You Had a Job for Life Read online

  “[The barker] was probably ten to twelve feet in diameter, and it constantly rolled on these big rollers,” Lolly LaPointe remembered. “Inside of it they had these baffles, and that would literally tear the bark off. That bark went out through some slats in there, and down into a chute and into a waiting truck underneath there. They’d haul that all away. It rotated on what they called trunions. They were huge steel things; they actually rolled the drum.”

  There was a reason, LaPointe explained, why the drum barker was a job for new hirees: “Everybody who worked at Groveton Papers started on the drum barker, it seemed like because it was a crazy job. . . . Nobody would stay there because it was really work-intensive and scary. It was really, really a scary job. When I first went there I didn’t even know if I dared get out on that chain. It was just absolutely scary all the time. That wood would come at you at a tremendous rate. I’d never seen a pickaroon [an ax-handled tool with a perpendicular, slightly curved metal head for handling pulpwood]. I practically had to pry my fingers off that; I was so stiff and lame and not used to that type of work. After a few weeks you got toughened into it, and it went good after that.” LaPointe bid into the stock prep department inside the mill as soon as he could.

  The debarked wood continued on conveyors to woodpiles that contained as much as forty-five thousand cords of pulpwood. The wood yard crew built giant retaining walls along the railroad tracks as the piles grew in size and height. They were forever adding heavy conveyors as the pile grew. “They had these chutes about five feet long [and about four feet wide]. They were hardwood; there was irons on them. They probably weighed 250–300 pounds,” John Rich said. “Most of them would take two guys, and they’d drag them up, one on each side with a pulp hook. [Lionel] Maltase would take it right on up there [alone]. That old wood was slippery, you know. Peeled pulp. He’d walk up through there. He was rugged. Very rugged.” I asked Francis Roby what it was like working atop those woodpiles. “Nothing. Just like any other place,” he replied. “You’re getting closer to heaven, that’s all.”

  The woodpiles supplied the mill throughout the winter. The tough birds on that crew were out in all kinds of weather feeding pulp logs by hand onto the conveyors to the wood room, where the debarked logs were fed into a giant chipper. The wood yard crew was notorious for its consumption of alcohol. Raymond Tetreault’s first job was in the mill yard. “I kept getting laid off,” he said. “I worked with these guys who were drinking. Every weekend they were drunk. They [his supervisors] sent me home. I told them, ‘I’m not drinking.’ He said, ‘But you’re with that crew, so you’ve got to go home.’ That’s why I bid out of there and went in the mill.”

  A REAL STEADY EDDIE

  Don Noyes was one of the cast of characters who worked in the yard in all weather. He was mentally challenged, but his prodigious strength, coupled with his willingness to perform the most exhausting and unglamorous jobs, earned him the respect of his fellow workers. Pete Cardin was newly hired when he first encountered Noyes in 1968. “Everybody in Groveton knew Don,” he remembered. “Don was strong as a bull. He was huge—big and round. He was a big stocky guy. He was kind of slow, but he was a real Steady Eddie. They’d always have him in these places that were the lousiest places to work. They were always moving conveyors around because the pulp pile would grow or it would shrink.”

  Cardin had been sent out to the woodpiles to relieve Noyes: “I came around this corner, and didn’t see anybody, and all of a sudden I hear this Wheeeee. That was his nickname, ‘Wheee.’ That’s what he’d say all the time, ‘Wheee, what ya doin’? Lookin’ for somebody?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes. I’m looking for you, I guess.’ It scared the heck out of me because he kind of reminded me of a gnome of some sort, down underneath that conveyor system. He had a bucket or something he was sitting on. That big cigar, sitting on that bucket, crap falling all around.”

  Bruce Blodgett told of the time Noyes stood atop the woodpile, “and he dropped his pants and gave somebody the moon, and there was a woman that happened to take a picture at the same time that Don gave the moon. And she didn’t have a very favorable comment to the mill when she got her pictures exposed. Don with his big old rear end.”

  Because of his mental challenges, Noyes was the butt of pranks and cruel jokes. One paper machine crew conned him into painting the machine tender’s favorite bench green. This tender was furious because he couldn’t sit on the wet bench. “There was still some of that paint left,” Lawrence Benoit said. “They had the whole crew hold [Noyes] down, and [they] painted his ass green. He was a strong man.”

  Joan Breault witnessed times when Noyes walked past a paper machine and someone said, “‘Come on, let’s wash old ass.’ He’d drop his pants right down and turn to them, and maybe they’d throw a bucket of water on his rear end, or hit him with a fire hose. And he’d do it every time. Most of these companies wouldn’t bother with somebody like that, but the Wemyss [family] did. I guess they figured these people were valuable in their own way, and they had to make a living.”

  Pete Cardin admired Noyes and the other mentally challenged workers: “There were characters throughout the mill. Because back in the old days, people weren’t hired as they are today; they would just hire people, and if they worked out, they worked out. They were judged by their ability to do the job. A lot of these people would be given the jobs that nobody else really wanted to do. They were valued because they could do the job. In this day and age, there really wouldn’t be a job for that guy. Everybody is so much into being fearful of liability. It didn’t seem to be an issue back then. It seems like everybody was looking out for each other, and they were all part of society up here, so therefore they deserved to work just like the rest of us.

  “You wanted people to be able to pay their way. So how are they going to be able to pay their way unless you give them a job? And there was always a job. They were paid a good wage. They were part of the union, so they had all the benefits that everybody else had. So they were equal at that level. And it was satisfying work for them, and they felt they were part of the community, and they were. I think they had a lot of self-esteem because they were providing for themselves. They weren’t asking anybody for anything; they were doing it for themselves, which was a good thing.”

  Coos County Democrat (hereafter Democrat), August 19, 1891.

  “The Lumber Business,” editorial in Democrat, October 3, 1894.

  Democrat, October 12, 1892.

  Democrat, August 2, 1899.

  Democrat, January 20, 1909.

  Gropaco News, Christmas 1920, 6.

  Chapter Three

  MAKING PAPER

  NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND softwood paper has been highly valued for over a century because its fibers tend to be longer and stronger than hardwood fibers or softwoods grown in warmer climates. Wood is composed of cellulose, hemi-cellulose, and lignin, a natural glue that holds together the cellulose. Lignin is light brown, and, if not removed, contributes to the chemical degradation of paper.

  The pulping process separates wood fibers to create pulp—cellulose fibers embedded in water. The Groveton mill relied on chemical pulping for its fine papers and tissue papers because this process produces pulp that is stronger and more bleachable. The yield from chemical pulp is only 40 to 50 percent of the wood used, while the yield from mechanical pulping is about 95 percent. Mechanical pulping grinds logs or chips, but in the process it damages fibers and does not remove lignin. Accordingly, it is commonly used for newsprint and lower-grade papers. It was not utilized in the Groveton mill.

  Beginning in the 1950s, the Groveton mill began to use the semi-chemical process to produce hardwood pulp for its paperboard—the corrugated paper that gives cardboard its strength. Semi-chemical pulp is first chemically treated and cooked; afterward, it is mechanically ground.

  Groveton’s chemical process required a sulfuric acid solution, called “liquor,” that was produced in the mill’s two acid towers. As a young man in the late 1940
s, Hadley Platt transported lime to the acid towers: “We used to load these big [lime] rocks into these little carts, put them on that elevator, and take them up to the top. An old guy was up on the top all the time. Us two young fellows would load this stuff by hand. Big chunks of rocks. They’d come in in them big open [railroad] cars. They had a couple of old guys that would throw them out of cars too. They didn’t have no machines. They had to do it all by hand. [We were paid] about sixty-five, seventy cents an hour.”

  Sulfur chunks also arrived in railroad cars. Unloading the sulfur, Pete Cardin recalled, “was a horrible job. They would have boxcars with solid sulfur—chunk sulfur, and that would all have to be shoveled into a conveyor system and then put into a tank where they would melt the sulfur. Just nasty jobs. You work around that stuff all day—you know the dust and what have you.”

  The sulfur was cooked in a burner to produce sulfur dioxide. The crew had to monitor the mix of air and sulfur so that the process produced sulfur dioxide and not sulfuric acid. The hot sulfur dioxide gas flowed through cooling tubes to achieve the desired temperature as it entered the tower at its base. Water, introduced from above, trickled to the bottom of the tower, where it was collected as acid cooking liquor and piped to the digesters. Some of that water formed a heavy steam cloud that produced a foul sulfur smell.

  Jim Wemyss explained how the acid towers could cause London fog in Groveton: “To make the liquor, we had Jenssen towers. You fill those [two] towers with lime rock, which I think was mined over in Vermont. The sulfurous gas passed up through the Jenssen towers from the bottom to the top, and by the time they’d got to the top, it was mostly absorbed with the water that trickled down over the lime rock. But a little wisp went out of the top of the Jenssen tower, and it seemed to have a specific gravity that made it attract to the ground rather than go off into the stratosphere. A cool morning, or an evening, especially in the fall, it came down like a fog. It didn’t stay all day; it would be for a few hours. It would not be allowed today, I don’t think.”

  Greg Cloutier, who grew up in Groveton in the 1950s and 1960s, recalled the evening discharge: “The acid towers would put the steam cloud out at night, and I remember it hung low over downtown. I knew it was important to get home before 9 p.m., the curfew, because the sulfur smell took over the town after that time. My parents’ home on Riverside Drive didn’t seem to get the smell.”

  Pulpwood entered the mill at the wood room, in the southwest corner of the mill. After the logs passed through the wood room’s chipper, the chips were screened to remove sawdust and excessively large chips. The screened chips rode a conveyor to the top of the four-story digester building. There they were packed into one of the four digesters that cooked the chips at high pressures and temperatures in the sulfuric acid solution.

  The digesters were like giant pressure cookers, fifty to sixty feet high and approximately eighteen feet in diameter. The digester crew loaded fifteen to eighteen cords of chips into a softwood digester and then added the acid solution and sodium carbonate (Na2CO3). Mill workers referred to sodium carbonate as “sody ash.” It softened wood chips and controlled pH levels during the cooking. “Our job was to keep the sody ash mixed so you have some all the time,” Gerard Labrecque explained. “We had to wear a mask all the time on account of the dust and the sody ash. We used to shovel it out of the boxcar. Put in the wheelbarrow and go and dump it in the tank. Then we used to put some water and mix it up and dump it in all the tanks. Sody ash would burn your eyes, your face. That’s why we had to wear masks.”

  The digester crew bolted the top of the fully loaded digester tightly, and pumped in steam to cook the chips for about eight hours. Raymond Tetreault worked on the digesters for nearly forty years: “Towards the end, I was the cook. You put the steam to it after it was full. Then as it built pressure, you had to keep relieving it—like a pressure cooker. The same thing, only a pressure cooker had a button to let the steam out. Out there, we had to do that by hand.”

  “In the digester room, Stuart Nugent was the boss,” Labrecque remembered. “He asked me to work overtime. Sometimes, too much overtime, I’m getting tired. ‘Aw, you’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘You’ll get a break. You go behind the tank and have a nap.’ You couldn’t ask for any better boss [laughs]. I wasn’t the only one to do that because the cook is the one that is still awake. Sometimes, we had a pretty good break. An hour or an hour and a half. He said, ‘Go behind the tank there and have a nap.’ I didn’t say no.”

  After eight hours, the cook turned off the steam, and a helper climbed down three flights of stairs to open the valves at the base of the digester. Decades of climbing stairs took a physical toll on Raymond Tetreault. His wife, Lorraine, said: “Up and down those stairs—he had to have a knee replacement twice, I think. The third time, they put a rod in his leg.”

  Gerard Labrecque recalled the first time he blew a digester: “There were [five] of them digesters. At first I was kinda scared. ‘Jesus Cripes, if I make a mistake and blow the wrong one, I could have killed a lot of people.’ There was a pipe about that big [1.5 inches] from up there to downstairs. The cook said to rap on that pipe, and he said, ‘I’ll come to the pipe. You ask me which one it is. Make sure you blow the right one.’ So I made sure I was going to blow the right one. Jeezum. That [smell] was pretty strong when you used to blow the digester.”

  Tetreault wryly observed: “We never had too much visitors in the digester room because it stunk so. It would take your breath right out of you. That was strong. We had a mask over our mouth and breathe through that way. The only time it was real bad was when you’d blow. While you’re cooking it weren’t too bad, unless you had a leak. If you had a leak in the head, well you had to stand it.” Lolly LaPointe said, “When they blew a digester, I’ve seen times when you’d come out of that mill, and you’d want to walk on your hands and knees to try to get under that stuff so you could breathe. It would bring water right to your eyes.” Roger Caron recalled: “I remember growing up, my father coming home with sulfur smell, and my mother always kept his clothes segregated and would wash them every day, immediately.”

  The pressure in the digester blew the chips and acid solution into blow pits. “When those digesters used to blow,” Jim Wemyss marveled, “I mean, incredible. Ten-inch [pipe], two hundred and ten degrees, chips flying right out into this big blow tank.” The softwood pulp in the blow tanks looked like beige mush. The blow pits were flooded with water to wash out some of the acids. “I went down and worked in the blow pits for a while [in the late 1940s],” Hadley Platt recalled. “I had to wash the stock with them old gents that were down in there. I was spare help. There was one old guy that used to talk to himself all the time, and when I’d think there was somebody there with him, he was all alone in one of the other blow pits. They were big old wooden pits where the stock was. They had these big hoses, and you’d reach in through a big wooden hole and wash it down. It was all old wood, and it was in really pretty bad shape. At times—if they blew a digester or something, [the smell] could make you really sick if you was down in the hole there.”

  From the blow pits the mush was pumped to the bleach room, where it was treated with bleaching chemicals, then washed and screened three times. First, chlorine, which reacts with lignin to form water-soluble compounds, was added. This solution removed chemicals and dissolved lignin. Next, in the “extraction stage,” chlorine dioxide was added. A second series of washers and screens removed chlorinated and oxidized lignin. Finally, hypochlorite, the actual bleaching agent, was added to the mush to make the paper white. It removed most of the remaining lignin. A final series of washers and screens removed chemicals and dissolved lignin. The wastewater, containing toxic organochlorines, including carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, benzene, and dioxin, was dumped into the river until the pulp mill was shut down in April 1972.1

  The bleached mush then went to the stock preparation department, often referred to as the “beater room.” Lawrence LaPointe worked
there for thirty years. Initially, he was given “the most menial job” of collecting and baling wastepaper pulled from the paper machines. The top jobs in the beater room were beater engineer and his first helper. The first helper mixed the vats for fine papers, using about 80 percent bleached virgin pulp and 20 percent re-pulped wastepaper. Then the first helper added the chemicals, the talc, the clay, the sizing, and dyes for colored paper runs.

  LaPointe described the stock prep process: “A beater is a big tub with an agitator in the bottom; some of them had agitators on the side, or cutters. They would beat that paper right up and make slush out of it. You added water; then after it got to a certain consistency, you had to open a valve and start a pump. It would suck that stuff out. You’d direct it to the chest that you wanted it to go to. There was a tremendous amount of chests everywhere. Underneath that floor was basically chests in some areas. Big holding tanks with an agitator to keep that stuff circulating to keep the consistency the same.”

  The bleaching process and stock preparation were major sources of water pollution prior to the early 1970s. “On the night shift, if there was a color change to be done, you’d take and dump all these dyes,” Bill Astle, son of a paper machine tender, said. “There would be this deep blue, deep red, and gold dyes. You’d flush out all of the trays, and it would go down into the sewer which was a straight pipe that went right into the river. If you were out there and shined a light on it, you could see it was just brilliant. It colored the entire river. The interesting thing is if that happened today, there would be people serving jail time. But that was considered very acceptable. There was raw sewage in the same river.”

  The stock was now ready for the paper machines—large, long machines that require staggering amounts of energy to operate. Channie Tilton, a former tour boss (pronounced “tower boss” by former Groveton mill workers), described a paper machine as “a giant, endless, dewatering machine.” Foils, vacuums, wires, felt, and presses transformed the slushy stock that came from stock prep into a paper product with very little moisture.