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  Wemyss realized a small New Hampshire paper mill could thrive only if it modernized in an efficient and thrifty manner: “I never stopped,” he boasted. “We had forty-two men in our construction crew, or more. I kept them busy all the time.” In 1960 the construction crew began the largest single addition in the mill’s history, a thousand-foot-long building adjacent to the two buildings that housed the paper machines. Wemyss named it in honor of Bill Verrill, his longtime plant engineer. The new offices were at the end of the Verrill Building, nearest the town and adjacent to a spacious fine-papers finishing room. The remainder of the building housed a cavernous shipping complex that included a warehouse and railroad tracks with a capacity for sixteen railroad boxcars and six docks for tractor-trailers. Shipping department crews were especially grateful for the indoor railroad-track loading facilities when it was thirty below zero outside.

  The steel for the Verrill Building came from the Grumman Aircraft building in Bethpage, Long Island, that built World War II dive bombers. Wemyss crowed: “They practically gave it to me for four cents a pound, delivered to Groveton, match marked. My father said, ‘You’ve lost your mind. Do you realize how much that building’s going to cost?’ It was one thousand feet long and 150 feet wide: $580,000. That’s the price of a house today in a lot of places. Can you imagine that? There’s no buildings in New Hampshire or any place that are built as rugged as those buildings are.”

  Once I asked Wemyss how he dealt with major screwups during the construction process. “We couldn’t afford them,” he snapped. “It’s a family business. You didn’t make a decision and then forget it. No. You were there too. If something came up, and a decision had to be made, you could make that decision or correct it. Everybody worked together. That’s Groveton. We wouldn’t bring in outside people to do it. We did it ourselves.” Wemyss’s policy sustained scores of local jobs, saved huge sums of money, and built up a construction crew with intimate knowledge of the entire mill.

  Fred Shannon and the construction crew loved working for Jim Wemyss: “He always treated us like kings. He could have had the president of the United States in his office, but if we showed up to see him about something, he’d kick that guy right out; he didn’t care. We were important to him. That’s what made you feel good. He’d always come right up and talk to us.” When Boston-based steelworkers picketed the mill to protest Wemyss’s use of his local construction crew, he told John Gonyer, the crew supervisor: “It looks dirty around here; get that fire hose and wash that street up a little.” The soggy pickets eventually departed.

  Wemyss loved his wild construction crew: “They were a tough bunch. I used to have to get ’em out of jail sometimes on Monday morning. The jail used to be right there by the railroad track.” He took pride in the crew’s ability to do anything on short notice: “John Gonyer and people like that were the steel riggers. The best. ‘John, put up a building from here to there, will you?’ That’s all you had to say to John. That’s the type of people who were in Groveton.”

  “A lot of times, Jim would ask me if I could handle a job,” Gonyer recalled. “I’d say, ‘Piece of cake.’ Make it sound good. That’s my boss I’m talking to. A lot of times he’d say, ‘You know what I want, order the steel.’” Gonyer’s best friend and coworker, Fred Shannon, said Wemyss “had his blueprints right in his head.”

  When the construction crew built the bleach plant in the early 1960s, it had to devise a way to install heavy machines thirty feet in the air. “We fabricated all that steel from the ground up,” Gonyer said. “It was quite a project, because it had no crane. We’d always find a way. I think we had cables strung from one building to another and would hang up chain falls from that to get a [sixty-foot-long] column up in the air. Now we’ve got to put in these I-beams for the roof part of it. You’ve got to have room above the column for your chain falls and everything to hang on. I made up a bracket that went on a column with kind of a gooseneck on it, and it clamped onto the column, and it probably went we’ll say four to six feet above the existing column, and I put my falls on that and pulleyed the beam into place. It was slow work, but we got it done.

  “We had heavy equipment in there too. Some of it had to be jacked from the ground floor, I’m guessing thirty feet in the air. Eight-by-eight cribbing as we went up. It was pretty shaky work. We would stabilize the cribbing to the existing building as we went up. You’d go up a ways, and then you’d tie off to keep the cribbing from tipping. We bulled. We worked hard. I guess we put enough thought into safety, but back then you kind of stretched it a little at times.” I asked about OSHA, and Gonyer retorted: “Never heard of them.”

  Despite the hair-raising nature of the work, the construction crew suffered only one fatality. On April 25, 1960, four men, including thirty-seven-year-old James Ledger, were forty feet up on a catwalk removing a high-pressure steam valve that weighed about three-quarters of a ton. The men put a chain around the pipe so that it could be lowered after it was cut loose. Inexperience led to a tragic mistake. “The falls were all rigged up ready to take this valve down,” Gonyer remembered. “And the bolts were all cut; they had to be drove out. The valve was upright, and he made a hitch on the valve, but he hooked on the bottom part of it. So when he picked it [cut it loose], the valve flipped, and it hit [Ledger], and there was an inch-and-a-half angle-iron rail in there, and it put him right through it and he went down on his head.”

  Until the early 1960s, blue laws required the mill to shut down on Sundays. Dave Miles, a conscientious paper machine operator, described how the weekly work stoppage tormented him: “We’d shut down on Sunday [morning], clean the machine up, get it all ready, and then go home. I may be in bed an hour and I’d think, ‘My goodness, did I shut this valve off?’ I’d get up and go down to the mill. I couldn’t help it. I don’t think I ever failed to do something important, but it just didn’t stop me.”

  Wemyss considered the blue laws a wintertime curse because boiler operators had to start up cold boilers at 4 a.m. on Monday in “goddamn twenty-five below zero.” He explained: “Every time you start a motor up that’s been down, you blew one. Starting up and shutting down is the worst thing you can do in a paper mill. You’ve got a turbine as big as this room, and you let it cool off, then you’ve got to get it balanced up and heated up and bring it up to temperature.”

  Shortly after the Verrill Building was completed, Wemyss attempted to run the mill seven days a week. This provoked a brief strike on September 23, 1962. Two days later, Wemyss withdrew a controversial clause in the proposed contract that mandated work on Sundays when the mill was operating.6 The following evening, both locals voted to end the strike.

  The era of blue laws ended when the mill negotiated a new labor contract in 1964. The new contract instituted the “southern” swing shift for paper machine operators and stock prep workers. The swing shift rotates four crews on three shifts. Each crew works seven consecutive days and then takes two, two, and three days off. At the end of twenty-eight days, each crew will have worked twenty-one days and had seven days off. To compensate for the roughly three hundred work hours lost annually under the new system, workers received a sixteen-cent-an-hour raise when the swing shift system was implemented. This meant that an average worker who worked no overtime and took no holidays or vacations would earn about $130 a year less under the new system but enjoy forty more days off from work every year. Few workers suffered that $130 loss, because they could quickly recoup it through overtime opportunities that also increased as the mill ran full time. Additionally, the mill hired more workers to fill out the fourth shift. Maintenance and construction crews continued to work day shifts (with ample overtime opportunities), and the finishing rooms and shipping departments remained under the old blue law schedule of closing on Sundays.

  It had become necessary to abolish the blue laws, Wemyss explained, because “what happened is everybody wanted paid holidays, Christmas, New Year’s, Fourth of July. Then all of a sudden everybody wanted hea
lth care. Then everybody wanted two weeks, three weeks—we ended up with five or six weeks vacation. Either run full, or you can’t support it. The whole industry went seven days a week.” Gary Paquette, a longtime paperboard machine tender, wryly suggested: “Jimmy wanted to make more money.”

  Wemyss acknowledged that working a swing shift was “very debilitating.” Research into the health risks of shift work suggests that disrupting natural rhythms often leads to diminished exercise and an increased consumption of junk food that can contribute to obesity and diabetes. The risk of cardiovascular disease in shift workers may increase. Many shift workers suffer serious gastrointestinal problems, including higher risk of peptic ulcers, nausea, diarrhea, and constipation. There is also evidence of problems with pregnancy among shift workers, and a significantly higher risk of breast cancer for women with more than twenty years on a swing shift schedule.7 Shift workers may be at greater risk of depression and mood disorders.

  Swing shifts wreak havoc with family life and social activities. “Summertime, you might be mowing your lawn,” Dave Miles said, “and I’m trying to sleep. Kids might be out playing on a hot day; you’re trying to sleep. For some reason or other, you just can’t sleep.” Ted Caouette said most workers hated the three-to-eleven shift, “because it’s like the best part of the day; it’s the end of the day. The kids are coming home; things are starting to happen; you can enjoy supper together. You couldn’t; that was gone.” Workers on the night shift also usually missed out on evenings with the family because they had to sleep until about 10 p.m. “Most of the time when you woke up,” Caouette recollected, “you were grouchy because you knew you had to go to work.”

  Bill Astle observed: “Studies have shown that the older you get, the more difficult it is to reset your internal clock. I can remember my dad’s comment, ‘As the years go by, I mind shift work more and more.’” That may be one reason a very high percentage of mill workers opted to retire at age sixty-two, even though their Social Security and pensions would have been 18 percent greater if they had worked until sixty-five. Astle’s father, Edgar, died of a heart attack shortly before he could retire.

  Some loved the night shift. “Most people think I’m absolutely nuts,” Sandy White laughed. “I loved the night shift because I’m a night person. As hard as you worked, you could have some fun as long as you got your work done; nobody ever gave you any problem. All the foremen were good. It was quieter, nobody bombing around bugging you. You just went in there, you did your job, and that was the end of it. Day shift, there was so many people [from management] wandering around.”

  When he was hired, Lolly LaPointe said, “It used to be fun to go to work. On the night shift we used to have big fish fries and corn on the cob. We used to use steam lines to cook it. And we used to have big breakfasts sometimes. We’d designate a cook. Somebody had to cover his job when he was cooking. [The supervisors] knew exactly what was going on. Most of them would have breakfast with you. It didn’t hurt nobody; everything was getting done.”

  Wives tended to have their own parties while their husbands worked evenings or nights. I asked Francis Roby if the men had their own parties. He snorted: “The men never hung together. We had enough of each other down there.” Late in his career at the mill, Dave Miles had to transfer off the paper machines because of the wear and tear on his knees from four decades of working on cement floors. He took a day job and marveled at the luxury of “having the night to yourself. I never had weekends off [on shift work]. If you wanted to invite us to supper tonight, we could say, ‘Yeah, we’ll be there.’ Whereas before, it was ‘I’m sorry, Dave’s working three to eleven,’ or ‘I’m sorry, Dave’s got to go to bed.’ When I was working eleven to seven, I’d go bed as soon as I’d get home, usually sleep till ten, eleven o’clock, go back to bed usually at six [p.m.] so I wouldn’t be too tired at night, get up at ten, have something to eat, and then go to work. It was just brutal.”

  THE PAPERBOARD OPERATION had been a huge success since its inception in 1951. The two highest-paying union jobs in the mill throughout the 1950s and 1960s had been “boss machine tender” and “machine tender” on the paperboard machine. By 1965, however, the venerable Number 3 paper machine could no longer compete with more modern, faster, and wider machines. Jim Wemyss approached Groveton’s customers and suggested they join him in forming a new company, Groveton Paper Board, to buy a new, specially designed, corrugated medium paper machine. The Wemyss family would own 50 percent of the new company. With Mead Corporation, St. Joe Paper Company, and Diamond International as partners, Wemyss was able to design and buy a new paper machine from Black Clausen. He borrowed an additional $7 million to construct a new building along the north wall of the Verrill Building.

  During the construction of the Paper Board building, John Gonyer had a Tarzanesque confrontation with Wemyss. “Things were going good; the steel was flying,” Gonyer recalled. “They wanted us to get one bay a day. A lot of steel. You’ve got to put steel in for the ground floor. You’re putting steel in for your siding and their brace work, and it’s a lot of work. A bay is probably twenty feet between columns. I had been after my boss, Earl Livingstone, to get a raise. He said, ‘When I can get the young fella [Wemyss] in a good mood.’ This went on for a month, and so one day Wemyss come a walking down through, and I was up on top of the steel there. I timed it just right, so that when he went by this steel column I come sliding down the column, and I landed right by his feet. I said, ‘I want to speak to you.’ ‘Yes, John, what can I do for you?’ I said, ‘I want more money.’ He stopped and thought a minute. ‘Yup, I can give you more money, John, but when this job is done, I can kiss you good-bye, too.’ I had on a pair of welding gloves, and I threw the welding gloves down by his feet, and I said, ‘Plant one right here, I’m on my way.’ I struck off, and he said, ‘Get your ass back here!’ So I went back, and we negotiated. Jim and I got along good.” Tarzan got his raise, and, thanks to Gonyer, so did all the lead men from the other departments.

  The crew moved the massive new paper machine parts into the new building with a forty-ton crane, and Black Clausen specialists assembled it. Wemyss named the new machine “Love in the Afternoon”: “I said, ‘I’m tired of having it called “Miss Rock Mountain” and “Mr. Granite,” and “Mr. God.”’ That’s what they name paper machines. We printed up labels, ‘Made with “Love in the Afternoon,”’ and we put it in every load that went out. The guys in the converting plants we were selling to [said], ‘Go out and get me a roll of “Love.”’ It got to be a joke with everybody.” Whenever I asked Wemyss why he chose that name, he evaded the question. One time I told him I’d read in a news story that while the construction crew was working around the clock on the Paper Board job, Wemyss would give crew members a couple of hours off in the afternoon; he smiled and said, “That could be.”8

  Number 5 paper machine was dedicated to Old Jim Wemyss on July 28, 1967. When it came time for a trial run of Love in the Afternoon, the crew shut down Number 3, switched a valve, and began pumping stock over to the new machine. Gary Paquette was a back tender on the first run: “They had some high-pressure hoses that had just clamps on them. The pressure was so great, it blew the clamps right off the hoses, so we shut down. Went back over on the other side on Number 3 and started that up again. That was only a couple of days. Then we come back, and after that, we did get started up on it. We started up at around seven hundred feet a minute, seven fifty, right around there. Overall, it started fairly well. We was making paper quite well after two or three weeks.”

  The new machine had fifty-four dryers, each sixty inches in diameter, whereas Number 3’s forty-eight dryers were forty-eight inches. The old machine was operated by hand. Paquette thought the new one, which was controlled by instruments, was easier to operate, but changing a felt was more difficult because felts were heavier. Many crew members wanted to remain on the slower Number 3 when it returned to action. This allowed younger, ambitious men like Paquette to bump up fro
m third hand to back tender. It meant more money, and, Paquette said, “I wanted to make as much money as I could.”

  Paquette worked on Love in the Afternoon until he retired in 1996. Many people hated Number 5 because of the heat, smell, and noise. Paquette learned to cope: “At that time I was young enough that I could take the heat. I’d hate to try to think of it now.” His wife, Beverly, recalled, “When he came home half baked, just leave him alone.” “The first thing I’d do,” Paquette said, “is sit in the chair and go to sleep because it was brutal in that heat sometimes. We had a thermometer setting there against the wall. One hot summer day, 128 degrees. You run over to the water cooler, and you run the water on your wrist; it helped a little bit to cool. That’s the hottest. Most of the time in summer, it was 112, 113, 114. But some of them days, the air just don’t want to go anywhere. That was the toughest shift in the summertime, working three to eleven, because it would be that hot when you’d go in, and it would be ten o’clock before it starts to cool off. The night shift, even in the summertime, wasn’t too bad as far as the heat goes, unless you had some trouble where you had to get right up next to the dryer.” The machine heated the building even in winter, and crews worked in T-shirts year-round.

  Number 5 made “a really loud whistling sound, very shriek,” Paquette remembered. “I had to wear earmuffs.” Paquette’s hearing, unlike that of a great many former mill workers, remained “pretty good.” After his retirement, he and his wife went west in a camper: “We got into South Dakota, and they have those underground caves. I went into one [two hundred feet down], and the park ranger said, ‘I’m going to put the light out, and everybody be really quiet, and you’ll see how quiet it is down here.’ When everybody stopped talking, I heard this, ‘rrreeeooo, reeeoo, reeeoo, reeeoo.’ I was still hearing the cooch roll from the mill two years afterwards. It was really strange.”