You Had a Job for Life Read online

  Paquette thought making corrugated paper was easier than fine papers: “When you make the corrugated material, it just goes in the digesters. There’s no looking to see if there’s dirt in the paper because everything goes in the corrugated. But when you’re working on fine paper, you’ve got to make sure it’s good and white. It was a lot touchier job. It was a lot easier with the corrugated. It didn’t matter because they chewed up the bark and everything.” Paperboard stock was smellier because fine paper stock had been thoroughly washed and bleached.

  As soon as Love in the Afternoon was running smoothly, Number 3 was rebuilt to make fine papers again. Dryers manufactured by Sandy Hill Company replaced the old dryers that had gotten out of round during the Depression. The rebuild included a new head box, an expensive new size press, and a new calender stack. When it resumed operations, Number 3 produced one hundred tons of fine paper a day, double the output of Numbers 1 and 2. The ancient pulp mill could not satisfy three fine-papers machines and a tissue machine, and the mill had to purchase bales of pulp from other mills.

  The Paper Board expansion, the installation of Number 5 paper machine, and the rebuild of Number 3 were completed by the beginning of 1968. Jim Wemyss believed the small Groveton mill was “the perfect balance” in the 1960s. It produced an impressive array of tissues, fine papers, and stationery products, as well as paperboard. The world the mill had operated in, however, was in flux. Although it would be a decade and a half before people realized it, the era of local ownership was about to end.

  Democrat, May 14, 1952.

  Democrat, May 21, 1952.

  Democrat, May 28 and June 4, 1952.

  Democrat, June 25, 1952.

  Democrat, April 12, 1950.

  Democrat, September 26, 1962.

  Anders Knutsson, “Health Disorders of Shift Workers,” Occupational Medicine 53 (2003): 103–8; Joseph LaDou, “Health Effects of Shift Work,” Western Journal of Medicine 137 (December 1982): 525–30.

  The story appeared in Peter Riviere, “‘Jimmy, Jr.’ Honored at Plant Ceremony,” Caledonian-Record (St. Johnsbury, VT), July 29, 1998.

  Chapter Nine

  THE DARK SIDE

  WHEN SEVERAL HUNDRED people converge morning, afternoon, and night to labor under exhausting and harsh conditions, there are bound to be social problems. The smell, noise, heat, chemicals, swing shift, stress of meeting production expectations, breakdowns in machinery, labor-management conflicts, dangerous work environment, and human frailty test one’s endurance.

  Some conflicts were inevitable under old-school management practices. A member of a paper machine crew bid onto another job to escape his supervisor: “He treated everybody like a dog. Hollers. Bellow at you. After I got out of there, oh, I don’t know—quite a while—I wouldn’t even speak to the man. How many times would I see him in the store, ‘Hi.’ I turned my head and walked right away; I had nothing to do with him. I was ready to quit any day of the week. Otherwise than that, it weren’t too bad.”

  Union representatives handled grievances of their members—mostly small matters involving a few hours of overtime or issues of seniority. The union and management usually worked out a compromise on more serious issues such as chronic absenteeism, personality conflicts, drinking, and stealing. Joan Breault sadly recalled an occasion when the union could not protect a worker who was being bullied by coworkers: “We had a squabble once from some finishing room people. A couple of guys were harassing a fellow that wasn’t too bright. It ended up he threatened to kill a whole bunch of them. The company had to get rid of him because he could not work around those guys. Even though they were told to leave him alone, they wouldn’t leave him alone, and nobody could prove when they were harassing this man. We tried our darnedest to get the company to find some way to keep him. We knew what was going on. We couldn’t get proof of it. Not all things are fair.”

  A few mill workers teased a colleague by alleging that Web Barnett, head of the local union, was cutting a deal with management to hurt this fellow. The victim of the prank was so angered he took a gun to Barnett’s house to shoot him. Fortunately, the Barnetts were out of town, and the following day the union president was able to convince the man of his innocence.

  Mill managers tolerated the inevitable pranks and stunts pulled on fellow workers because they helped release pressure and stress. When a convert to the Jehovah’s Witnesses stood atop some bales and began preaching to his coworkers, a couple of them “got the high-pressure hose and turned the hose on,” the widow of one of the pranksters laughed. “Then they put the hose back, and they ran so he wouldn’t know who did it. They never saw him get up to preach to the boys again.”

  Mill workers were allowed to take home a couple of rolls of toilet paper, and supervisors tended to turn a blind eye when employees also took flashlights, gloves, and other low-cost supplies. I asked one longtime worker about pilfering. He replied: “Nobody ever stole nothing. Nobody ever stole nothing.” “Borrowed?” I suggested. “Yes. Nobody would say anything if you went up and took a couple of rolls, four rolls [of toilet paper], put ’em in a bag and took ’em home. But always somebody, ‘I’ll take a case.’ After a while it gets out of hand.”

  One 1960s-era college student was having car engine troubles. His wife described how it was repaired: “His older coworkers, longtime mill employees, [said] ‘Why don’t we see what we can do.’ This man took it upon himself, and through the mill ordered the part that [he] needed, and one in reserve. [My husband] said, ‘I can’t take that.’ ‘Yes you can’ [laughs]. [My husband] felt he didn’t have a choice because it was the standard mores. If he had refused it, it would have been an insult, so you kind of have to go along with it. But [he] was very nervous that he had pilfered this part, that it might someday come back to haunt him. He was under the impression that it was done all the time.”

  Alcohol consumption in the mill posed a more serious problem. “The Wemysses didn’t care as long as you done your job and behaved yourself,” Herb Miles thought. “You could bring beer in. Up on the paper machines, on Number 4 and 3, they had a sink with a spigot of water running cold all the time, floating with beer. The guys would go along and have a beer, think nothing of it.”

  The pipe shop was one of countless celebrated hiding places, Thurman Blodgett said: “You could put your hand in any piece of pipe or elbow or something and pull it out with a jug. A lot of times you went in there sober and came out drunk.” Lenny Fournier said electricians encountered hidden bottles in every nook and cranny of the mill: “We used to get around a lot, changing lightbulbs. It was all screw bulbs—big black ones. We’d go behind some of those tanks, and God, there’d probably be a case of beer cans and beer bottles. Bottles then more than cans. They’d be in someplace where there wouldn’t be any light.”

  The old warehouse was another celebrated spot for hiding the evidence. Bill Astle became superintendent of shipping in the 1980s: “I recall Leo Rich, whose position I took over when he retired, telling about adding on to the warehouse [around 1960]. There was a section that had an old wooden floor. When they came in to tear the floor out, he said, ‘My God, you’ve never seen such a stash of beer bottles and whiskey bottles.’ It was everywhere. Everyone threw it when they were done consuming it.”

  Thurman Blodgett’s earliest job was as a pool laborer on the construction crew. One day he was running a jackhammer; the next day he was moving cement. Often there was temptation: “Down in construction—‘Hey, come on over here behind this wall and have a drink.’ Sometimes if you’re working with a wheelbarrow, it gets pretty crooked down there.”

  Older mill workers often sent the younger men on booze runs. “When I was working at the mill driving the bark truck, a lot of times when the boys were doing a lot of drinking on weekends, they’d send me to get them a couple of cases of beer,” Hadley Platt recalled. “Boucher’s Grocery Store was right across the street. I drove up there with the bark truck and picked up two cases of beer and put them in the t
ruck, and who walked out of the Eagle Hotel [across the street] and saw me doing it was Jimmy [Wemyss]. I took it back to the boys on the drum barker. He never said a word, and I never said nothing either.”

  As a fifth hand on the paper machines in the early 1950s, Lawrence Benoit often was sent on errands: “They used to send me to the liquor store all the time. Castile’s and, I think, Fleischmann’s. Pints mostly. Most of the time they’d go on the back side of the paper machine because all the bearings were water cooled. You had water going in and water coming out. They’d take that pint and lay it right in the gutter. Nice cold water. When I first went in there, just about everybody drank on the job.”

  Gary Paquette spent over four decades on the paperboard machine: “I wasn’t much of a boozer. Once in a while a guy would bring in a bottle or two. But you don’t want to be fooling around with booze on the paper machine.” Puss Gagnon advanced the counterintuitive theory that the mill was a more dangerous place when one was sober: “I never heard of anybody getting hurt drinking. They’d get hurt quicker sober.”

  Christmas was the one occasion when drinking in the mill was sanctioned. “At Christmas it was the supervisors, the big superintendent of the paper machine, all the tour bosses would chip in,” Lolly LaPointe, who was hired in 1966, remembered. “After you got the machines shut down, and everything was washed up, they’d open up the laboratory down there, and they’d had a shelf completely full of liquor that they’d buy for the crew. Some of them guys would get totally, absolutely shitfaced. It ended up some guy fell down, got hurt, or something. He was still on the clock. I don’t think Wemyss ever came in there; I never saw him in there, but I’ll guarantee he knew what was going on.”

  Wemyss had his reasons for not attending the workers’ Christmas parties: “I couldn’t get involved with them because anytime people that aren’t used to drinking have two drinks, all of a sudden they’d decide to become argumentative or start to tell me everything that was wrong with me. A lot of genius comes out of a drink. To avoid their later embarrassment, [it was best not to] be there. But I did hear they were dingers.”

  Cat-and-mouse drinking at the mill frequently masked more serious drinking-related problems at home where alcoholic husbands verbally or physically abused wives and children. Neal Brown recalled: “I think perhaps behind closed doors, things weren’t always as pleasant as they could have been, either due to the mill [or] the stresses of not having a lot of money. A lot of men who came back from the war, and had significant life-changing experiences in the war, perhaps had found alcohol as a way to get past it. There were some kids that you knew that were beaten pretty regularly, but you didn’t talk about [it]: ‘We know that what’s his name drinks and beats his wife and kids.’ But it wasn’t something that you would openly confront. In retrospect, you would recognize if one of your friends came down to play and had a black eye. You knew they had been batted around a little bit.”

  Mickey King and Bill Astle were sons of lifelong mill workers. In the 1970s both served as social workers at Alpha House, a home for troubled and abused boys that operated from 1971 to 1977 in Lancaster. “I remember [working with] a number of kids whose fathers worked at the mill,” King told me. “Alcoholism was the problem. There were those people that died young, too, because of alcoholism. It complicated things like diabetes. Just so wrapped up in the alcohol that they couldn’t deal with the illness of the diabetes. I saw a number of cases like that.”

  “There’s a certain amount of negativity that took place [at the mill],” King said. “Just dealing with the lack of safety in the early days; there were a number of deaths and amputations and all kinds of things. Working with the pollution, and there was a very high rate of alcoholism. I think the anger sometimes from the monotony of the work ended up coming home with a lot of men. There was a fair amount of abuse of families, children, and wives. People needed work, but it tended to be monotonous. It was not always cheery.” Although abuse occasionally was physical, usually it was verbal, he thought, adding: “It’s unbelievable how much resilience children have.”

  “There were hair-curling stories of people that didn’t live that far from where I grew up,” Astle recalled. “I can remember a family that I was friends with. The kids basically were fending for themselves. They were as close as a little town like Groveton would have to street kids. They did have a house, and there was an older sister who held things together. But the father was no longer in the picture, and I’m thinking the mother died, or she was very sickly. She wasn’t functioning as a parent. Not to say that Groveton was a bad place to grow up. It was more of an enlightenment for me; what seemed like such a quaint little town, that everybody meets at the church social, and gets along, and belongs to the same fraternal organization. There was a lot more to it than that, and there still is.”

  In the 1950s and 1960s, Astle remembered, heavy drinking was considered socially acceptable at the mill: “You worked hard, got the loads out; once the work was done it was OK to send somebody over to town to pick up some beer, and they’d kind of finish up their shift that way. The drunk was considered an amusement. ‘Gee, did you see so and so at the Christmas party. My God they had to carry him out.’ And everybody would chuckle. If that was to happen today, it would be, ‘My God, can you believe the scene that this guy made. He needs help.’ It was kind of a culture of drinking was glamorous.”

  “An awful lot of people who worked at the mill were very passive folks,” Mickey King observed. “They were raised here; they stayed here; they lived through the Depression, although the Depression didn’t hurt people here anywhere near as much as it did in urban settings. People had gardens here; they survived. No one was jealous of anyone else because everyone was in the same boat, and you put up with it. Then you were taught all kinds of values at home. ‘If you want to eat, you’ve got to work.’ It sort of transferred to the mill. ‘I’ve got money; I’m making money.’ The reason that the town was bubbling and moving was that it needed just hands. It didn’t need anything more complicated than that. You had bull teams; you had forty, fifty men—well, they weren’t building pyramids, but it was similar. You had to have strong back and good hands.”

  His mother, Belvah, interjected that workers did not have to use their minds. “Nothing up here,” she said as she pointed to her head. “They were jobs that maybe people shouldn’t have been doing anyway,” Mickey continued. “It was like—dehumanizing. It’s like, ‘You’re a cog in a wheel.’ And I’m sure that really affected people’s minds and attitudes. You’d come home, and you weren’t really satisfied with things. ‘All day long I’ve been doing this.’ I’m sure people were soaking their feet. And the dust—I’m sure it caused a lot of medical problems. I remember, even as a kid, that there was a lot of hand shoveling done of chemicals. Talc and stuff. And a lot of guys—on their way home—they’d look like ghosts. They were just covered.”

  I remarked that I had expected to hear many more negative stories about the mill than I had been told. King responded: “Perhaps somewhat more from my generation you’ll hear it. There’s not a lot of reflection on the part of people; they were just happy to have work. A lot of the negative stuff, they would push it out of their mind. There was a lot of drinking on the job. And there were a lot of people who came in on their shift who were not able to work, and their peers would protect them. ‘Go lay down in the corner, and I’ll watch your machine.’ The company knew it. They wanted you to have your job, and you probably did your job pretty good. But they didn’t realize what they were allowing to happen. It wasn’t until I think really the Wemysses left that that was not tolerated anymore. You really needed to get help for these people. They really needed to deal with their issues because they were not going to be valuable employees, and they were risking their own health. Then actually the company would be put at risk.”

  Television, radio, and automobile travel in the postwar years expanded the worldview of Groveton’s children. Perhaps there were options in life tha
t did not involve working in the mill. As children of the town’s doctors and mill bosses aimed for college, many daughters and sons of mill workers also began to dream of pursuing higher education.

  Greg Cloutier’s parents made it clear they wanted “a better life” for him. “I wasn’t going to learn any French,” he recollected. “I was going to learn how to speak English correctly, and I was going to get an education, and I was going to leave Groveton. I found them to be disappointed when I returned. Not unhappy to see me. Their view was that success was somewhere beyond, that it was going to be a better success somewhere else. I think it was that post–World War II group that fought the war, worked very hard to recover from the war, catch up, and didn’t want their child to work as hard as they did. Which, in some respects, probably is not good.”

  Enrolling in college or pursuing a career in the military service gave many Groveton boys and girls opportunities denied their parents. There was, however, a poignant cost to this liberty—the classic “brain drain.” “We developed certain skill sets that we did not bring back to Groveton because all that was here was the mill,” Neal Brown reflected. “A lot of people from my group, particularly the class of ’64, went away. They never came back.”

  In September 2010, nine months into the mill oral history project, I shared some of the liveliest stories I had gathered at a public presentation on the mill’s history. During the subsequent discussion, Kathy Mills Frizzell, who never worked at the mill, urged me to investigate the impact of the mill’s presence on the lives of children. I immediately contacted her to ask just those questions, and I continued to ask every subsequent interviewee about her or his childhood memories of the mill.