You Had a Job for Life Page 26
“There were times when we had great relations,” Cardin remembered, “but when it came down to the operation of the mill, decisions were being made that would affect them and us both. Then the relationship would deteriorate.”
The Groveton Paper Board Company operated only one paper machine, Love in the Afternoon, renamed “Number 1” to avoid confusion with old Number 3 that Wausau had renamed Number 5. Paper Board’s machine crews, operators of the neutral sulfite semi-chemical mill, and stock prep crews became Paper Board employees. The two companies had always shared maintenance and utility workers. The 1993 separation required that those jobs be assigned to one company or the other.
Paper Board had to negotiate its first union contract before the official separation date of April 1, 1993. “Everything was going fairly well in the negotiations until it came to an issue regarding the folks that worked in the [wood] yard, the folks that were dealing with the chip pile, and the people that maintained the equipment out there,” Cardin recalled. “During this negotiation, the union wanted those people as union employees. I could see it from their point of view, because knowing that this was going to be a separate union, they were going to have a very small bargaining unit, and they wanted to make their unit as big as they could. We took a pretty firm stance on that one. These were salaried employees, and we were not going to allow them to become unionized. It just went against the grain. It would be like allowing our office workers to become unionized. We were talking about probably a dozen jobs. These folks felt very strongly that they did not want to be in the union. They felt like they were being used as pawns here.”
The union threatened to break off negotiations. Chicago-based lawyers for Jefferson Smurfit, at the time a large shareholder of Paper Board, wanted to call the union’s bluff. Cardin remembered Jim Wemyss “was getting pretty emotional about this. He was saying that he has lived through strikes before; he does not want another strike in this town. It’s just not worth it. The attorneys are telling him they cannot go on strike. They have no legal course to go on strike because first of all we don’t even have to recognize them as a union.”
The union negotiators knew that their bargaining leverage was limited because if everything fell apart, the company might shut down. “When we met again, the union said that there was only one person they could trust to negotiate for Groveton Paper Board, and that was Jimmy Wemyss,” Cardin noted wryly. “The rest of us were untrustworthy. They didn’t put it that kindly. Remember we have a dance going on here. And so, Mr. Wemyss enters the negotiations. The speeches were given and how he loved these folks and we’re all family here. In the end, he gave in to the union and allowed those employees in the yard to become part of the collective bargaining unit. They felt like they had been betrayed. There were bitter feelings. But it did resolve the contract issue. After it was all done, we had a big dinner with the union, and I think we invited the yard employees, and everybody was best friends, and we all loved each other. Well, we [supervisors] were [still] despicable guys. But Mr. Wemyss was pretty heroic [laughs].”
As part of the separation agreement, Paper Board had to find office space outside the mill. In May 1993 Shirley MacDow negotiated the purchase of the Weeks Medical Center building in Groveton for Paper Board’s new offices. This building, on the corner of Main Street and Mechanic Street leading into the mill, had once been the site of Everett’s Diner.1
During the transition period, Tom Bushey declined a job offer from Paper Board and remained with Wausau: “The Board Company still retained that culture of almost terrorism of managerial style. The Board Company was very 1950s in their managerial style. Take two good guys and put them in a situation where they’re going to become adversarial to one another. Whoever wins was the best guy of the two. If you ask me, that was bred with the Wemyss family, and then continued with different managers.”
Jim Wemyss’s daily involvement in Paper Board had diminished over the years, except during crises. Every day Wemyss would call Shirley MacDow or Greg Cloutier to learn Paper Board’s daily tonnage; “444, and you can see me no more,” he would tell them. “If they didn’t make 444 tons that day, they had to answer to me if I was in Florida, if I was in Tanganyika. Every day I said, ‘What’s the number?’ And if it was 398, ‘What the hell—I’m on my way; I’m coming up.’ ‘Oh, Jesus, don’t do that.’”
Wemyss spent more and more time in Florida. Even during the warmer seasons, when he returned to Groveton, he left the day-in, day-out running of the mill to his small, loyal group of managers. Cloutier believed that Wemyss had set up a management team that only Jim Wemyss could manage: “If you talked to most of these guys, I think you’ll find they’re all tough, potentially bullies, dynamic, dominant characters. They would cause chaos beyond belief and could never manage a company. Mr. Wemyss was somehow able to control these people who were exceptionally good in their skill set, but their personalities were borderline aggressive. We knew that when he called us all together, we were a team. He had that rare quality to be able to do it. There wasn’t a good replacement. Maybe he didn’t give it up soon enough. Like family businesses, the father’s really got to turn it over early.”
Wemyss had installed his son-in-law, Gene Petryk, as superintendent of the mill in the early 1990s. Initially, Petryk, a retired army captain and helicopter pilot, tried to run the mill as if it were a military operation. Greg Cloutier recalled that Petryk’s demand “You will show me respect” failed to impress union workers who were governed by seniority, union-management grievance procedures, clearly defined job descriptions, and loyalty to Jim Wemyss.
After a while, Cloutier said, Petryk “realized that the best thing he could do was organize. He started using his helicopter maintenance training to lay out procedures, so when we attacked a problem, there was a little bit more of a structured [approach]. He realized that production increased when Mr. Wemyss wasn’t meddling. Towards the end, I found [Petryk] to be pretty good. We must have come up at least a hundred tons [on the machine] before he left.”
Cloutier questioned Petryk’s savoir faire in dealing with his irrepressible father-in-law: “I remember the day [Gene] came, and it was like the third year, and they were going to build a new house, and we were all interested in how he was going to build it. He said, ‘I got a nice piece of land. Beautiful.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Right next to my father-in-law’s.’ ‘Are you stupid?’ [laughs]. [Petryk] liked to come in around eight o’clock; he’d come in before that if we had trouble. [One morning] he looked all tired. ‘Mr. Wemyss was mowing the lawn out in front of my house at six-thirty’ [laughs]. Really, what he was trying to do was get Gene to get into work. That’s the lawn mower trick.”
In 1996 Petryk decided it was time to go to Paper Board’s directors and propose it “retire” Jim Wemyss and promote him, Petryk, to president. It was, Cloutier judged, “a suicide mission,” especially since Wemyss learned of the plan before the board met. Cloutier described the bloodbath: “Mr. Wemyss was the chair of the board. These were all loyal investors with thirty years. And then [Petryk] got drinking. He never drank at work, but once he got out of work, he’d have some pretty stiff drinks. His judgment was clouded. It was merciless. They just railroaded him out of town, basically. They didn’t want you to carry out any trade secrets. A cardboard box. I could not believe that it was done that way. It was bloodshed. The comment I use was, ‘Mr. Wemyss, people of that genetic makeup, eat their young if they have to.’ And he did. It was terrible.”
Shirley MacDow retired shortly thereafter. Pete Cardin recalled her retirement dinner: “That was a nice party they gave for Shirley. It was really first class. Shirley is probably the most loyal employee to that company, I think, that they ever had. Her number-one thing was that company, period. They can’t complain about Shirley’s performance—ever.”
In the summer of 1998, Jim Wemyss finally retired. “I wanted to retire for five or six years,” he said. “And Mr. [Ray] Duffy was one of the directors, and he was an office
r in Jefferson Smurfit, and very friendly with Michael Smurfit and the whole family. They owned a section of the Board Company, and they had a lot of other paper mills. I said, ‘Come on, Ray, you take it over. I don’t want to do this any longer.’ After that everything went to hell. Ray was a nice person, but he had no paper mill knowledge. I felt he could draw on the resources of Jefferson Smurfit’s, and it just didn’t work. I don’t know what the hell happened. Replacing me with my ideas and way of doing things is—I don’t think you can do it [chuckles]. Not that I’m that smart; it’s just that I did things so much differently than anybody else.”
Greg Cloutier offered a different perspective: “He was forced out. Part of it was me. He was seventy-one or seventy-two. Mr. Wemyss was not there, so we were struggling with day-to-day leadership needs. I’m in charge of operations, and really operations means how well the paper machine was running: the 444 sort of thing. We had come up from like 300 tons to 440 tons on this machine. I did not have the technical science that supported that next level of operations on the paper machine. Mr. Wemyss had that, and he’s not around. It really required somebody that understood the science. When the crew made a change, everybody understood why they were making it. Mr. Wemyss was very dynamic in being able to do that. Had he been there every day, he probably could have taught me how to do that. We got to a point where I said, ‘Listen, you’ve gotta take him off my back. You’ve gotta let me try to do it my way or find somebody different.’ Mr. Wemyss was never going to give it up. What we were basically saying was, ‘Let us have our own meetings. Let us do our own problem solving,’ and not have a person come in who may not have been involved for two days, and all of a sudden he comes in and says, ‘Do all this.’ We can’t get him to listen to the fact that we’ve already done that. [Ray Duffy] asked Mr. Wemyss to step aside. That didn’t go over well. There was clearly tension, and I felt pretty guilty that we had done that to him, but we probably did it too late.
“We had these ass-chewing, lecture meetings with Mr. Wemyss, and they would go on. The machine was struggling, and the guys were struggling. [Bruce Simonds] was a young guy who had good ideas about what to do, and we were tying his hands. He truly understood the science, and he read about it. He wanted to learn more about it—that rare individual that just loved it. It wasn’t fair. You tried to tell [Wemyss], and he just would go off. It was his legacy. I think he was struggling with a lot of personal dynamics, having to turn it over to somebody else. Seeing that he didn’t have the energy and the skill to take it to this next level. Part of it was that he just wasn’t there every day.”
“I just walked away from everything,” Jim Wemyss Jr. said. “I didn’t say I lost interest in the people of Groveton, but I had no more authority. The worst thing you can do is put somebody in your place and then try to micromanage it from there. Walk away. ‘It’s yours now.’ No excuses. It’s yours. You do it. That’s the way it should be.”
Jim Wemyss III succeeded his father as president of Groveton Paper Board, and Ray Duffy succeeded Wemyss as chairman of the board. Greg Cloutier did not miss Wemyss’s meddling, but he did miss Wemyss’s vast knowledge of how to produce paper. “Duffy really didn’t bring anything to making the company more profitable,” Cloutier said. “Monthly meetings he would sweep in for a day and leave. He went and played golf and never spent any more time really thinking about operations other than you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do. You need to go there and work the problem: ‘What do you need? What are you missing? What are we not bringing to the table that I can use my contacts to help you with?’ He didn’t do any of that.”
Pete Cardin offered a very different assessment. Duffy, he thought, was “very professional, super-professional.” Cardin explained: “Whereas Mr. Wemyss was a production guy, Mr. Duffy was a financial guy. He really taught me an awful lot about business management. My business management skills were nothing. He really showed me how to read a P&L [profit and loss] statement and make decisions. He had great people skills. He was a top-notch politician. Great negotiator.”
“Instead of just having goofball meetings, we’d actually have monthly, professional meetings,” Cardin said. “The chairman of the board would come to Groveton and have a meeting with all of his managers, and we’d actually have an agenda that we would have to sit down, and we would have a time limit on our meetings, and each department would have to report, instead of having somebody rant and rave about something. If we didn’t meet our production levels, our quality levels, instead of ranting and raving about it, ‘Let’s talk about why. Give me a reason why.’ Very severe if you didn’t meet it. He had these cold, blue eyes, ‘Give me a rational reason why you didn’t meet it, and how are we going to correct this problem?’ He wasn’t some pushover. He knew. That forced us to become better and better and better. Over the course of his chairmanship, we progressed a lot, and we improved dramatically as a business. We were very, very, very proud of ourselves for all the things that we did.”
Greg Cloutier was struggling as head of operations. He had never run a paper machine, but as head engineer, he had supervised the machine’s rebuilding: “We had changed so many things in the paper machine. By that time we had done the dryer section over. We’d done the drives over so we could go faster. We’d done the press over. We’d done part of the Fourdrinier over, so I may not have been a papermaker, but I had made the machine. I was kind of the chief mechanic for the operation. You glean a lot in the process, and what it needs to run, but you lose the finesse on how to handle fiber. That was a fairly steep learning curve.”
During the summer of 1999, Cloutier remembered, the rewinder could not be made to work reliably: “We’d had a month of poor production. We’d all worked night and day for a month, so tempers were raw. The final blow was Ray Duffy had a friend [who] sold variable speed drives. We put that variable speed drive on the winder, and it just worked terrible.”
On August 17, 1999, Greg and Rita Cloutier’s wedding anniversary, Greg’s frustration boiled over: “I basically told [Jim Wemyss III] to get f-ed, and you can’t do that. We had worked every day, eight-, ten-, sixteen-hour days for thirty days, and we were not seeing the solution to this winder problem. Our production numbers were down, and we were shipping paper that was of low quality as well. It was a perfect storm from the point of view of a one-machine operation. We were doing everything wrong, and we really didn’t have an answer. We were burned out. ‘Shoot me. The disease has overtaken me. Put me out of my misery’ [laughs].”
Cloutier, who had survived countless such blow-ups with the thick-skinned father, was fired on the spot by his boyhood chum. Oddly, Cloutier endorsed his own firing: “It wasn’t a pleasant thing,” he said. “But you can’t be in that position and be disrespectful to the president of the company and the things he wants to have done. The interesting thing is my wife congratulated me. Because up to that time, I never had had a vacation. Every vacation I was working on my hydro plants.” After his firing, Cloutier built up a successful hydropower company.
Production manager Pete Cardin explained how difficult it is to run a paper mill: “A paper mill is extremely capital intensive. It was heavy industry. You have to reinvest in this thing constantly, otherwise it’s not going to make it. So your capital outlay is huge, just your operating capital, not necessarily your projects for nice-to-do process improvement or production increase. Our operating expenses were very high. Mind-boggling. It always blew me away how much money you’d have to spend to run a paper mill because it’s such a corrosive environment; it’s such a damaging environment that everything has to be replaced almost constantly. As a manager, you really have to be able to predict; predictive failure is where it’s at, predictive maintenance. Because you’ve got to minimize your down time, and at the same time you’ve got to maximize your life on your equipment and your process. It’s a fine line, and it takes a lot of experience to get there, to know how to do it, because you’ve got to be willing to push it. You’d like to play
it safe, but that’s not a luxury you have. You’re under production pressure. You can’t just take the thing down when you feel like it’s time.”
Entering the twenty-first century, Pete Cardin believed Paper Board’s operation had never run better. Management and workers had lowered costs relentlessly: “The irony is we finally got this paper machine humming. We’re putting out paper like you wouldn’t believe; we’re hitting production numbers that are just fantastic. Our up-time is really good; we’re putting out a really good product. Lowering our costs. We’re operating as efficiently as we possibly can run. Our fiber usage and our energy usage are as low as we can possibly make them.”
“We were very proud of what we did to survive,” Cardin reflected. “It was a constant battle, and, man, I’m telling you, we fought a lot of good fights, but in the end there was one battle we couldn’t win, just couldn’t win. In the end, it all came down to the fact that it’s a commodity that we were producing, and the demand was disappearing, and so because it is a commodity, we had no control over the price. The price was collapsing because the demand for boxes was going away. There were a lot of people out there that could make it a lot cheaper than we could. The newer, bigger mills down South, overseas. Wider machines, faster machines, just more efficient machines.” The decline in United States manufacturing during the 1980s and 1990s reduced demand for boxes. When Wal-Mart required its suppliers use shrink-wrap instead of cardboard boxes, prices for corrugated medium collapsed.