You Had a Job for Life Read online

  Fred Shannon’s family moved into one of the mill tenements shortly after the war ended. He was ten, and he discovered the ideal playground. “We used to play in the mill, everywhere,” he said. “At night we were pretty sneaky. Kids will be kids. We’d go in there and get a piece of cardboard, and slide down the conveyor belts. A couple of them would run ahead and get the wheels all spinning, and then we’d go down through out on the shipping dock. When I stop and look back at it, yeah, it probably was [dangerous]. Like swimming over there to the [Brooklyn Street] Dam. They’d have the gates half open, letting the water out, so we’d climb up there and jump off on them. I often think, how come we didn’t get sucked right down through? But we did come through them gates one time during the [maintenance] shutdown. They had the gates wide open; the river was drained so they could work on the dam. We went up by the old railroad bridge with a plank—three or four of us. We’d get on that plank and we’d come right down through the little channel. Right on through those gates going like a bat out of hell. The current would be strong, and away we’d be going. We’d get back to shore just before we’d get to that covered bridge, and we’d get off. Carry it all the way back up and do it again.”

  After the Second World War ended, the mill and the town, along with most of the United States, entered an extended period of prosperity. In 1946 the mill produced ninety-four tons of paper a day. After two decades of relentless activity, the old, rat-infested mill had been transformed into a modern mill that had nearly doubled in size; by 1967 it turned out 450 tons a day. Just about anyone who wanted a job at the mill could get one.

  Shirley MacDow was hired in 1951, right out of high school. She recalled downtown Groveton in those years: “There were several stores, and the townspeople would sit on the street at night and talk to everybody on the street in your car. It was very laid back. But it was a busy little town. There was all kinds of stores, restaurants. Everett’s Diner [would] have a dance there every Saturday night, so everybody would go downstairs to the dance. You hardly ever went out of town. And then, you’d go up to Dinty Moore’s Diner, after you’d had a few drinks, and have something to eat before you went home at night.”

  Dinty Moore’s on State Street served beer on one side and soda pop on the other. Neal Brown described how the clientele for the two operations occasionally mingled: “The woods people were a little bit more apt to be the wild and crazy guys. They lived a pretty rough life. I don’t want to be disparaging; there were a lot of good people who worked in the woods. But there were some pretty rough-and-tumble guys who lived out in the logging camps, and then they’d come in on the weekends and raise hell all weekend. Dinty Moore’s had a bar on one side, and they’d hang out there. One of them would run out of money, and then he’d come outside, and all of us guys would be out there. He’d lay down on the ground and tell everybody they could jump on his stomach from the railing, and if he didn’t flinch, we had to give him a quarter. Get some money and go and drink some more.”

  Thursdays were paydays. “It was a busy little town on Thursday night,” Thurman Blodgett remembered. “Sat on the street and watched the people walk by. That was big excitement. That’s when everybody was doing their shopping. Watch the drunks fall out of the beer joints. Go to the next one, somebody’d get to fighting. I didn’t know they was mill guys, but after I got in the mill, some of these guys are still working there.”

  “When the mill blowed them stacks off,” Blodgett shuddered, “you wanted to get out of town. Stank like a son of a gun. They’d probably blow every three–four hours. That old sulfur; you could see it just laying right into town.”

  “Oh God, you’d get that old sulfur smell in the morning and sometimes it would be like a cloud right down on the town,” Fred Shannon added. “Sulfur from the cooking of the chips. It was pretty nasty in the mill. Some places you had to go, if they had just got done blowing one of the digesters, and then they’d bleed off the pressure, boy, you couldn’t see; if you needed to go through there, you had to hold your breath and run like hell through and down the stairs. If you didn’t know where you were going, you’d probably die. It was pretty strong, oh, yeah, real strong in the town.”

  Sylvia Stone said you simply had to endure the smell: “In the Old Red Office we’d get the sulfur smell terrible. Some days you’d have to sit all day with a tissue over your nose, it was so bad. If you wanted a job, you had to do it. There was nothing we could do about it. It would happen off and on. Not all the time. There were days it was really bad.”

  Neal Brown was almost always outside playing as a youngster in the 1950s: “Groveton did not smell nice. If you got a weather inversion in the summertime, you kept your houses closed, no matter how hot it was—the strong sulfur smell that you had down there, the rotten egg smell that would come out of the mill. You got a little bit used to it, but you still knew it was there.”

  Tom Bushey’s father told him about hunting downwind of the mill in the 1940s and 1950s: “He said you’d walk through the snow, and it would be up over your knee oftentimes, and he’d step into the snow, and you could see the layers of black and yellow and white, black and yellow and white. The stratification.” Soot, sulfur, and snow.

  Groveton residents drew some consolation from the belief that the smell wasn’t as bad as the stench emanating from the much larger Kraft pulp mill in Berlin, twenty-five miles to the east. “That was our claim to fame,” Kathy Frizzell remarked with gallows humor. She remembered that the mill would blow two quick whistles to alert asthma sufferers to get inside because a particularly nasty blast had just been emitted from the digesters.

  Coal dust was another hazard from the mill. Shirley MacDow remembered having to rewash the laundry many times, thanks to the mill’s boilers: “My husband and I lived over on West Street in a small apartment. They were burning coal at the mill then. And to put out a laundry, you knew when you brought it in, it was going to be black. But you know what? We all lived the same way. ‘Oh, the mill just blasted us with some more coal dust.’ You didn’t hear people grumbling about it. I’d grumble, but it was sort of, ‘Oh, well, I’ve got to wash my clothes all over again.’ Every time the boiler would burp, out come the coal dust. It was just a way of life. I guess we all thought, ‘If you are going to live here and work here, this is what you are going to have to put up with.’ You didn’t get into all this clean air stuff. Back in the old days, my God, everything went into the river, up the smokestack.” Her longtime boss, Jim Wemyss, asked a group of former mill workers: “What color was my house when I lived in town? Black! I painted it black because that way nobody could say my house doesn’t look good.” The mill switched to oil around 1958, and thereafter the laundry remained white, although it might still smell of sulfur.

  “Back then there wasn’t the concern about environmental hazards and the connection to your health,” Kathy Frizzell explained. “I’m aware of a high cancer incidence in Groveton, and I can’t help but think the smells we lived with in Groveton, what was released into the air, could have had an impact on us. It was taken in stride. It was our life. Other kids would say, ‘Oh, you’re from “Stinky Groveton.”’ I think that impacted us because I think I used to say, ‘I’m from the armpit of the North Country.’ Lancaster and Littleton are so lovely and genteel, and Groveton was just stinky, smelly, and dirty.” When she lived with her grandfather, the house had a coal furnace: “He smoked a pipe, my mother smoked, the mill spewed [laughs]. You put up with things. I do have a susceptibility to bronchitis, and I do have a calcified spot in my lung, and I can’t help but think it’s all the stuff I grew up breathing.”

  Shirley Brown reflected on the health hazards of mill towns: “Groveton, Berlin, and Lincoln have the highest cancer rate in New Hampshire. When you used to walk downtown, or when we were kids, you’d get home, and you’d look yourself in the mirror, and you could see in your eyes and mouth, that everything was black and sooty.” Her son, Neal, added: “We went through a period of time where we had six
or seven people in town who died of heart attacks in their thirties and forties, and early cancers, people dying of cancer when they were in their early thirties.”2

  Strong community and family bonds in Groveton helped to overcome the unpleasant smells, the filth, and the illnesses. As America became increasingly mobile and rootless in the postwar, automobile culture, isolated Groveton remained a remarkably stable community. “Somebody said you could throw a blanket over this town, and it would be one family,” Jim Wemyss joked. “One day I was talking about somebody in this town,” he said on another occasion, “and [town manager Bob Mayhew] said, ‘Jimmy, you can’t talk about him; he’s my third cousin.’ I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Bob, is there anybody in this town you aren’t related to?’ He said, ‘Yeah, you’ [laughs].” Lolly LaPointe recalled a friend whose father and grandfather were both working at the mill when he was hired. “Three generations worked there,” he marveled, “until they retired.”

  Groveton kids roamed the streets and neighboring woods without adult supervision. “We were let out in the morning. When the noon whistle would blow, we had to come back for lunch—gobble, out for the rest of the afternoon. When we got older, we were also out at night,” Kathy Frizzell recalled fondly. “We had a gang, the Roughriders. It was kids of all ages, boys and girls. The big kids took care of the little kids. Gangs in a good sense. We had a fort, a playhouse; we were organized; we played baseball. We were roaming all over the hill. Parents were not involved in this. We had rules; we couldn’t go in the river. It was a safe environment. Any parent could discipline you. There were kind of eyes on you, but for the most part they didn’t know what you were doing, and we didn’t need them to know. We were very industrious in our play, and very self-directed. I’m quite nostalgic about that kind of play being lost in the world.”

  Bill Astle remembered the trucks that hauled the bark away from the mill’s drum barker: “Boy, one of my earlier memories of the mill is living on Odell Park. Ten-wheelers would haul the bark to the bark dump. They had holes in the tailgate that allowed the sap to flow out, and it would be like you had a water truck going down the road. We were all out there playing barefoot—five- or six-year-old kids. You had to time it so you could get across the street before the next truck came through because the sun would dry it out in a matter of a couple of hours. If you walked across it, it would be sticky and you’d end up stuck to the pavement—not to the point that you couldn’t get away. They dumped the bark down where the town has its clarifiers now. It was all wooded then. It would make all these little moguls there. It was a great place; all the neighborhood kids would be down there playing army, whatever. You’d jump down behind one mound and pop up kind of like whack-a-mole or something.”

  As a young man, before taking a job at the mill, Astle was a social worker for several years. He learned that not everyone had enjoyed the idyllic childhood he remembered: “There were things going on in their homes I never would have dreamed of. I’d always assumed that I grew up with Ozzie and Harriet and so did everybody else. I came to find it was a much different place than it appeared on the surface. Groveton has always been a tight-knit community. It takes care of their own, rallies if someone comes on hard times.”

  Kathy Frizzell’s father never worked in the mill, and she grew up poor, yet she never felt stigmatized: “I was friends of Holly Schumacher [niece of Jim Wemyss Jr.] early on. I went out to the red house by the railroad trestle, swam in the pool, and went ice skating. Birthday parties and things like that; it was very nice. I was always kind of aware of this sort of fantasy life. A life that would never be mine, but privy to a glimpse of it. It was sort of like, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice?’ I really appreciated the exposure I had when I was invited out to the swimming pool or the birthday party, and the toys that they had.” Kathy later reflected on how she viewed the Wemyss and Schumacher families: “It was, I guess, the way a child would think about a rich, kindly, but demanding, grandfather. You were aware that you were at the mercy of his benevolence.”

  Even as a child, Kathy was a worrier: “We lived with the river, and I remember in my younger years the pulp in the river, the smells from the river, when the river was high, when the river was low. Was there enough wood on the woodpile? Were they going to be able to make paper for a while longer? Is there enough water in the river to get the pulp down? There was a threat of fire in the woodpile. Accidents. One of my classmates’ father was missing an arm from the mill. It was just worrying about the livelihood of the town. What if something happened to the mill? Because even as a kid, we realized it was a one-horse town, and we were at the mercy of how well the mill did.”

  Kathy and her playmates worried when union contracts were under negotiation: “I remember as a kid, and I was seven, eight, ten years old, schoolyard conversations would be, ‘What’s going to happen if they go out on strike? There won’t be any income. What if the mill closed?’ I remember this sort of being a threat, like a bogeyman. People would generally get along, but at times of possible strike and negotiation, you really felt that separation of the workers and the management. So it was terrifying as a kid.”

  “I WAS HOT”: PUSS GAGNON’S WILD CAREER AT THE MILL

  Albert “Puss” Gagnon (pronounced “Gon-yer”) was nicknamed “Ti-Puss,” or “Little Cat,” by his mother. He had one of the most extraordinary careers at the Groveton Paper Mill. Hired at age fifteen, fired—and rehired—at twenty-nine, he retired at age forty-five after a near-fatal accident. At age eighty-four, two months before his death in March 2010, Puss cheerfully described his hell-raising career.

  Hired at fifteen: Puss was thirteen when his father, a woodsman, died at age fifty-three in 1938 following a two-year illness. The family was poor, and in the summer of 1940 Puss decided to get a job at the mill. How did you get a job that young? “I lied to them to start with. There was two of us. One kid, he was pretty near eighteen; so Red [O’Neil] came up to him: ‘How old are you?’ ‘Seventeen. I’ll be eighteen in a couple of months.’ ‘Come back in a couple of months.’ He came over to me, and I knew by then, lie or I wasn’t going to get a job. ‘How old are you?’ I says, ‘Eighteen.’ ‘Get your card.’ That’s when the [mill] timekeeper sent me up to the high school because he knew goddamn well I wasn’t old enough. And when you get them permits like that, you’re not supposed to work no overtime; you’re not supposed to work nights. I worked both.”

  I was hot: “I remember going in there [to the boiler room] one night, they had to have a guy lead me down to the mill. I was so goddamned hot. I went down there. It was me and Albert Auger on these hand fires. When I first started in the mill there, there were three wood fires. I tried to pick these long pokers to poke the fire because the steam was going down. Couldn’t hit the hole. I threw the poker on the floor and lay down and went to sleep. The head fireman came over, and Albert says to him, ‘Puss is awful drunk, ain’t he?’ ‘No, no,’ Carl says. ‘He’s sick.’ So he worked for me all night. He was the boss.”

  Fired: Puss and his two crewmates were fired on July 22, 1954, because they were caught sleeping by engineer Bill Verrill, not once, but twice on the night shift. “When I worked in the fire room, time dragged. Sit there and do nothing. On the big boilers there’s nothing to do. It’s all automatic. You’ve just got to watch the board. I got done because they caught us sleeping on the job. ‘You ain’t heard the end of this.’ You know fuckin’ well you ain’t, especially when the big boss catches you—Bill Verrill.”

  “You can’t let the steam get to four hundred pound pressure. It would blow them to hell if the pop-off belt didn’t release,” electrician Herb Miles explained. “Bill Verrill, the engineer, walked by and woke them all up. When he came back, they were asleep again. They fired them all, but you know Wemyss hardly ever fired a person. Most guys that got fired, he would bring them back.” Gagnon shared with me the memo about his rehiring. It read, in part: “These men will be re-hired with loss of old departmental seniority. . . . Management will
endeavor to furnish continuous work during the year period, but will not guarantee that this will be done. Present mill seniority will be restored at the rate of 5 years for each year worked, based on date of re-hiring.”3

  Rehired: “[After the firing] I went over on Littleton dam. What I didn’t like about it was traveling. You’re using a lot of your wages just for running. I run into Bill Swift [foreman of the wood yard]: ‘You want a job? C’mon down; I’ll give you a job.’ So I went down on the barker.”

  Run over: In June 1970 Puss Gagnon was working in the rail yard of the pulp mill. “We was moving one car, and I slipped off the ladder in the back and fell on the ground and underneath it. It went down, oh I would say, probably a couple of hundred feet, dragging me down under them pockets. I couldn’t fit under them; I was too fat. All my ribs is broke; back was broke; fractured skull. I know Doc Hinkley was telling everybody when they took me with the ambulance, he says, ‘When he comes back, it’ll be in a pine box.’ I was in Hanover for a month. When I got there they said I’d be there six months at least. I didn’t break no bones below [his legs], just up in here [chest].”

  Puss drew workers’ compensation, and he became a junk dealer. “All I done is bought and sold junk. Just something to do. I remember one time, the little guy down here at the mill office—he looked after, I guess, insurance things—he says, ‘You know, you ain’t supposed to be doing that.’ I said, ‘I don’t give a fuck what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m doing it; I’m going to keep doing it.’ They never bothered me, neither. And I used to bring stuff right in back of the mill office building. They’d see me; a lot of fellows said, ‘I don’t know how you get away with that bullshit.’ I says, ‘Fuck ’em. They think I’m just gonna lay down and die, I’m not.’ You’ve got to do something.”