You Had a Job for Life Read online

  Prior to the nineteenth century, paper was made one sheet at a time in presses that squeezed the water out of the stock. Around 1800, Fourdrinier paper machines were developed to make continuous sheets of paper that formed reels. Advances in steel making, engineering, and power generation led to the development of larger, wider, faster paper machines in the final two decades of the nineteenth century.

  The top men on a paper machine crew—the machine tender and the back tender—are among the highest paid workers in the mill. Given the high pay scale, one would expect a long waiting list for these jobs, yet Joe Berube secured a job on a paper machine while still a teenager. Why? “That’s a double-edged sword,” he laughed. “Even though they were giving all these incentive payments, all this extra money, those jobs weren’t user-friendly. These paper machines are man killers. I mean when I first went to work there, you saw guys with eyes missing, fingers missing, arms missing from these paper machines because they were a safety hazard to work around. I’m one of the fortunate few that worked there that long that still have all my appendages. That was not unusual to look around and see all these guys handicapped in some way from having worked on those machines, and a lot of them had not worked there that long.”

  Five crew members operated a paper machine. The fifth hand performed all sorts of menial tasks, including cleaning. He hauled away the substandard paper to the beater room when the crew was rethreading the machine. The fourth and third hands operated the dangerous rewinder, a machine that cut the reels produced on the paper machine to narrower rolls that were sent to the finishing rooms.

  The back tender, never referred to as the second hand, made the reel of paper coming off the machine at the “dry end.” He threaded the paper down the machine while it was running. Many men lost fingers on this job. In later years the mill installed a rope—a much safer method to thread a machine. The machine tender was the head of the crew, and he operated the paper machine controls at the “wet end.” If things were running well, Channie Tilton observed, “there was not a lot to do.”

  The tour boss was the shift supervisor, and, along with the beater engineer, he ran the papermaking process. He had to check on quality and to make certain the product met specifications. Was the paper curly? Was it too dry or too damp?

  The stock preparation department pumped the 4 percent solution of water and pulp to the machine chest, a big holding tank often referred to as the “4 percent chest.” Joe Berube said: “It looks almost like cream of wheat,” and it was heated to about 125° to help with drainage on the “wire.” The stock was pumped up to the “stuff box” roughly thirty feet above the machine. It was then gravity fed into a huge fan pump where additional chemicals were added.

  The fan pump delivered the stock to the head box that spread it evenly onto a thirty-foot-long moving screen called the “forming fabric” or “wire.” “It’s just a big screen, and it’s made out of monofilament—Dacron in both directions,” Berube explained. “It’s like a regular fabric, only it’s a coarser weave. It’s real flimsy if you ever took it off. Those run about fifteen thousand bucks.” How long do they last? “Typically three months, if you’re lucky. If you’re lucky. And it’s a major operation to change one. You have to get two complete machine crews, and it takes about three hours. You have to completely dismantle the wet end of the paper machine. You’ve got to get everything super clean. If you punch a hole in that thing, say the size of that ballpoint pen, you’ve ruined fifteen thousand dollars worth of equipment. So it’s pretty sensitive.”

  The wire was porous, and all along its thirty-foot length, water was continuously draining out of the mushy stock. Foil blades and vacuum boxes under the wire sucked out as much as 60 percent of the water by the time the sheet reached the end of the wire. Dave Miles described one of the occupational hazards of a machine tender: “It’s always wet up there. It got so, when I was running Number 1 [paper machine], between [my feet] and my toes would all bleed. I went to the doctor about it, and he said it was because of the dampness. I’d come home and take my shoes off, and my socks would be all blood. That’s one reason why, when I got onto [back tender on Number] 6, I was comfortable. Shortly after that, my toes all healed up because it was so much dryer. My wife could tell you I threw away more socks.”

  At the end of the wire a “cooch roll” vacuumed more water, reducing the amount of moisture to about 15 percent. The sheet passed from there onto a quarter-inch-thick felt. “In the old days they used to be made out of real fine, virgin wool,” Berube said. The felts took the sheet through a squeeze press that Berube compared to “old wringer washing machines” and fed it onto the first press, where a vacuum roll under the felt sucked more water out. A second press, with a second felt, removed more water. A third press, called a “smoothing press,” was used on some, but not all, grades of paper. It added smoothness to the paper and helped determine the caliper (thickness) of the paper.

  The wet end of Number 3 paper machine in 1955. A fine-papers machine for most of its active life, it made paperboard from 1950 to 1967. From a 1955 Vanity Fair sales catalog. (Courtesy GREAT)

  Dryers on Number 3 paper machine. From a 1955 Vanity Fair sales catalog. (Courtesy GREAT)

  After the three presses, the sheet of paper entered the drying sections. The main section on Number 3 paper machine consisted of thirty-six big round drums. Steam was pumped into the dryers at about 125 pounds of pressure from both top and bottom. The first of these dryers applied low heat, and each subsequent dryer gradually increased the temperature. “You don’t want it too hot near the wet end,” Berube explained, “[because] it will set what they call a curl in your sheet. You want to keep your sheet flat.” The sheet of paper retained only about 2 percent of moisture when it emerged from the first set of dryers. It entered the size press, where starch and other chemicals called “fillers” were added; they gave the final sheet its special surface properties. In the size press the sheet regained considerable moisture, most of which was then removed in the ten after-section dryers.

  Finally, the sheet, containing about 5 percent moisture, went through a vertical set of rollers called the calender stack at the dry end of the machine. Calenders applied pressure to fix the caliper, or thickness, and smoothness of the paper. Berube cautioned, “There is a problem running too much calender pressure. That’s a whole other science altogether. Sometimes you get calender marks and what they call stack veins that leaves little veins in your sheet, plus you can run into real structure problems: corrugations, ridges, stuff like that. If you get too bad of a corrugation or ridge in a reel, you have to throw the paper out.”

  “The back tender was in charge of building the reel,” Dave Miles said. “Make sure you’ve got a good reel, so it would go out the door, rather than a bad reel and have to be cut up and sent back to the beater room. You had to keep your eye on it all the time. If you got hot spots in here, the reel would go soft. You’d be feeling along here and you could tell when it was soft just by tapping it—an experienced back tender. A lot of people would come into the mill on tours, they’d come over [and touch the reel and recoil from the heat]. Once you got used to it, your hands could stand that, but if you weren’t used to it, it was hot on your hand.”

  A reel of paper on Number 3 was usually five or six feet in diameter and weighed five tons. To remove a full reel and start a new one while the paper machine continued to churn out paper, the crew at the dry end brought an empty reel down and kicked out the full one; the fifth hand cut the sheet, and the back tender used an air hose underneath the new reel to blow the paper onto it. Berube recalled that when he started on Numbers 1 and 2 paper machines in 1964, “a guy would be there with a gallon pail of water, and he would throw it in behind this reel at the same time that they kicked the existing reel out and the water would make [the paper] stick on this [empty] spool. That’s the way the old-timers used to do it.”

  Joe Berube at the controls of the dry end of Number 3 paper machine. Raymond LeClere is tes
ting for hot spots on the reel. Photo ca. 1983. (Courtesy GREAT)

  What happened if your timing was off? “You’d have a mess.” You’d shut down the machine? “No, not necessarily. You’d keep trying till you’d get it on there. Those old machines didn’t go that fast. It got pretty dicey sometimes. If you had an experienced crew, it wasn’t a big deal. If you had a bunch of green people, it could be a problem.”

  Whenever paper machine crews changed an order, or when there was a tear in the sheet, a “break,” the back tender would have to rethread the paper through all the presses and dryers and back onto the reel. Joe Berube described the process: “A lot of your breaks would be in the midsection where the size press is. This is like liquid cornstarch. It’s a real watery solution, but it’s one hundred and forty degrees and it’s got pipes the whole width of the sheet all the way across, top and bottom. You’re actually gaining about ten pounds of weight with this cornstarch, and it sealed both sides of your sheet so it gives it a lot smoother sheet. A lot of your breaks would occur right here. Either you’d lose your starch here, or you’d have a hole come down, and it would hit that starch and pop it and break it there. And so, you’d have to cut a narrow strip of paper, and your back tender would come along, and he’d have to thread that through, back over the paper machine. You’d add right onto the reel. You’d take a lumber crayon, and you’d mark it on the side of the reel where the break was. After you took the reel off the machine, the rewinder would stop there, and he’d cut out any bad paper, skin it out, take it off, and make a splice. They had this two-edged double-thick splicing tape so there wasn’t any actual bad paper there by the time he got through. You’d splice it and flag it, so that when this was taken out to the finishing room, they would stop it where the splice was and kick that splice out, and they’d have good paper.”

  Joan Breault worked in the tissue finishing room in the 1950s: “There was a big open doorway right into the dry end of Number 3 paper machine. We could see right down the length of the machine. Charlie Allin from Lancaster was the back tender. He threaded it. I can remember seeing him taking a tail and going. They alternated hands putting it through the different rolls. Guiding it through. And the rolls were running. Charlie made it look so easy, and you knew it wasn’t. He was fabulous on the machines.”

  When the sheet failed to thread through the paper machine, a disaster referred to as “haying,” the entire crew had to pull the balled-up paper onto the machine room floor. “I’ve seen many times, we would hay so bad, we’d have to shut the machine down—we had no place to pull the paper,” Dave Miles said. “The whole place was full of loose broke. Everybody worked when that went down.” How often would you have a break on an eight-hour shift? “If you had a good day,” Berube answered, “you didn’t have any breaks. It would depend on what type of paper you were running.”

  When a paper machine was making unsellable paper, the mill was not making money. The crews dropped everything to fix the problem in the shortest time possible. “The amazing thing was that that culture in that mill was a culture of urgency,” Pete Cardin explained. “A sense of urgency. Everybody understood it; when a paper machine went down, as soon as it went down, started to hay, we had a sheet break; as soon as that happened, if you weren’t moving, I mean somebody was going to kick your butt, and it was going to be one of the other guys that you were working with because our job was to get this thing back on the iron as fast as we can. So guys would run tssk, tssk, tssk. Everybody knew exactly what they were going for; everybody had their role to play. You don’t think, you just do. Put the sheet on, get it down. There’s a lot of whistling and screaming. It’s pretty cool. Get the sheet down, get it on the reel; what a sense of accomplishment. We’ve done it in, ‘Oh, man, what was that down to?’ ‘Five minutes.’ ‘Oh, all right!’ That sense of urgency is for the company. We were smart enough to understand that without that machine, without it running, we don’t have a job. So it was a good culture that way; it was a great culture.”

  Working for decades on a paper machine took its toll on crew members’ health. Paper machines are brutally hot, especially the dryers. Lolly LaPointe said: “Back when they had the older paper machines, it was just horrible hot in the summertime, comfortable in the winter. Then they started enclosing the paper machines and add the huge fan that would draw the heat out. That worked pretty good. It was hot in the summer, and not too bad in the winter.”

  “It was not unusual to go in there at a hundred degrees,” Joe Berube recalled. “And if you had to work up on top of the hood to install new wet-felts, sometimes it was as much as a hundred forty up there. That’s warm. Probably the last ten years that I worked there at my wet end station, we had an air-conditioned office at the end of the machine there because we also had a computer in there. They wanted to protect the computer probably, more than us.”

  Paper machine operators invariably suffered serious hearing loss. “My hearing ain’t good,” Thurman Blodgett said. “‘You shoulda wore earplugs.’ ‘I’ll be all right today; I don’t need them today.’ That’s just the way it went.” By the time the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) mandated ear protection, Ted Caouette recalled, “I suppose I’d lost most of my hearing anyway. I have a difficult time hearing a lot of things. My wife will say, ‘Listen to the birds this morning.’ I cannot hear any noise whatsoever. But different pitches I can hear.”

  “My knees were going, and I couldn’t have kept going on that cement floor,” Dave Miles, a veteran of four decades on paper machines, said. “They’re hell on your knees and feet. My knees got so bad, and they had a job come up taking care of the dock, sweeping floors out there and running the compactor out there, and I got that. I’m guessing probably the last four or five years that’s what I did. I think I went from sixteen or seventeen [dollars an hour] down to eleven or twelve, but it kept me going until I got to sixty-two. So I was able to get my time in.”

  The harsh working conditions frequently provoked zany behavior, and paper machine crews were notorious for playing pranks. Fifth hands, lowest in the pecking order, were the target of many initiation rites. However, everyone was a potential victim, and woe to the fellow caught catnapping. Anyone might bite into a bologna sandwich and discover a slice of red rubber had been substituted by some clever wag.

  “When I first went on the paper machine [in 1952], they were getting wrinkles on a sheet,” Lawrence Benoit recalled. “One of the guys said, ‘We’ve got to send somebody up to Number 3 to get that paper stretcher.’ I went up there, and I says, ‘I’ve got to get a paper stretcher.’ ‘Oh, yeah, it’s over here.’ Christ, I looked at this thing, and the damn shaft must have been that big and probably from here to the wall. ‘How the hell am I going to get that on the cart?’ A guy says, ‘I’ll help you.’ We picked up on that shaft, and I wheeled it all the way down there. Bill Jewell was down there. ‘What the hell are them guys doing up there? This ain’t the right one. This is a small one. I’ve gotta have a big one.’ They sent me all the way back up there. They had it all planned. Right beside that small one, there was another one. Here I am wheeling it back down, and here comes Opie Veazey, a tour boss. He says, ‘What the hell are you doing, Benoit?’ ‘They want this paper stretcher.’ He knew they were playing a joke on me. He said, ‘Wheel it over there, we’ll put it on in a minute.’ It never went on.”

  During a public presentation of mill stories, Joe Berube and Dave Miles regaled the audience with tales of pranks. When did you find time to make paper? “The work was so disastrous that you had to do something,” Berube replied as the audience erupted in laughter. Miles added: “Like Joe said, it kept us sane working on those machines. When the days were bad, they were very bad. You’d bring your lunch in, and some days you’d bring it back home.”

  Nevertheless, the danger and stress fostered an esprit de corps comparable to bonds forged in wartime. “I started on old Number 1. [It] was 1800s technology. It was all by hand, and it was a real art. It was cr
aftsmanship in making paper. There wasn’t much for instrumentation; it was all knowing,” Pete Cardin said. “These guys could see it; they could hear it, sense it, feel it. They knew how to make little adjustments. There was an awful lot of pride in it. To get it just the way they wanted, there was an art to it. As a fifth or fourth hand, no way did I have a right to ask what was going on here. There’s no guarantee I’m going to be there that long. Why would he want to waste his precious time and his knowledge on me? If you get up to third hand, and they knew you were working into a back tender slot, then they’d start bringing you more and more into the Brotherhood—the Brotherhood of the Papermakers.”

  As in war, the Brotherhood suffered grievous injury and even death. The most dangerous job on the paper machine crew was operating the rewinder at the dry end of the machine. The rewinder trimmed off rough edges and cut the reel down to several smaller dimensions for the finishing room. Joe Berube recalled the old rewinders: “They had these old cam machine winders when I first got there, and those were man killers. Dick Sheltry was a third hand [in 1943], and he was feeling for wrinkles on the drum. You used to have to have this spreader bar underneath the rewinder. He was feeling the drum for wrinkles because sometimes they would wrinkle when you’re first starting the rewinder up. He was going slow, and he was trying to adjust the spreader bar, and his hand got caught in that reel, and he couldn’t get it out. Two guys jumped on him to hold him, and it yanked his arm right out of his socket. When I came to work there, he was a supervisor in the stockroom.”