steel producer, memories he believes deserve to be preserved.

"Bethlehem Steel was a great company. It was a traditional American, old-time company that did a lot of great things. It should be remembered for the good things it did," says Mr. Treiber, who continued shooting Bethlehem operations as a freelance photographer after the company affectionately known as "Bessie" disbanded its 25-person photography department in 1983.

More than 90 of Mr. Treiber's photos, accompanied by text from Elizabeth Kovach, the last person standing in Bethlehem's public affairs department, have been published in a coffee table book, "Inside Bethlehem Steel: The Final Quarter Century" (www. insidebethlehemsteel.com).

In its heyday, the magnitude of Bethlehem Steel's enterprise was not unusual. It was just another U.S. industrial giant. But after decades of downsizing and foreign competition, it's hard for younger generations to appreciate how large companies such as Bethlehem were. It's also hard for them to appreciate the sights and sounds involved in making something as fundamental as steel, an experience Mr. Treiber spent more than two decades documenting.

"The grandeur of it, the scale of it, the drama ... It was an exciting place to visit," he recalled. "People who worked there a long time probably started to treat it like any other job. For me, it was always exciting."

The heat, dirt and darkness involved in photographing tons of molten metal being tapped from a blast furnace is an altogether different assignment than a day at the beach shooting petulant models for the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated.

"They're not going to stop a steel mill for a photographer," Mr. Treiber said.

From 1904, when it was organized by former U.S. Steel executive Charles Schwab, to 2003, when the bankrupt company's assets were sold to International Steel Group, Bethlehem employed more than 1 million people. Its steel was used in San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, Madison Square Garden and other landmarks.

Bethlehem's I-beams, wide flanged steel that remained Bethlehem's symbol even after the company stopped making it, made skyscrapers possible. Its wire rope -- braided steel cables -- was used in the elevators of the World Trade Center, which fell a month before Bethlehem declared bankruptcy.

Mr. Treiber did most of his work for Bethlehem's advertising department. His photos were used in industry publications and were taken to display how the steel could be used or to showcase Bethlehem's technical prowess in making it. They feature gargantuan equipment and the spectacular orange glow of molten metal, but not the hearts and souls of workers.

The only photo where workers take center stage is reminiscent of the hardened blue collar workers featured in Michael Cimino's film, "The Deer Hunter." It features six Bethlehem coal miners. Five of them are bearded. They are standing defiantly inside a mine, the tops of their heads inches shy of the mine roof, the lights on their helmets glaring into the camera. In front of them is a gleaming metallic statue of a woman holding a child, a safety award the company won from the National Mining Association.

Each time Mr. Treiber was hired for a Bethlehem assignment, after he was let go, he would see more handwriting on the wall, the ever-present message that workers either made gallows humor about or ignored. Even though Mr. Treiber and other photographers knew they would lose their jobs a year before it happened, he can't recall a single one of them looking for a job before it happened. Like many steel workers of that generation, the mill was their everything, whether they were on or off the job.

"That was their life. That was the only thing they knew. It's not surprising they were in denial," he said.

Ms. Kovach captures it best in her introduction. She writes: "No one was chained to a coke oven door, a blast furnace sub car, a rolling mill stand or a desk. We all saw the cracks widening over the years and made our decisions to stay," Ms. Kovach writes.

In one respect, the sentiment expresses the sentiments of the Titanic crew members who didn't seek an option to going down with the ship. But on a deeper level, it's the sentiment of loyal workers who believed in their employer despite the risks and hardships, who refused to give up faith in America's industrial might despite the ever darkening clouds.

That pride and loyalty is hard to comprehend in a global economy where workers are responsible for their own retirement plans and change jobs as often as a major league manager changes pitchers. The days when that kind of pride and loyalty were second nature may be long gone, but the memories of them should be preserved. Maybe one day, they'll make it from the museum to the workplace.