You Had a Job for Life Read online

  Pam Styles and her fellow office workers spent a substantial amount of time disposing of records and supplies: “We had to package up everything that was significant and send it over to Wisconsin. We had to shred everything that might have been confidential or wasn’t needed. A lot of stuff was given to the employees. You just had to check with Dave. He told us to take anything that was part of our supplies or office materials. I was the one that stocked the cabinets, so I had quite a bit of stuff to sort through [chuckles]. I brought a lot of it here to [Groveton High] school. Labels and paper. I also kept the sample room stocked up, so we had reams and reams of paper. I don’t know how many cases of paper I had sent up here.”

  Tom Bushey and three other managers refused to believe the mill’s fate was sealed. They developed a plan to keep part of the mill open to make paper towel grades on a reconfigured Number 6 paper machine. “[We] tried to do some research on what it would take to convert Number 6 paper machine to towel grade,” Bushey recollected. “At that time, generally speaking, for a few million dollars, that machine could have been converted. Now, it wouldn’t have been the most efficient machine because of line speed and that sort of stuff, but that machine could have been converted to towel grades. We found out Wausau was already buying four hundred and five hundred tons a day of parent roll stock from another tissue manufacturer to satisfy the demand for their Bay West products. This is the sinister part of what they voted to do in Groveton—you’ve got four and five hundred tons a day being purchased from China and other mills. The sad part about it is they had a paper mill here in Groveton that had a very good, efficient workforce. They had a modern electrical system, a modern waste treatment plant system, and they just flushed it all down the toilet. Those paper machines—put brand-new tissue machines on those old, existing foundations. Completely doable. Ultimately, they put in two new machines [in Harrodsburg, Kentucky]. Those two machines could have been put here. But for them, it’s all about centralization—one great big mother of a mill, I guess.”

  Dave Auger invited Dave Atkinson to join the effort to buy the mill. He declined: “I probably didn’t have the heart to tell Dave [Auger] that it’s a lost cause. You don’t want to pour water on someone that’s just been punched in the face. Out of respect, I let it go. I do remember them wanting to have an audience with Scott Dasher and Tom Howatt, and that’s probably where the definiteness of the covenant was communicated more clearly. They knew they can’t make fine paper, so I think they nitpicked the covenant. Good for them, from that standpoint. But in the end it didn’t matter.”

  Bushey described their plan to save the mill: “Dave Auger, Steve McMann, and myself, and Norm Fortier put forward a letter to the Wausau corporate office asking them if they would be interested in buying parent roll stock—towel stock—that we would make off the Number 6 paper machine if they would either sell the mill to this group for short money, or lease the facility to this group where an investment could be made. Would they be interested in a contract? If you are, then we would then go and try to secure the money. We had a fellow out of Maine that was helping us with trying to secure financing and that sort of stuff.

  “We were at the beginning stages when we found out that not only the place was gonna close, but it was going to be transferred to a new owner, and the new owner was going to have a covenant in the deed that it could never be a paper mill again. The full depth of what they intended to do was not understood by most people. [At the October 23 meeting] they used the words that the mill was being shuttered, and they didn’t want that asset to compete against the remaining assets.”

  They didn’t come right out and say: “We’re actually putting a covenant on this thing and it’s your death sentence”?

  Bushey replied: “Right. I personally did not understand that [initially].”

  Bushey said that after Eastern Pulp & Papers Corp. had declared bankruptcy, the mill manager and employees of its Lincoln, Maine, mill were able to purchase the mill. “But the difference there,” he pointed out, was “they had a bankruptcy court on their side. Whereas Wausau, when they made the decision to shut that place down, they did it from a position of very solid financial footing. They owned it; they didn’t have a creditor standing there waiting to be paid, and so they were able to do what they did without any recourse.”

  Wausau did offer Bushey jobs in Wisconsin and Kentucky. “I refused,” he said. “There have been times when I probably kick myself for not doing it. But, on the other hand, once I understood the true realities about what they were doing, and the covenant—I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and go to work for somebody that was doing something to my hometown that was completely unnecessary. If this mill was not viable for them to run, then all they had to do was sell the damn thing to somebody else or sell it to the employees and put some restrictions on where the mill can and can’t sell paper and be done with it.”

  Atkinson and his managers developed a schedule for shutting down the mill. The last supplies were delivered by mid-December. To avoid flooding the wastewater treatment plant, they shut down the paper machines on different days. The final run on Number 6 paper machine ended at 9:42 a.m. on December 19.

  Old Jim Wemyss had told his son that at all costs Number 3 paper machine must be kept running. When it shut down, he warned, the mill was finished. On December 20, 2007, at 11:44 a.m., the one-hundred-year-old paper machine completed its last five-ton reel. Fred Shannon’s niece, Wendy McMann, called him the night before that final run. Fred and his pal John Gonyer went down to the mill: “It was sad. It was sad. When that tail came down over the last time, it kind of choked you. I remember Dave Atkinson come walking by, and we said, ‘We’re sorry to see it happen.’ He said, ‘Nobody feels worse than I do.’ I looked at him, and I says, ‘You wanna bet?’ He weren’t the only one that felt bad. We all did. A sad day. You figure all those people—just throwed out, done; that’s it. They all gotta go find jobs. I feel so damn bad for all those. . . .”

  “I had tears in my eyes,” John Gonyer confessed. “It was a sad day. Really was. Terrible. All these people standing around with long faces.”

  Dave Atkinson’s memory of the last run was hazy: “I remember standing at the dry end with the whole maintenance force, a lot of the office staff, admin staff. There was probably a hundred people. It was sad; it was surreal. That’s probably why I don’t remember it all that vividly because it’s really not one of those things you like to remember. Jim Wemyss probably called me and said, ‘Will you do me a favor and save me a strip off the last reel off both machines?’ I personally made sure that that happened. He was in Florida. It was a couple of months later that he finally limped into my office and I said, ‘Here you go.’ A lot of the guys wanted to sign it. I think we did two. We did one for Jimmy. I think we did one for the Historical Society.”

  When the last reel had been removed, the washup, cleanup, and boil-out began. Normally, a shutdown requires an additional eight-hour shift. Because this was a permanent shutdown, the maintenance and machine crews spent a week siphoning the dryers and lubricating the massive machine. Perhaps someday the machine might run again. Glimmers of hope remained.

  Tom Bushey was impressed by how the workforce shut down operations: “Greg Nolin kept encouraging everybody, ‘Let’s go out on top.’ There was a sense of pride with the entire workforce despite everybody losing their job. So many of the people, that was the end of their working careers. They’ll never make that kind of money again, and they’ll never have another opportunity like that because of their age and skill set.”

  Roger Caron recalled the final day: “People were going around, visiting, socializing, and talking to people that they’d spent a good share of their lives with. Kind of gut-wrenching watching people go out the door with their personal belongings and know that they don’t have a job to come back to.”

  “Wausau Papers always felt the Groveton operation was hired help,” Bill Astle observed. “If you looked at the Brokaw, Wisconsin, area, Waus
au Papers was involved in everything—probably every little league team and anything that they could be supportive of, they were sponsors. There was never a sense that Groveton was part of the family. I’m sure when they shuttered Groveton, they thought, ‘We’ll never be there again.’ I’m pretty certain that no one from Wausau Papers in Wisconsin has set foot in Coos County since the mill closed. Nor will they ever have a reason to, because they have no connection.” Dave Atkinson subsequently confirmed Astle’s assertion.

  Epilogue

  THEY RUINED THIS TOWN

  DAVE ATKINSON remained at the mill throughout 2008, overseeing the process of shutting down. Tom Howatt urged him to continue working for Wausau as a vice president. “We’d love to have you stay with us,” he told Atkinson late in 2008. Atkinson declined: “I got called three times. I’m glad I didn’t go.” The decision to terminate his career at Wausau and to remain in the Groveton area has endeared Atkinson to the community. Roger Caron spoke for most former mill workers: “No one on the floor blamed Dave Atkinson or the managers for what came down. A good share of us felt this was a Wall Street decision and not a Main Street decision that shut this place down. It wasn’t the work ethic by any means that caused this place to go down.”

  Reflecting on his career at the mill, Atkinson said it was “very satisfying. Too short, for sure. I learned more there about managing people, managing a fairly complex operation that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. I think because of the remoteness of Groveton, I was probably given opportunities, at a younger age than I might of in a larger corporation somewhere else. I was able to raise my family, make a very good living, stay in the area where my roots were. There’s something very satisfying about that; that’s why I chose to stay. I was paid well, but it was a fair wage for what I was doing. A great career; twenty years too short. Now that I’m doing something very different, I sleep better at night. I’m sure that not being responsible for the mill has probably added years to my life. Would I like the mill still to be operating? Would I love to be driving there every morning at six a.m.? I would absolutely love to still be doing that, but that’s not reality.

  “I think one of the things I miss are those friendships that because you don’t work together anymore, you don’t see them as much. A lot of good friends over the years. There were three hundred people that worked there, and really, I knew all three hundred of them. That was one of the nice things about Groveton is all three hundred certainly knew me, but I knew them, and really tried to know them.”

  Roger Caron was born into a family of mill workers: “The mill was always a part of my life.” At age fourteen or fifteen, Caron got a job servicing the mill’s vending machines. He graduated from high school in 1972. “I had full intentions of taking the summer off, but Dean Sanborn stopped my father and said, ‘Tell your boy to come down. I want to talk to him.’ I got a job immediately after graduation. There were a lot of times I was getting ready to quit and leave. Of course, one thing leads to another, and lo and behold, I’ve been here forty years.” He worked in a variety of maintenance jobs over the years, serving as foreman in the final years of the mill.

  After the mill closed, he collected unemployment and made home improvements on his property. In the spring of 2008, he worked for a month on the construction crew of the federal prison in Berlin. “I wasn’t real happy with that particular job [as an equipment operator]. It wasn’t as structured as mechanical maintenance was in the mill. In the mill we had more planning and more knowing exactly what moves you were going to make and when you were going to make it. I didn’t see that there. I said, ‘I’m going to try something else.’”

  In the fall, Caron was called to help with the auction of machines and equipment because of his knowledge of the mill. He worked there sporadically until March 2009, when he was hired full time—the last employee at the mill: “When I first took over here, I figured it was just for a few months. All in all, it was a real busy job. There’s a lot of different hats you have to wear.”

  He performed basic maintenance on the massive facility—repairing leaks in the roof, pumping out water from the three springs in the mill’s basement, and maintaining the mill’s water treatment system. He also was in charge of public safety: “The potential for danger is incredible. Out behind the mill, there’s still 34,500 volts that comes into the facility at ten feet off the ground. If someone ever touched that in the right way, it would be history. It’s extremely powerful.” He helped catch thieves who stole thousands of dollars of copper and ruined tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment in the process.

  “I worked for two different companies. One is an auction company, and one’s a used-equipment company. The used-equipment company, Perry Videx, would call and ask about equipment, and you’d go out and find the equipment, take pictures of the equipment, dig out any books or files that you could find on that equipment so they could put this stuff in their database and try to sell it to someone. At other times, there would be clients coming in from all over the world, whether it’s India or Brazil or what have you to look at this equipment. And you’d give the people tours through this facility.”

  Sometimes he helped dismantle and remove equipment; other times, he supervised the contractor: “These people would come in here and they’d work for a week or two—long, long hours. Not knowing this facility, a person would have a hard time wrapping their arms around how much equipment is in a place like this. The number of electric motors, the number of pumps, what have you. Quite a place.”

  What was it like working in an empty mill? “It’s been very strange in a lot of ways. The building creeks and groans. There’s always noises when you’re walking through here. If you had a person that’s a little skittish, he wouldn’t last very long here. It’s extremely dark. I carry a good flashlight with me, and hopefully it doesn’t go out. I’ve had to come back to the front office with a Bic lighter before. That’s a hard trip.”

  How did you feel about being the last employee of a mill that had employed thousands of people over the previous 116 years? “It’s not something that I’m extremely proud of. To me, I would like to see this place still hopping and making paper, or something else. What kept me going is that this facility could be repurposed. I jokingly said to CBS News, ‘Maybe it could be an electric car manufacturing facility.’ The point I was trying to make was that we have an abundance of talented people in this area with a good work ethic. Once the property is cleaned up, another company will come in and see this as a viable site to do something different. This place does hold a lot of memories for a lot of people, and it provided good employment for a lot of people in this area.”

  The day I interviewed Roger, August 1, 2012, he was optimistic that a new owner would sign the purchase papers later that day. Instead, a few hours after we spoke, he sent an e-mail informing me that the would-be purchaser had failed to secure the funding and had withdrawn the offer. A salvage company purchased the mill a few months later, and that fall the long, depressing yearlong demolition process commenced.

  ON THE BEAUTIFUL STRETCH of the Upper Ammonoosuc River that runs through town, there is a vast open space where the mill had been. For generations of Grovetonians, the mill had always been there. Always. And always would be there. . . .

  The closing of the mill left the people of Groveton shocked, bewildered, devastated. Despite the mill’s struggles in the early 1990s, and despite the closing of the smaller Paper Board operation two years earlier, the Groveton community was utterly unprepared for the October 23, 2007, announcement. “The mill did good for this town, and it’s really hurting without it,” lamented Hadley Platt, who first worked at the mill in the late 1940s and retired in 1993. “I wouldn’t have this home if it hadn’t been for that mill. The mill was the life of this town.” “It was worth it,” said Belvah King. “I wouldn’t have what I’ve got today if I had just been a housewife and depended on Ted’s check.”

  “Nowadays,” Shirley MacDow scornfully remarked, “you
could walk up the street naked at night and nobody’d notice you. Sad, sad, sad to see what’s happened.”

  “I tell you, they ruined this town,” Lawrence Benoit charged. “They bought up all the buildings and tore them down, and what do we got? A parking lot down here. I think they just hated this area or something and wanted to bankrupt this town. That’s my feelings anyway.” Benoit’s sarcasm is not far from the mark. In its heyday, there were more than thirty storefronts on Main Street and State Street. Each boasted a local business. In 2017, a quarter of the storefronts house active businesses; another quarter are gone, replaced by vacant lots; and the remainder are empty.

  “I think where everybody missed the boat was how important that place was from not only the roof over your head and the food on your plate, but also it really was a part of you,” Louise Caouette observed. “Many of these folks were many generations. Nobody took the time to deal with the mourning of the loss that the people were going to feel. It was literally a mourning period that people went through, and it was sad.” Murray Rogers, the last president of Local 61, emphasized: “The big thing I want people to know is that the majority of people that worked there appreciated that they had that job.”

  Pam Styles was fortunate to find work as the secretary of Groveton High School after thirty-seven years at the mill: “I think it’s taken a big effect on the town, especially that tax [not] coming from Wausau that the town was guaranteed every year. Now the slack has got to be picked up by the taxpayers in town. A lot of people not having jobs have moved away. They all have children in the school, so the count for Groveton High School is going down all the time, too.” Raymond Tetreault, who retired in 1987, concurred; his property taxes eat up his Social Security and his pension—“takes it all.”