You Had a Job for Life Page 17
By the 1960s, there were over one hundred private camps on lands leased from the mill in the Nash Stream watershed. Most of the camps were built after International Paper (IP) reserved access to its Phillips Brook lands for its executives. Groveton mill workers who were displaced approached Old Jim. Jim Wemyss Jr. remembered: “So the people in Groveton who worked in the mill said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And my father said, ‘Come on over to Odell [the township where the Nash Stream Bog is situated].’ That’s all. Just like that. ‘You’d be welcome.’ That’s how it happened.”
In February 1969 there was a record snowfall, and snow lingered in the woods until May. On Saturday, May 17, temperatures reached eighty-five degrees, and the Connecticut and Androscoggin Rivers flooded, causing an estimated $400,000 in damage in Colebrook, Berlin, and Gorham. The previous day, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department had stocked the 250-acre Nash Bog Pond with a thousand eastern brook trout. The fishing was good, Herb Miles remembered: “I was up there the week before with the boss, Ralph Rowden. Friday night, Saturday, Sunday. Took a day off. We stayed at the Company Camp. It had been raining a lot. The water got up within a foot and a half of the dam at the top. We cranked the gates up to let it down.” By Tuesday, May 20, the gates were again closed.
That morning, Armand Gaudette, foreman of the river crew, and four others were ordered to open the gates. When they arrived, the bog had already begun to overflow and had cut a channel around the western side of the wooden dam. The dam held, but the breach prevented Gaudette’s crew from reaching the dam’s gates on the eastern side. There was no telephone communication with the mill. Forty years later, Jim Wemyss was still exasperated: “There was three feet of snow in the woods; it was seventy degrees and raining. Instead of opening the gates, they didn’t want to let the trout get out, so they let the water keep building up. I came back into town. I had to fly my airplane in, and I went over to Nash Stream to see what was going on. I called the superintendent in charge of that and said, ‘You get up to that dam as quick as you can and open all the gates, and the hell with your fish!’ He didn’t get there in time. He spent the night in a tree.”
Superintendent Ralph Rowden headed up Nash Stream a short time after Gaudette’s crew had been dispatched. The earthworks adjacent to the dam washed out at 11 a.m., and a mass of water, trees, boulders, and other debris started to rumble down the Nash Stream toward Groveton thirteen miles to the south. Rowden was a couple of miles downstream of the dam when he realized he was caught in the flood. He scurried up a yellow birch, later dubbed “Rowden’s Roost,” and hung on for dear life for four hours as uprooted trees and pickup-truck-size boulders tumbled down the stream.
Construction and maintenance workers rushed out to open the gates at the Brooklyn Street Dam adjacent to the mill as the floodwaters approached. “Those old things, you had two men on a crank trying to get them up,” Hoot McMann recalled. “That was hard work. Looked up the river, and here come this thing. Looked about twenty feet high, just moving toward us. No big rush or anything, but coming right towards us. It was just a mess of trees and stumps. You really couldn’t see the water. There was so much stuff ahead of the water itself. It looked like a dam coming at you—a beaver dam.”
The flood hammered the mill’s two pulpwood piles, and hundreds of cords of pulpwood washed downstream. Miraculously the old covered bridge survived the battering. The Route 3 steel highway bridge also held up, but the abutment at the southern end washed out, and the floodwaters carved a deep ravine at the bridge entrance. The mill basement was flooded to a depth of about four to five feet.
In an ordinary year, the mill would shut down during the week of July 4 for “maintenance week,” to address annual maintenance requirements while disposing of a significant number of employee vacations with the least disruption to mill operations. Wemyss announced that May 21–27 would be maintenance week, and he ordered non-maintenance workers to take a week’s vacation.
Fred Shannon spent that first week removing roughly two hundred wet, silted motors from the basement: “All the electric motors had to come out. They had to be sent away and get dried out, checked out, to see if they were shorted. That’s what we done, remove motors, remove motors. It was just nasty.”
After May 27, the mill started calling workers back to help with the cleanup and to repair the Brooklyn Dam. The basement was a foul mess. “It was devastating when I went back in there the first time, down in that cellar,” Dave Miles shuddered. “Everything was piled up on this end. The barrels, some of them, the labels were off of them, and you didn’t know what was in them. Haul that stuff out of there.” In the wood room, Francis Roby found “mud and dirt and stuff. Oh, Jesus. Fish and everything else was in there.” Who cleaned it out? “We did,” he laughed. “With a wheelbarrow. That was a nice smell.”
The covered bridge took a pounding by the flood but survived. Photo taken from the highway bridge just downstream from the covered bridge. The highway bridge abutment (off the picture to the right) washed out. Though the highway bridge survived the flood, it was closed for twelve hours while highway crews repaired the washed-out approach. The mill’s wood piles, acid tower, pump mill, and smokestack are in the background. (Courtesy Warren Bartlett)
By late June, the mill was again making paper.
The flood was another nightmare for Sylvia Stone in the accounting department: “I remember a lot of hard work because they brought all that inventory up to me from down in the stock room—the motors and all that stuff. I had to go through my depreciation schedule and write it all off. It was a mess. It took me longer than [a month].”
She added: “[Jim Wemyss] said that if Diamond had not purchased the mill when they did, the mill would have gone under. We had that much loss. Jimmy Wemyss said that himself.” Forty years later, at a public interview I conducted with Wemyss, he quipped: “If we hadn’t been with Diamond International, it might have been very serious. Instead of a catastrophe, we had a good bath. Diamond paid for it” [laughter from audience].
Three months after labor and management pulled together to clean up the mill, the two-year union contract expired. Jim Wemyss was proud that his mill managers and union members generally enjoyed a positive relationship. Web Barnett, president of the Groveton union from 1973 to 1977 and 1983 to 1993, agreed: “We were especially lucky with the type of negotiations we had here, because everybody got along pretty good. And they got decent contracts. Once in a while you’d get a bad one. Mr. Wemyss, I had no problem with the man at all. If we’d get into real tough things, we’d get together, and we’d have an agreement. Sometimes he was tough; sometimes we were tough. But it wasn’t a war. There was arguments and disagreements; but it’s all right to get together if you’re going to disagree, but not be disagreeable.”
One former shop steward suggested some union officers were too cozy with management: “I thought that the higher ones up at the union and the ones negotiating were kind of working together, you know. Maybe the one in the middle would get a few favors, or something.”
Whereas grandfather Wemyss had fought to keep the Northumberland mill from unionizing in the late 1930s, his grandson refused to run a nonunion mill. “You don’t want to talk to three hundred people or two hundred,” Jim Jr. explained. “You want to talk to one person. Now, if they become so obnoxious and so difficult you can’t work with them, then you have a strike, and then you teach them how you are, so they understand when they have a strike with you, you’re not a pleasant person to be around. A strike was not a pleasant thing for the town, and I didn’t want it to happen. I said, ‘You’re not hurting me; you’re hurting yourself. That’s what bothers me the most.’”
Negotiations foundered in August 1969, and mill workers voted to strike on September 12. The unions insisted future contracts expire July 1, not September 1, but Jim Jr. refused to yield: “There was no reason for a strike ever to be in Groveton. All the big mills in Maine and coming across to Berlin—May, June, July, August—is
when they negotiated their contract. We were in September. If they get an extra paid holiday, I knew we were going to get an extra paid holiday. If they got another week’s paid vacation, I knew we were going to have to give a week’s vacation. If they got two cents or five cents more, I knew we’d have to do the same thing.” When the union made a demand not conceded already by Maine’s mills, Wemyss would say, “That’s not negotiable.”
Shirley MacDow offered another reason management was adamant about the September deadline: “We always tried to have our negotiations in the fall because we knew all the employees were thinking about, ‘Oh, I’ve got to buy my winter fuel.’ It might have some bearing on how long they’d be out on strike.” Sounds like a cat-and-mouse game? “It was,” she chuckled. “I’m not sure who won.”
In the weeks before the strike, Joan Breault noted the change in atmosphere around town when she went shopping: “It almost seemed like every time a contract come up, prices come up in the stores. Like they’re already planning on us getting more money, so they’d get more money. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but we all thought the same thing. It cost more to live. So I guess it’s a catch-22 situation, isn’t it?”
The strike divided union members. Francis Roby refused to picket during the strike because “I didn’t want the damn strike. You didn’t gain a thing by striking. They lost.” Thurman Blodgett, who served a year as a union shop steward, had mixed feelings: “Nobody gains in the strike; nobody. But you’ve got to try to get the best you can.”
The timing of the strike was terrible for Joe Berube: “I had bought this house in mid-August of ’69, and two weeks later we were on strike down at the mill. That was not very cost-effective for me. I had a mortgage I had to pay off. I’d just come out of the military, and I was thinking of getting married, so everything was kind of snowballing on me. I was tickled pink when they went back because it meant I could start drawing a regular paycheck again.”
The union paid strikers to join the picket line. Some, like Belvah King, opted out: “[I] just came home and waited. I didn’t like the strike because there was no money coming in, but I kind of liked the time off.” Pauline Labrecque picketed on a raw night: “Brought me a little bit of money. You ought to seen the rain suit I made myself. It was rubberized on the outside, like a little cloth, and then pants. I said I ain’t going to freeze my tush off. But it was cold.”
Ted Caouette, a young paper machine crew member, remembered: “Nobody had any money. You couldn’t pay your bills. You didn’t make any money anyway, so you lived week to week. Even when the mill was running. When you’re raising your family—I had four children—it took all the money you had and then some. My wife was working at the bank; she worked at the grocery store. Even then it was hard to get by. But we did; we managed to.”
Many strikers found construction jobs during the strike. Armand Dube, a machine tender on Number 4 paper machine, worked at the Waterville Valley ski area an hour and a half to the south: “They loved us down there. I guess they never had help like we was. Oh, they loved us. Then we told them we was coming back here; they didn’t think too much of that. They said, ‘You guys know how to work.’ Because them stupid clowns they had down there, they wouldn’t do nothing.” Fred Shannon drove a big truck on a crew building Interstate 93. He supported the union, but with six children to feed, he needed a steady income: “We worked every hour we possibly could.”
Shirley MacDow, by then Wemyss’s administrative assistant, noted that despite his new responsibilities with Diamond, he “had his pulse on everything.” “He always had his own ear to the ground, especially with the union guys,” she said. “If the boys were in Dinty’s having a beer, he might be in Dinty’s having a beer with them. He’d pick up a lot of things there. I think, in truth, the union probably was in awe of him. He wasn’t about to be bamboozled by any of their antics.”
John Rich, a piper, recalled having a little fun with the boss during negotiations: “[Wemyss] wasn’t there too much, but when he was, we’d give it to him. He’d get pissed off. That was part of the deal anyways—piss them off a little because they was trying to piss you off. Jim and I was always good friends.”
Jim Wemyss claimed he settled the strike with the following stunt: “I took my Cadillac convertible. It was a sunny day in September, and I drove it right by the bank, in the middle of the street. Parked it. It has a long hood on it, and I went out and lay in the sun. The picket line was standing by the railroad track, and they all came over. ‘Mr. Wemyss, are you OK?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘It’s hot here. Let’s have a beer and talk this over.’ We all went [into Everett’s Diner], and the strike was over. And the International representative was mad as hell. He said, ‘You can’t talk to people like that. You have no right to.’ Yes, we did some crazy things. Not crazy; they were good.”
The new, three-year contract gave workers a seventy-two-cent raise over the period, including a 7 percent immediate raise. It also included increases in sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, and five weeks of vacation for employees with more than twenty-five years of service at the mill. However, union contracts continued to expire September 1.
Joan Breault said Diamond gave the union its first big pay raises: “The Wemysses never gave that much of an adjustment. A nickel was a big thing to them. After Diamond took over, the raises were in terms of dollars and stuff as well as benefits and things.”
Jim Wemyss’s position as a major shareholder of Diamond and his rapport with William and Richard Walters paid dividends for the Groveton mill at this critical juncture. “I’d say in the 1970s we spent more money on environmental problems than we did on anything in the mill,” Wemyss speculated. Was this due to recent federal laws such as the Clean Water Act or because it was the wise thing to do? “I live here,” Wemyss shot back. “I didn’t want everybody living like that. No. We have an obligation to do it. We did it. Everybody was doing it, or they were going to go out of business. It’s as simple as that.”
Throughout its history, the mill had dumped “white water,” primarily from the paper machines’ dewatering process, directly into the Upper Ammonoosuc River. In response to the 1965 Water Quality Act, the mill embarked on a two-phase pollution abatement program. Phase I, costing nearly $15 million, separated clean water from polluted water so that the mill could recirculate the unpolluted water instead of paying to clean it unnecessarily. By September 1970, the mill had reduced its daily water use by three million gallons a day.2 From 1972 to 1974 the mill spent about $600,000 on the construction of two clarifiers—110-foot-diameter cement tubs—downstream from the mill.
The workplace environment for the mill’s roughly one thousand employees was also transformed during these years. Following the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1971, the practice of shoveling toxic chemicals into wheelbarrows and shuttling them around the mill gradually ended. OSHA mandated that mill lighting be adequate and that workers wear eye and ear protection. Lolly LaPointe was one of the older workers who found the transition difficult: “There’s all kinds of noise in a paper mill. That’s why there aren’t too many of us guys, me included, that can hear anything anymore. My girlfriend, ‘Turn that [TV] down.’ I say, ‘Jeez, I can’t hear it.’ There again, when OSHA came in, they really recommended that everybody wear ear protection. Some did, and some didn’t. I hated it, but I got to the point where I couldn’t hear anything anyway, so I guess it didn’t sound too loud to me. I hated wearing the plugs. Especially when it was hot. There’s a lot of heat in a paper mill. They were hot and sweaty.”
Routine maintenance tasks henceforth had to be performed according to OSHA standards. LaPointe described how OSHA regulations transformed the process of cleaning the stock prep chests: “When I first went there, we wouldn’t even turn the agitators off. It was stupid, but we done it, and nobody ever got hurt. Then, of course, when OSHA steps in, you’ve got to get an electrician, and it takes
you longer to flag out the chest and get ready to go in and wash the chest out. In these later years, you had to have a guy with an air gauge monitoring to see if there was any chemicals. And it was a good thing. But it was funny. Union people were actually the ones that instigated OSHA. A lot of the older supervisors, they hated it because they knew that five, ten, fifteen years before, you’d get into the chest and wash it out and get the hell out of there, and you were ready to go again. Most of it was good; some of it was ridiculous. But then you’d get these younger guys that didn’t want—my comment was, ‘You were the guys that wanted OSHA, not me. So get your suit on.’”
Until 1972, Groveton mill workers employed on paper machines, in the stock prep department, the finishing rooms, and the shipping department had been represented by Local 41 of the United Papermakers and Paperworkers; workers in the maintenance department and the sulfite mill had belonged to Local 61 of the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite and Paper Mill Workers. In 1972 the two unions merged to form the United Papermakers International Union. Henceforth, the mill negotiated only one union contract, with Local 61 of the UPIU, which covered all unionized mill workers.
Following the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act in March 1972, some women with considerable seniority began to bid on jobs that had always been filled by men. Jim Wemyss recalled, with exasperation, an early, unsuccessful attempt at gender integration on the paper machines: “When all of a sudden the emancipation of women came in, and they started wanting to work on paper machines, I said, ‘Oh, Jesus, well start them on Number 4.’ The girls couldn’t do it. When you’ve gotta climb up twice as high as this room and lift up a ten-ton roll and slide a felt on, they didn’t want to. If you hadn’t done it, you’d have been sued and put in jail.”
Joan Breault encountered resistance when she took a job on the wrapper machine in the finishing room: “One guy that I worked with on the toilet paper line was kind of lazy. He’d leave me doing his job as well as mine, and he’d go sit in the break area and laugh about it: ‘What can you do about it? I’m the one that gets the money.’ I finally decided maybe I could do something about it, so I signed the next bid that came up for running a wrapper machine. I got a lot of flack from some of the guys. The lead man there was against me going on that job.