You Had a Job for Life Read online

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  © 2018 Jamie Sayen

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  For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sayen, Jamie, author.

  Title: You had a job for life : story of a company town / Jamie Sayen.

  Description: Hanover : University Press of New England, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017013164 (print) | LCCN 2017033176 (ebook) | ISBN 9781512601404 (epub, mobi, & pdf) | ISBN 9781512601398 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Paper industry—New Hampshire—Groveton Case studies. | Paper mills—New Hampshire—Groveton—Case studies. | Labor—New Hampshire—Groveton—Case studies. | Plant shutdowns—New Hampshire—Groveton—Case studies. | Unemployed—New Hampshire—Groveton—Case studies. | Groveton (N.H.)—Economic conditions.

  Classification: LCC HD9828.G76 (ebook) | LCC HD9828.G76 S29 2018 (print) | DDC 338.4/76760974221—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013164

  For Rachel O’Meara

  I think back then everybody had a good job, was making good money. I don’t know if everybody was happy, but at least they had a pretty secure place to work. Right now the town is, I think, in turmoil. Nobody has a job; well, they have jobs, but they’re not making twenty bucks an hour like they were in the mill. Once you got in the mill back then, unless you chose to leave there, you had a job for life. I think times were a lot better in Groveton back then. There was beer joints all over the place, and everybody was making a living, and everybody was happy. We lived right across the tracks, and I used to bitch about the sound of the mill in the summer when the windows are open, but it was a pretty good sound when you was working here. I didn’t have to drive to work. Five minutes, I was in my job. Unbelievable.

  LAWRENCE “LOLLY” LAPOINTE | worked at the mill for over thirty years

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  Builders and Destroyers

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Life of the Town

  CHAPTER TWO

  Feeding the Mill

  CHAPTER THREE

  Making Paper

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Prosperous Plant

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ratville, NH

  CHAPTER SIX

  Three Generations of Wemysses

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Crown Prince

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Perfect Balance

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Dark Side

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Fateful Decision

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  End of an Era

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Worst Years

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Best Years

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Battle We Couldn’t Win

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Controllables and Uncontrollables

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  F This

  EPILOGUE

  They Ruined This Town

  POSTSCRIPT

  The Day When Corporate America Doesn’t Run Us

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Introduction

  BUILDERS AND DESTROYERS

  JAMES CAMPBELL WEMYSS SR. purchased the bankrupt paper mill in Groveton, New Hampshire, in 1940. “Old Jim,” as he was known around town, revived the mill and the town’s fortunes. His son, Jim Jr., was seriously wounded as a nineteen-year-old soldier in 1945. He joined the family business three years later. Father and son diversified the mill’s product lines and doubled the size of the mill in the quarter century following World War II.

  The senior Wemyss owned the mill outright until the Wemyss family merged with Diamond International in 1968. Jim Jr. continued to rule over the mill and the village of Groveton for another fifteen years as vice president of Diamond and a member of Diamond’s board of directors. In 1982, the Anglo-French financier Sir James Goldsmith completed a hostile takeover of Diamond International. Jim Jr. no longer controlled the northern New Hampshire paper mill, and the era of engaged local ownership of the mill ended. The following year, Goldsmith sold the mill to James River of Richmond, Virginia. The new owner eventually starved the mill of investment capital. Late in 1992, Wisconsin-based Wausau Paper Mills Company bought the dying mill for the bargain price of $20 million. Wausau invested lavishly until 2000; thereafter, austerity reigned. In 2007, Wausau closed the Groveton mill without consulting local management. A “covenant” Wausau placed on the mill deed forbade future owners from making paper.

  For over thirty years, Jim Wemyss Jr. was involved in every aspect of the mill’s operations. When the paper machines were making bad paper, young Jim was renowned for throwing his coat on the floor, stomping on it, and then ranting and raving at the unlucky superintendent of paper machines. Wemyss was also a notorious practical joker who might light a cherry bomb and fling it anonymously into the office of one of his mill managers, or fire off his small cannon to entertain an IRS agent assigned to audit the mill. Many of his employees loved Wemyss; others loathed him. Most respected his encyclopedic knowledge of the mill, his loyalty to his workers, his commitment to promote union men to management positions, and his willingness to pitch in during a crisis.

  From the air, the Groveton Papers mill appeared as a large rectangle that was oriented from southwest to northeast. This aerial view, looking southwest, taken in 1993, shows the mill complex. The sections nearest to the Upper Ammonoosuc River were the oldest. They contained (from top of photo to bottom): the wood room, the old pulp mill (removed after 1972) and the Groveton Paper Board pulp mill, the bleach plant, the water filtration plant, and the boilers. The large middle section housed Number 1 and 2 paper machines (Number 6 replaced Number 2 in 1972); the electric and maintenance shops; the stock prep department; the building housing Number 3 and 4 paper machines, and old Number 4 finishing room. The long flat-roofed Verrill Building that was added in 1960–1961 contained the main office, the fine-papers finishing department, and the warehouses and shipping department. The section at the far right was the Groveton Paper Board addition of 1966–1967 that housed Number 5 paper machine. (Courtesy GREAT)

  On one occasion, a hose had fallen into the stock chest and become entangled in the agitator; the crew was about to drain the tank when Wemyss appeared and countermanded the order: “I’d just come from a party, and I had a tuxedo on. I said, ‘Anybody with a sharp knife?’ All paper people had knives. I took my bow tie, coat, and shirt off and dove into the stock chest, deeper than this room. I’m a scuba diver. I knew where the agitator was, and I went down and grabbed it [the hose] like an octopus, and cut it all off in hunks and came up, handed it to them, and said, ‘Let’s start this goddamned place up.’ I came out to the car; my wife said, ‘What’s all that black all over you? Go home. Get in the shower. You look terrible’ [laughs]. We did crazy things; that’s all. Don’t ask me why.”

  Greg Cloutier, today a successful hydropower developer, was the son of two mill workers, nephew to a dozen or so more, and a childhood chum of Jim Wemyss III. Greg earned a degree in engineering and eventually returned to his hometown. For fifteen years he worked intimately with Jim Jr. at the mill. Like his boss, Greg has an alpha male temperament. Both men cared passionately about the mill, and this often led to conflict. “Fought him all the time,” Cloutier told me with a smile.

  Shirley MacDow, Wemyss’s top assistant for over half a century, had t
he unenviable task of restoring the peace—or, better, of heading off the next explosion. MacDow also had to give employees “performance reviews.” “I hated to give performance reviews,” she said, “but it was part of the system, so we did it.” Although she thought Cloutier “was a very capable young man,” she recalled he scored poorly on the category “Learn to get along with Mr. Wemyss.” “I think he got zero on that all the time,” she laughed. “I knew when things were getting a little touchy, when to try to do whatever it took to avoid that, which might be telling Greg ‘Go away for a little while. Come back tomorrow.’” Cloutier praised her gift for keeping the peace: “Shirley was a lot better manager than I think she got credit for because she did a good job at soothing Mr. Wemyss. If I kept her informed of what was going on, she kept Mr. Wemyss informed. And that kept the fire down.”

  Not always. In separate interviews, Cloutier and Wemyss told me about an epic battle over whether to change a felt on the paperboard machine. I have taken the liberty of weaving their stories together as if they had been told in the same conversation.

  CLOUTIER: It must have been three o’clock in the morning, and he and I had a hell of a blowup. I think everybody left the machine room, and I stormed out.

  WEMYSS: These felts used to cost ten thousand bucks apiece. One of our managers [Cloutier]—and he’s a good man—said, “I’ve got to shut it down and cut the felt off.” I looked at him and said, “No, you’re not cutting anything off. Go get that car washing machine that has three-thousand-pound pressure outlet. Go down to the basement and wash the damn felt.” “I won’t do it; I’ll quit.” I said, “No doors are locked. I’ll go down and wash it.”

  CLOUTIER: “I can’t do this. This is not the way I want to leave this.” So I came back.

  WEMYSS: I started washing the felt, and I looked around, and he was right next to me. I said, “You hold it for a while,” and we cleaned the felt up, and it ran for thirty days after that. I said, “You had a plugged shower in the back; you didn’t see it.” Showers have nozzles, and if one gets plugged, it’s pretty hard to see with the steam and heat like that. If the felt gets dirty in that area, it can run a wet streak. I guess I’ve been around so long you’ve got to learn something.

  CLOUTIER: I had a chance a little while ago to thank him for that because I know I would not be successful today if I had not learned some of his techniques.

  SAYEN: Studied with the master?

  CLOUTIER: I did. I did. Like I said, I spent a lifetime working for him. He gave me a lot of latitude to build, and it was fun.

  Despite their frequent blowups, they never stayed angry with each other. The outbursts were triggered by frustration that the mill was not meeting production goals, rather than personal animosity. “We were both pretty adrenaline junkies,” Cloutier laughed. His parents had long ago advised their son: “‘You’ve got to show the man respect, but don’t take any shit from him.’ I always did respect him.”

  In the summer of 2016, Greg and I visited Jim Jr. As we were saying good-bye on the driveway, Greg asked me to take a photo of the two men. Instinctively, the ninety-year-old Wemyss and his sixty-five-year-old protégé squared up like prizefighters. As I snapped the picture, Wemyss’s middle finger emerged from his fist.

  ONE LOVELY SUMMER AFTERNOON six years earlier, Jim Wemyss Jr. and I were sitting on the shore of Maidstone Lake, Vermont, a twenty-minute drive from Groveton. Wemyss was railing against Wall Street financiers in general and Sir James Goldsmith in particular. He blamed them for the decline of the United States paper industry. “It’s terrible. It’s terrible,” he raged. “It’s destroyed the industry as far I was concerned. What the hell are you going to do about it? What’s going to start this mill up? They ruined it with that damned, stupid idiot [Goldsmith]. There’s nothing in the world that will ever start that mill up again. It’s destroyed because of this idiot. I hate them with such a passion.”

  I was startled by Wemyss’s outburst. “I thought you were a capitalist,” I spluttered. “I’m a building capitalist,” he shot back. “I’m not a person who tears things apart for gain. I never did that. I wouldn’t do it. These people in Wall Street have been disgraceful. What they’ve done in the last fifty years in this country.”

  THE DEMISE of the Groveton paper mill devastated the region’s economy and brought despair to the community. The covenant was the ultimate insult. Even more than the mill closing, the accursed covenant left scores of former mill workers feeling betrayed. In the first interview I conducted for the Groveton Mill Oral History Project, I asked Francis Roby: “If one of the big guys at Wausau walked in here, what would you say?”

  “I’d tell him to get out,” he answered tersely. “Point blank. I don’t want him in my home. That’s what I think of Wausau.”

  Many of the mill workers served in the nation’s military in times of war and peace. At the mill, they endured stressful, dangerous working conditions, morning, afternoon, and night. When the mill was struggling to survive, they did everything asked of them to keep the mill running. Global economic forces beyond their control and decisions made in corporate headquarters a thousand miles away killed the mill and took away their livelihood.

  After 2000 the nation’s paper industry sank into a prolonged slump. Commodity paper prices declined as demand for fine papers fell and low-cost imports flooded the market. Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, natural gas prices soared, and the mill’s energy bill ate up profits.

  Under increasing pressure from corporate headquarters, the mill’s last superintendent, Groveton native Dave Atkinson, reminded mill employees that because they could not control unfavorable energy and commodity prices, they should focus on “controllables,” such as reducing energy consumption, water use, workplace accidents, and generation of unsellable paper, called “broke.” “We need to stay focused on what we can control,” he emphasized month after month. “We can’t control the market. All we can control is how efficiently, how cost-effectively we work. Focus on that, and we’ll be OK.” The mill workforce performed miracles to improve productivity, reduce costs, and keep hope alive.

  The litany of uncontrollables that doomed the Groveton mill is familiar to rural and urban communities throughout the United States that have lost an auto plant, or a steel, textile, or paper mill: absentee owners with scant commitment to the local community; declining investment in modernizing the aging machinery and infrastructure; soaring energy prices coupled with stagnant or declining commodity prices; and competition from mills and factories located in other regions of the United States or in foreign countries where wages are lower and environmental protections are lax to nonexistent. “Everything you see is made in China, right?” Wemyss angrily declared as we gazed upon the shimmering lake.

  “That’s why I’m not a big fan of free trade,” I responded.

  “I’m not either,” he agreed.

  Without the mill, the region’s economy collapsed: taxes soared; families reluctantly pulled up roots in search of gainful employment; school enrollment declined; and politicians offered empty promises to solve the crisis. To some, the fabric of the community seemed to be unraveling.

  Nearly a decade after the Groveton mills ceased to make paper, the greater Groveton economy remains shell-shocked. From time to time an out-of-state entrepreneur rides into town with plans to build a wood-burning energy plant, a liquid natural gas distribution center, a furniture plant, even a medical marijuana farm. Hope soars . . . and nothing happens. Time after time, the hope bringer did not have the requisite financial backing to pull off the miracle that would revive Groveton. Today, in the heart of Groveton, along the banks of the lovely Upper Ammonoosuc River, in a valley dominated by the Percy Peaks, Sugarloaf Mountain, and Cape Horn, most of the old mill complex has vanished, and the downtown business district has twice as many empty storefronts as flourishing businesses.

  It is time to explore alternative approaches to economic revitalization. For Groveton and the communities of the Upper
Connecticut River Valley to gain control over their economic and cultural destiny, they need to address these questions:

  Why was the mill prosperous for so many years?

  What caused the mill’s demise?

  What lessons can residents of the Groveton region learn from the successes and failures of the mill as they strive to build a vibrant local economy?

  At a time of rapid, human-caused climate change, how can we design a prosperous, low-carbon economy that makes creative use of our natural landscape while conserving, preserving, and restoring the ecological integrity of our native ecosystems?

  Communities throughout the United States that have lost their economic mainstay must grapple with similar challenges. Each community is a reflection of its unique topography, climate, ecology, and land-use history. In times of economic crisis, each must discover its own distinctive path to revitalization. The experiences of other communities’ struggles to revive a failed economy can provide former mill and factory towns with valuable insights. I hope the stories in You Had a Job for Life offer consolation, inspiration, and a few laughs to those who are struggling to regain control over their own destinies.

  A NOTE ON THE GROVETON MILL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT AND EDITING ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPTS

  When I began to gather stories for the Groveton Mill Oral History Project late in 2009, the Groveton Paper Board Company had been closed for four years, and the Wausau-Groveton mill had ceased making paper two years earlier. Former shipping department employee Bruce Blodgett gave me a tour of the dank, dark mill colossus a few days after Christmas. The flat, industrial roof had more than a few leaks. The cavernous interior had been stripped of most of the machinery. Fortunately, Wausau’s two fine-papers machines were still more or less intact, and I was able to visualize the papermaking process. Those monstrous machines, installed in 1907 and 1972, were considered small, slow, and old. A year or so after my initial tour of the ghost mill, the paper machines were yanked out and scrapped behind the mill. In the autumn of 2012 a wrecking crew began to demolish the mill.