You Had a Job for Life Read online

  The bad blood between Wemyss and JR was common knowledge throughout the mill. While Wemyss railed at his successors, Bill Astle suspected James River “took it more with amusement than feeling that they were really getting beat upon, or that they needed to teach him a lesson.” Louise Caouette had known Wemyss when she was growing up. She thought JR might have “exposed him as being a human being.” “Groveton had really put Wemyss on a pedestal,” she explained. “I think James River was pretty free at making sure people knew that Mr. Wemyss was no longer calling the shots; that they were dealing with a corporation, and it wasn’t Mr. Wemyss. I would think that that would have been hurtful to him.”

  Wemyss had modernized the mill. He knew its remotest corners intimately. He cared passionately about the mill, the workers, the community, and his legacy. And he had no experience taking orders, or watching other people give orders he could not countermand. “They didn’t like me,” Wemyss said of the James River managers. “I tried to be good to them because I wanted to keep the people working.” What did JR do that was wrong? “They didn’t listen to me; it’s as simple as that. We knew the business; they had a new theory of running the business. They’d have paper machines down in Groveton, and Conway Process meetings up at the Legion with all the millwrights. I said, ‘The paper machines are down.’ ‘We’re having meetings. That’s more important.’”

  Greg Cloutier observed: “The James River group really spent a lot of time polishing teamwork and problem solving, communication. That was perhaps a [strength] Mr. Wemyss didn’t have. He was the single focus for everything. Everybody worked together almost because they hated him, or because they feared him. But they worked together. You could take extremely capable men who had terrible people skills, but had extremely good skills at making paper, and they would work under Mr. Wemyss because in many ways, he could control that sort of guy. He could take a high-energy individual that was a pain in the butt to work with and make that guy work well for him. He had that strong leadership, commanding leadership—I mean, he was the alpha dog. There was no question about it.”

  Cloutier offered an example of the contrasting management philosophies: “When Mr. Wemyss was there, if you were a key department head and the power blinked so the lights go out, you saw men run from wherever they were. The meeting stopped that second. You ran to your department to get it back on line. [Under] James River, your men were supposed to solve that problem. If you’d done your job right, they had the ability and the skill to make those decisions. They didn’t need you, and you stayed in the meeting. I don’t think that set quite the example.”

  Jim Wemyss’s management philosophy was Keep the mill running. He expected bosses to be there when there was trouble and to remain until the problem was fixed. “Don’t tell me you can’t fix it; fix it!” he would holler. When the machines were down, Cloutier explained, “[Mr. Wemyss would] walk through; he didn’t keep on walking. He took his coat off. He stayed. Maybe he was mad to stay, but he stayed. ‘What can I do?’ ‘Rethink what you’re doing here.’”

  Chan Tilton, a retired paper machine tour boss, admired Wemyss’s commitment: “If that tissue machine was in trouble, he’d be there. He was a papermaker. He’d come and talk to you. You couldn’t buffalo him. He was an intelligent guy, a little autocratic, but fair. If you needed to replace equipment, you’d get it. [While he ran the mill] there was nobody out of work in the town.”

  The key to success for a small, family-owned mill, Wemyss believed, was to offer a diverse product line; don’t rely on one large customer; always upgrade to remain competitive; encourage innovation; waste nothing; operate a clean, safe mill; and maintain a huge inventory of spare parts so that the mill never shuts down for want of a pump or a bearing or a bolt. When orders were down, he directed the crews to run the paper machines at a slower pace, rather than shut them down and lay off scores of workers. Employees kept drawing a paycheck, and the mill was spared the headache of restarting a paper machine.

  Jim Wemyss with “Jazzo” Kingston, one of Greg Cloutier’s many uncles, at Maidstone Lake around 1966. (Courtesy Greg Cloutier)

  “I don’t think Jimmy missed much,” Iris Baird suggested. “I think he conveniently didn’t notice on occasion. But if you had tried to take advantage, he would have known.” Wemyss agreed with her assessment: “I was involved in everything. Little went on that I didn’t have some knowledge of it beforehand.” He was proud that he and his father were hands-on owners: “My father would be working on a paper machine when things were bad, maybe pulling broke off the top press, and I did the same. We were not the managers that lived in New York City and came up once a year and walked through in our tuxedos to see how the paper mill was running. The president was here at two o’clock in the morning or four o’clock in the morning. That’s the way we were.” “We had a very strong work ethic in our family,” he explained on another occasion. “We didn’t talk about what time we went to work or how many hours we worked. If it wasn’t [running well] you were not supposed to be anyplace but where it was.”

  He was a local owner, who viewed the mill workforce as a large family: “It was a family atmosphere. I always left my door open. Anybody could walk in. ‘Hi, what’s going on? What can I do for you?’ [Groveton] was my home. Always has been my home.” There was no doubt, however, that Jim Wemyss Jr. was the patriarch of that family. “He could be a dictator,” Greg Cloutier said. Others used terms such as “autocrat,” “old school,” and “son of a bitch.”

  Dave Atkinson’s grandfather, “Bucko,” a stock prep supervisor under Wemyss, had a reputation for screaming and hollering. “You didn’t want to screw up for Bucko,” his grandson said. “I think he went to the school where it was ‘My way or the highway.’ Call it the Jimmy Wemyss School of Management. You just scream and holler. I don’t want to say disrespect people, but that was the style back then, and [Bucko] certainly fit the style, which is probably why he was promoted to a boss.”

  Wemyss was legendary for his outbursts when a paper machine wasn’t making good paper. He invariably directed his fury at management because the managers were in charge, and Wemyss, the ex-soldier, believed in the chain of command. “I had seen him when he trimmed up some of the bosses,” Bruce Blodgett said. “Kicked that sport jacket of his right up and down the floor and scream at those guys and rip ’em apart. He was not bashful at all.”

  Lolly LaPointe, superintendent of the stock prep department, witnessed a few Wemyss eruptions: “I’d come in there eleven to seven. If [the tissue machine] had been haying all night, he’d take off his jacket and throw it on the floor and jump and rave and rant and raise all kinds of hell, and then he’d walk out of the place. Maybe he was hot. But he’d come in there like on a night shift, and would he ever go into a tantrum, mister.”

  As always, Wemyss had an explanation: “If you walked into a machine room when you’ve got a big coat from outside, and it’s ninety degrees in the machine room, and it was forty below outside, [and] you’re going to be there for two or three hours, what do you do? Get the goddamn coat off and go to work. It worked. I didn’t go home until it was running. If it was two days later, I was still there. There’s no excuse. It’s got to go. It has to run. And I want it running at 95 percent efficiency if it can get up there.”

  For all the screaming, Wemyss rarely fired people. “You didn’t fire people to fire people,” he explained. “You knew their families and their kids. You can’t do that.” Herb Miles maintained that Wemyss rehired most of the hourly workers he fired: “He’d fire more bosses. Jim Wemyss told me himself: ‘I can get those fellows a dime a dozen.’” Bill Baird said: “He had a temper. If you crossed [him], he was just as apt to fire you, as not. But he expected you in the next morning to go to work at seven.” Iris Baird added: “The first time he fired you, somebody said, ‘Don’t pay any attention. He’ll have forgotten by morning.’”

  John Rich recalled a man who was fired for oversleeping: “He was on call. They’d call him. ‘
Yup, be right in. Be right in.’ He never show up. Jimmy got sick of it. He had him canned, and a year later he hired him back, and he give him a garbage can and one of them big old alarm clocks with the bells on top. ‘You put that goddamned clock in that garbage can, and you set it. That ought to wake your ass up and get you out of bed in the morning.’ I think Jimmy was fair.”

  Union contracts forbid the mill from firing an hourly worker without going through the union grievance process. Office workers did not enjoy those union protections. “I didn’t really know him well,” said Pam Styles, who was hired in 1970. “When he was there, I was really, really young. Shirley MacDow was the office manager, so we had dealings with her. Everyone kind of tiptoed around him. I know she bent over backwards to do what [she] could to help him.”

  “I don’t think I walked on eggshells, but I kind of understood where he was coming from,” MacDow told me. “I wouldn’t challenge him in any way. People would feel like they were walking on eggshells because if he made a decision, or if he walked through the mill and saw something he didn’t like, the shit would hit the fan.” Characteristically, Wemyss embraced the eggshells image: “If they had something they weren’t doing right, they had good reason to walk on eggshells.”

  In the 1980s and 1990s, Greg Cloutier and Jim Wemyss were notorious for their shouting matches. But Cloutier remained because he admired the older man’s commitment to the mill: “You’ll find a lot of business people are very strong and powerful people, and the underlings won’t stand up and protect them from themselves. Mr. Wemyss would say [something like], ‘I expect you to protect me from myself. You’ve got to do what I ask you, but if it’s wrong, don’t do it. Tell me what’s wrong with it.’ He always wanted respect and loyalty. If you did that, you were 80 percent there.” Cloutier pointed out that Wemyss liked foremen who argued with him, adding that they remained union members who were protected by union grievance rules, whereas once they were promoted to supervisor, they became management and no longer enjoyed those protections.

  Mickey King’s father was promoted to tour boss, but despite the welcome pay raise, he soon quit because he refused to scream and holler at his former crewmates. He told his son: “I will not blame my help for things that they did not do. I can’t do this.” Mickey described Wemyss as a kind of tragic figure: “Jim is a strange fellow. Just a difficult, difficult person. He surrounded himself with lackeys. He always had people who, ‘What can I do? What can I do? Do you want a drink? Do you want a drink?’ He loved it, and he would belittle them. They were people who were bosses in the mill. People who contracted with him for certain things. He couldn’t help himself; he loved belittling people. You’d see a moment of kindness once in a while from him, and you’d say, ‘Wow, that’s different.’ Then he’d go right back to his—. It’s always been sad, but that was Jim. If you really stood up to him, he would kind of respect that. If you didn’t, he’d insult you right in front of your face. His father was the same.”

  Bill Astle described a complicated man who often succumbed to the temptations of power: “He was always considered very authoritarian and perhaps more involved in some people’s lives than they deserved to have him. My perception is he always looked out for what he believed was the best interest of the town. There were times when Jimmy could be a cruel man. He could belittle people. There were people that were hired and fired five times as a boss because he’d fire them and chew them out and humiliate them publicly in front of all of the people that were working for them, and then Jimmy seemed to get a little bit of levity about that, and then he’d come back the next day and say he hadn’t meant that. I think a lot of that was to demonstrate the dynamic of power that he had. One of his expressions was, ‘Employees are just like a can of coke. Go over to the machine, you put your money in, you press a button, and another one comes out.’ I think he was a fairly complex man. He absolutely wasn’t all bad, but ownership meant he could do anything he wanted when he was in his heyday. There really was no check. I suspect he learned many of those attributes from his father.”

  Because of his dominant role in the town over the course of half a century, even his admirers vented from time to time. “We used to bitch about him, but he kept us working,” electrician Len Fournier observed. Francis Roby declared in his characteristically terse way: “Jimmy, he was just the boss. I worked for him. He made the paycheck out. That’s all.”

  Wemyss promoted locals to management positions whenever he could: “Half our management came out of the union. I can’t think of all the names of all the men that came in here as young boys out of high school and [became] head of the electrical department or head of the labs or running the paper machines and the pulp mills. When they got up in the thirties and forties, and they had a heckuva lot of knowledge, I’d say, ‘Want to try it?’ ‘Mr. Wemyss, I don’t have a college education.’ ‘You’ve got a college education; you’ve got one here.’ It’s always better to bring them up through the ranks. The quickest way to destroy the morale is to say, ‘Gee, I’ve been here twenty years, and I always wanted to be the head of this department, and look at that, he brought somebody in.’ You give him a chance first. You say, ‘You want to try it? You think you can do it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Go. You got it.’ It has a great morale boost to the people.”

  This policy contributed to a much more flexible relationship between union and management. Wemyss recalled a visit to the mill by Leonard Pierce, president of Berlin’s paper mill, who wished to observe Groveton’s high-speed toilet paper winder. Wemyss introduced him to Jim Doolin, superintendent of the finishing room. While they were talking, as Wemyss recounted, “All of a sudden, Mr. Doolin said, ‘Excuse me, sir, I’ll be right with you.’ He turned away, yanked the adjustable wrench out of his pocket, loosened one of the folding plates on the seventeen-inch napkin machine, and moved the plate a little bit, which you do every so often. Leonard said to me, ‘What did he just do?’ ‘I think he adjusted that folding plate on that napkin machine.’ ‘What did you say his job was here?’ ‘He’s superintendent.’ ‘We can’t do that in Berlin. [The union would] shut the whole place down.’ I said, ‘They won’t shut it down here. I would adjust it if I felt like it.’”

  During a public interview, Wemyss suggested another reason for promoting locals: “The best possible thing you could do was get a good man out of the union and put him in charge of the department. And shortly thereafter he says, [in an exaggerated voice] ‘Those goddamned union bastards . . .’” The audience of former mill workers roared with laughter, but it was a great insight. Lolly LaPointe was promoted to day supervisor in stock preparation after nearly twenty years as a union member: “In my heart, I was a union man, I guess. Personnel problems really got to me. Towards the end of it, all these young kids they were hiring, I don’t think that any of them had ever worked a day in their lives. They were great kids until they got in the union. You’d ask them to do something: ‘That ain’t my job.’ I guess I was from a different generation. You was lucky to have a job.”

  Despite the bullying and tantrums, Wemyss really cared about his adopted community. Shortly after his election to selectman, he learned the town swimming pool was too run-down to use: “One day I saw a little kid walking out toward my home. He had a tube over his shoulder, and I said, ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’m going to go swimming in the river.’ I said, ‘No, you’re not. You’re too little to do that. Why don’t you go in the swimming pool?’ ‘The swimming pool’s broke.’ I went down to the mill and said, ‘Nobody goes to bed until the swimming pool in Groveton is fixed. Put new toilets in, put new stainless steel valves, pumps, fill it up with water, chlorinate it. Nobody goes to bed. These are your kids that swim there, and I don’t want one to drown. Do it!’ And they did. I think we spent between $25,000 and $30,000 before we got through, getting that thing right. It never should have gotten down like that.”

  As a boy, Dave Atkinson witnessed Jim Wemyss’s tough love: “My dad worked for Paper Board in the office. I thi
nk he was very good at what he did. But he had, at times, a pretty serious drinking problem. It got to the point where it was affecting his work. I can remember Jimmy coming to our house and saying, ‘Anne, we’re going to get this guy some help. Thomas, you’re going to Founders’ Hall over in St. Johnsbury.’ I was twelve; it would be mid-to-late ’70s. ‘Tom, I don’t give a shit what you have to say. You’re drunk right now.’ And I think my father was. I think it was during the noon hour, probably in the summer. That’s why I was home. ‘You’re going now, and that’s it. If you don’t, then don’t bother coming back to work. You’ve got a family here; you’ve got a wife that loves you; you’ve got kids that are crying.’ It was quite a scene, as I remember. Off he went. I think it was thirty days. It helped my dad; he relapsed and had all those type things. But it was certainly something that I remember about Jimmy. He ruled with an iron fist, but he had a heart for those he wanted to have a heart for. For whatever reason, he had a heart for my dad.”

  At a time when there were few if any female executives in the paper industry, self-proclaimed male chauvinist Jim Wemyss promoted Shirley MacDow to vice president of Diamond International. MacDow had graduated from high school at age seventeen in 1951. She immediately went to work at the mill as a clerk, earning seventy-two cents an hour, at a time when the minimum wage for women in the union was eighty-five cents. She never attended college or earned an MBA, although she took some correspondence courses over the years.