In his introduction to Portraits in Steel (Cornell 1993), labor and public historian Michael Frisch points to limitations in the scripts of postindustrialism. He offers instead the value of portraiture: photography and oral history interview, enacted in this volume by Milton Rogovin’s photographs of former Buffalo, New York, steelworkers in the 1970s and 1980s and Frisch’s oral interviews with those same people, now former steelworkers, also in the 1980s. I will use Frisch’s comments on scripts as a means for dialogue with the presenters at Transatlantic Rustbelts: Scripting Urban Futures, drawing upon my hearing of those presentations. In addition, to demonstrate the value Frisch attributes to portraiture, I will share some of the portraits created by Rogovin and Frisch and use their media—photograph and oral history—to offer a portrait of my father, a former steel worker in Canton, Ohio.