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  “One day I went in, they had shut down the wrapper because it needed a change of film—a roll of plastic [that] weighed about a 120 pounds or so. You had to lift it into slots. I couldn’t lift it from that angle. I didn’t have enough leverage to get it up, and I couldn’t change it. They told me I might as well go home; I couldn’t do the job. I went to the boss, and I said, ‘I guess you’ve got me because I can’t lift that.’ He said, ‘No, I didn’t figure you could. It’s a man’s job.’ So I sat in the break area, and pretty quick my union president came up, and he went in to see the boss.”

  Web Barnett continued the story: “I went down, and the boss came over and said, ‘Goddamn them. These women, they want this, and they want that.’ The men were sticking together, except this one guy that said, ‘They’re lying. Those girls are working like hell. They are lifting the rolls, and too bad because they can’t do it. It’s too much. The guys don’t do it. The guys always helped each other, but they won’t help the women.’”

  “The thing that came out of it,” Breault concluded, “was that nobody—man or woman—was ever to lift those [rolls] alone. They were to have two people lifting. You had to get through these things. They’re natural in any environment, I think.” Breault emphasized that most of her male coworkers who had worked at the mill a long time treated her fairly. The ones who gave her trouble usually were recent hirees.

  In 1971 Wemyss decided to scrap old Number 2 paper machine, installed in 1896, and to replace it with a new two-hundred-foot-long fine-papers machine—Number 6—built by Manchester Machine, a Diamond subsidiary. Wemyss dubbed it “Queen of Diamonds” in honor of the corporation that paid for it.

  Machine crews on Number 2 were assigned to the thirty-man crew dismantling the old machine and installing Number 6. Wemyss noted proudly: “When we got ready to start the machine, those men knew more about the machine than the engineers did. I said, ‘Give them a job’—why lay them off and hire outside people to come in and do it? They’re your mechanics. Plus our mill mechanics. That’s why we had a very good start-up with the machine.”

  The Queen, capable of making 150 tons of paper a day, started up on June 27, 1972. Dave Miles, a back tender on the Queen, thought the start-up was “an awful job.” For the first two or three months, while working out the bugs, two five-man crews worked side by side on twelve-hour shifts. Miles described the nightmare: “The first day we started Number 6 up; we tried running it until about eight o’clock. We just couldn’t keep it running. So [Wemyss] said, ‘That’s it. Shut it down; we’ll come back tomorrow and start again.’ We made a tremendous amount of broke. It would break everywhere. I don’t think it ran more than fifteen or twenty minutes steady, and it would break somewhere else. We’d try again. Once in a while a bolt might come loose, or something like that, and they’d have to tighten it up, or a rope would come off and we’d have to put it back on. It was a disaster trying to start it, to be truthful. That first day, I don’t think we made half a reel of paper. Then we got better at knowing what to expect, and we’d catch it ahead of time. It was definitely a learning process to get it running. Lots of times I’ve gone in there in the morning and set your lunch box down here, and it would be there when you come home.”

  Ted Caouette was working on Number 1, and during those early weeks he would put in time helping out on the Queen. A decade later, he became a supervisor of the fine-papers operation. “It never ran well,” he said. “Number 6 machine was another headache in the mill. You were always trying to do something. If it didn’t break on the machine, it would break on the winder. It would be the same thing day after day. You never really caught up to what exactly was wrong with that machine.”

  The foul-smelling, ancient, inefficient sulfite mill in Groveton was one of Wemyss’s greatest headaches. According to several former mill workers, Dr. Robert Hinkley, a much-beloved figure in Groveton, regularly complained to Wemyss about the correlation between the horrible sulfur smell emitted by the sulfite mill’s digesters and the high incidence of asthma and other respiratory ailments of townspeople. “I think Dr. Hinkley did more to clean that up than anybody,” John Rich asserted. “Because one night, I guess, [Hinkley] got a charge, and he went down: ‘Shut down the sulfur burners. If you can’t run them better than that, they don’t run.’ One guy used to get in there and fire [the sulfur burners] right up. He did it for a joke. Some people had real bad trouble with breathing, lived right here in town, lived all around. Hinkley said, ‘You kill one of them, and you’re going to pay dear.’” Jim Wemyss denied that Hinkley ever challenged him over sulfite emissions.

  A single blow pit, where the digesters emptied cooked chips and their acid bath, drained about ten thousand gallons of water with a pH of about 3 into the river. “I think it would have killed fish on the Amazon,” Wemyss observed. On one occasion, he had his outboard motorboat in the Connecticut River, downriver from its junction with the Upper Ammonoosuc: “I pulled the motor out to check something, and the propeller was glistening. I said, ‘Whooo. Something’s cleaning that propeller.’”

  When Diamond International’s Old Town pulp mill faced a monthlong shutdown because it could not sell enough bleached pulp, Wemyss shut down the Groveton sulfite pulp mill on April 29, 1972, and increased the mill’s pulp purchases from Old Town: “Here I am, the president of the company, what the hell would you do? I said, ‘Wait a minute. SHUT GROVETON DOWN, NOW! Not tonight, now. All pulp for all of our mills must come out of Old Town starting yesterday, now.’ All of a sudden [Old Town] had a 150- or [1]60-ton-a-day customer here, bang, just like that. We shut the [Groveton] sulfite mill down, cleaned it up, and stopped polluting the river practically overnight.”

  Most of the fifty-six workers in the pulp mill’s digester building, its bleach plant, and the acid tower found other mill jobs. Gerard Labrecque began driving a Towmotor forklift that ferried five-hundred-pound bales of Old Town pulp, called “hogs,” from railroad cars to the pulpers in the stock preparation department. The four wires around the bales had to be cut and removed before dumping the bales into the pulper. “The one who drive the Towmotor had to get off his Towmotor, go cut the wire,” Labrecque explained. “The [operator of] the pulper had to hang on to the wire. And the one in the Towmotor used to push a bale in the pulper. Lots of time [wires] did go in the pulper. It would get caught on the pump underneath, down in the cellar. You had to go down there, open the pump, get them outta there and clean up the pump. [The wires] used to get in a big ball.”

  Forty years later, Jim Wemyss was still sensitive about accusations that the shutdown of the pulp mill had caused job loss in Groveton: “We were going to have to spend millions of dollars in this pulp mill over here, which was antiquated and old. They had a pulp mill over there that didn’t have any customers. It’s sound business. I didn’t do it to hurt people in this town. Are you crazy? I did it to make the town a better town. Why would I want to hurt the town? I lived here. That’s just a logic of business decisions you have to make.”

  Campbell Stationery, a subsidiary of Groveton Papers, played an important role in the mill because it used paper that failed to meet fine-papers standards. Wemyss enjoyed telling of the time in the mid-1960s when he was giving the president of Mead Paper a tour of the mill. His visitor remarked: “I don’t see any reject rolls here.” Wemyss replied: “‘We don’t make reject rolls.’ He said, ‘Jim, stop the baloney. Everybody makes reject rolls.’ I said, ‘We don’t, sir. Anytime we see the paper isn’t quite up to spec, we put it in the rewinder and cut it up to 34.5 inches wide.’ He said, ‘Yeah, what do you with those?’ I said, ‘Come with me.’ I took him up to Campbell. ‘That’s where you put it on the back of the ruling machines. You rule it.’ And he said, ‘Oh, my God. Every time we make bad paper, we give it to people in New York for nothing.’ I said, ‘You’re a generous man.’” A month later, Mead acquired Westab, a venerable stationery company.

  Campbell had moved from the old Northumberland finishing facilities to a la
rge new building in Groveton in 1969. At that time Campbell shifted from school-oriented products to a broader, more commercial, product line. Its business grew so rapidly that within three years it had outgrown its new building.3 The mill purchased the shuttered plywood mill in North Stratford early in 1973 and, after renovating it, moved one hundred employees of Campbell Stationery into it later that fall. The 190,000-square-foot building provided ample space for Campbell to expand; it had direct access to the Grand Trunk Railway line for shipping, and it saved the mill the need to erect a planned new Campbell warehouse at Groveton.4

  The Equal Employment Opportunity Act probably played a role in the Campbell move. Relocating to Stratford allowed Diamond to pay Campbell finishing room workers at lower rates than workers doing similar jobs in the Groveton finishing rooms. The move angered union officials, and decades later, Wemyss defended his action: “I didn’t do it with malice towards the people in town. When you have a paper machine man running a big paper machine making five hundred tons a day, you pay him umpteen dollars an hour. And if you have a little girl working on a ruling machine in the tablet division, she says, ‘I should get the same pay. I work here too.’ If you gave her the same pay, you would not be in that business very long because your competitors weren’t giving that type of money to their people who were running the ruling machines all over the country. That’s a sound, simple, clean decision to make. Not with malice and hate.” A more apt comparison would have been with wages paid to finishing room workers in Groveton, not high-paid paper machine tenders.

  Old Town’s new tissue paper machine, also manufactured by Diamond’s Manchester Machine, ran so poorly that Old Town’s finishing plant was operating far below capacity. Wemyss recalled: “My brother calls me up and said, ‘You’re shipping finished facial tissue over to Old Town so we can make up a car properly, and it’s costing us a fortune. What are you going to do?’ I said, ‘It will be taken care of tomorrow.’ I went into the mill here and said, ‘We’re shutting the facial tissue line down.” On June 8, 1973, mill vice president Walter MacDonald announced that the tissue converting plant would close in twenty days, and that those operations would be transferred to Old Town. Number 4 paper machine would continue to run in Groveton.

  Most of the finishing room employees found work elsewhere in the mill, although not always with the happiest results. Pauline Labrecque used her seniority to bump into Number 1 finishing room, where she wrapped reams of fine papers. A coworker made her life miserable: “The fellow that was behind me didn’t like it because I bumped down there. He was dirty to me because I was new. I was learning. And he was pushing that to the hilt. The paper was piling up on me. Just made me more nervous.”

  There were no jobs for college students in the summer of 1973 because of the transfer of facial tissue finishing to Maine. Bill Astle recalled: “A lot of union employees were laid off, and they weren’t about to let summer kids come in and take jobs that could have gone to a union employee. So I didn’t get to work that summer.”

  When the mill announced it was closing Number 4 finishing room, union president Web Barnett, fearing the loss of a hundred jobs, urged town officials to go down to the mill and learn what was going on. Several town leaders toured the mill, and one expressed concern that there was “not a good working relationship” between Wemyss and Groveton’s municipal government.5

  Barnett blamed town manager Dana Kingston and the selectmen for job losses at the mill: “I say you are against the working man in this town. . . . It will be the blackest day this town will ever see if Mr. Wemyss gets out.” Selectman Jay Gould, who had recently lost a high-paying salvage job with the mill, said, “We’re willing to talk it over; we’ll break the ice, but the ice is pretty thick.”6 Two weeks later, Barnett and Gould again exchanged insults. Shep Mahurin, a local political leader, attempted to calm Barnett: “The people of this town would do anything in their power to make sure that this mill stays. But they have to know what to do.”7

  Jim Wemyss claimed the selectmen wrote to Diamond’s president, Richard Walters, urging him to fire Wemyss. According to Wemyss, Walters said: ‘Jim, tell them to go to hell, shut the mill down, and come on over to Old Town. You’ve got that big mill over there.’ I said, ‘I don’t walk away from problems. I’ll take care of them. Leave me alone.’ That’s when I ran for selectman and fired every one of them.”

  Wemyss was elected selectman in March 1974, and for the next dozen years he dominated the town government. I asked Wemyss if he ever felt there was a conflict of interest between mill and town interests: “No. Absolutely no. There were no problems. There were no problems. I’m telling you there were no problems.” Did anybody challenge you with a conflict of interest over mill taxes? “Who’d do that?” he smiled. “It was good for both sides.” He once was criticized at a Diamond board meeting: “They were talking to me about taxes. I said, ‘You don’t understand. I’m the tax assessor, and our taxes are right.’”

  THE DEMOCRAT’S HEADLINE on October 25, 1973, read: “Fuel Reserves Dwindle at Groveton; Mill Shutdown Narrowly Averted.” The mill used sixty thousand to eighty thousand gallons of fuel oil a day, and the oil tanker carrying the mill’s resupply had been delayed at sea. When the tanker reached Portland, Maine, the oil was speedily delivered mere hours before the mill would have run out.8 This was the first hint of the oil crisis that fall and winter. Middle Eastern oil-producing nations had set up an embargo against countries that had supported Israel during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. The price of crude oil increased by 70 percent as OPEC nations moved to secure a much greater share of the revenues from their massive oil reserves. By January 1974, oil prices had quadrupled. The era of cheap energy, one of the cornerstones of postwar American economic growth and prosperity, had expired. Skyrocketing and unpredictable energy prices would torment the energy-intensive Groveton mill for the remainder of its existence.

  On December 3, 1973, the mill learned that its fuel supplier, Texaco, would reduce Groveton’s allotment for the month by 75 percent because of OPEC cuts in supply. “It was serious, really serious,” Jim Wemyss reflected. “I wasn’t sure we were going to survive. Paragon [a subsidiary of Texaco], who was selling us all our oil, told us, ‘We haven’t got any.’ I said, ‘You can’t do that to me. We’ve been with you for so many years.’ I went to military school with a fellow who was a vice president of Texaco in later years. I went down to the Chrysler Building and said, ‘I want to see him.’ ‘You have to have an appointment.’ ‘Just give him my name, and tell him I want to see him.’ I did see him, and I got my oil [laughs].”

  Spurred by the 1973–1974 oil crisis, Wemyss decided to convert one of the mill’s recovery boilers to an incinerator that would generate some energy for the mill by burning mill waste and town garbage. A ton of garbage burned in an incinerator yielded the equivalent of sixty-three gallons of oil and saved the town fifteen dollars in sanitary landfill fees.9 The $250,000 incinerator began operations in October 1975.

  Two or three times a day truckloads of mill trash, skids, and bad rolls of paper were delivered to the incinerator; on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, town trash was delivered. “When they put it in, they said you could burn everything, don’t even have to separate the glass,” Thurman Blodgett, one of the incinerator crew members, said. “But every Monday morning, we had to go in with a jackhammer. It melted up front, but when it got to where it dropped down on the chain, it cooled. It solidified right there and kept building back. We’d spend all Monday, four of us, digging it out. It was shut down over the weekend. It was still hotter ’n a devil.” The incinerator experiment ended in the early 1980s. By then, environmentalists were warning that incinerating plastic and other manufactured products released PCBs, dioxin, and furans.

  Fuel costs would play a major role in the demise of the mill. In its final decades, the mill would convert from oil to wood chips, back to oil, and then to natural gas in a vain attempt to secure a stable, low-cost supply of energy to keep it
self running.

  Wall Street Journal, June 6, 1968, 34.

  Democrat, September 2, 1970.

  Democrat, September 13, 1973; October 18, 1973; October 25, 1973.

  Democrat, March 22, 1973.

  Democrat, June 14, 1973; July 19, 1973.

  Democrat, July 26, 1973.

  Democrat, August 9, 1973.

  Democrat, October 25, 1973.

  Democrat, March 28, 1974.

  Chapter Eleven

  END OF AN ERA

  THE OVERTHROW of the shah of Iran in January 1979 triggered another sharp rise in oil prices, the hostage taking of fifty United States Embassy officials in Iran in November 1979, and a war between the new Iranian government and Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime in 1980. Uncertain oil supplies were an even more serious threat to the mill than price rises. Wemyss and his managers were losing control over the mill’s destiny.

  Saddled with a $25 million a year energy bill, Wemyss decided to convert Number 1 boiler to burn hardwood chips. In August 1981, mill general manager Jack Hiltz optimistically wrote: “The conversion of No. 1 boiler to wood chip burning seems to be coming along quite well, and we expect to be starting the converted boiler in October. We certainly will need it before the snow flies.”1

  The wood-fired boiler missed the intended November 1, 1981, start-up date by two months. It used oil for several weeks while the system was “de-bugged.” Early in 1982, during a bitterly cold stretch, the mill started burning wood chips, and quickly discovered all sorts of problems. The belts alternately froze or slipped. The hopper over the boiler plugged up with chips. Although the boiler worked well when fed wood chips, design flaws with the tubing prevented running the boiler at more than half capacity.2