THE 1950S AND 1960S stand out as a kind of golden age for the Groveton Papers mill. This was the period of unprecedented economic prosperity in postwar America, a time when most families had a car or two and a television set. The economic, social, and cultural forces responsible for those good times also contained the seeds for the slow demise of the mill and Groveton’s downtown business district. The railroads began their steady decline after the war. The Amusu, Groveton’s movie theater, shut down in 1956. The near universal ownership of autos allowed mill workers to move out of town. The clothing stores, food markets, and even Groveton’s beer joints began to disappear as families headed to shopping centers an hour or two away and watched TV in the comfort of their living rooms at night. Northumberland’s population peaked in 1950 at 2,779; the 1960 census recorded a 7 percent decline.
When Jim Wemyss Sr. had recovered his health and returned to the mill in 1950, the family embarked on a second major project to diversify the mill. Father and son were not happy with Number 3 paper machine. “It had old presses, and it was not a good [bond] machine,” Jim Jr. said. The old digesters could not make enough pulp for three fine-papers machines and the new tissue machine. The mill was paying high prices for additional pulp.
There was a nationwide shortage of the fluted, corrugated medium paper that gives cardboard boxes their strength. Friends from the Mead Corporation suggested Number 3 would make an excellent corrugating machine. Old and Young Jim Wemyss “revamped” Number 3, installing two new suction presses and a new suction cooch. Several New England region box manufacturers committed to buy a certain tonnage of the new product. The mill began to manufacture paperboard in the summer of 1951, and soon it was producing 125 tons a day.
For years, the mill had been dumping improperly cooked pulpwood, called “screenings,” down by the river above the Weston Dam. Old Jim decided to dig them up and use them as a cheap source of pulp. The mill had also been dumping hard coal screenings from the old Hynie boiler on top of some of the pulpwood screenings. One day Jim Jr. received a phone call from a customer with a problem: “I go out to his corrugated box plant. All the men standing around were black. White circles around [their eyes]. ‘What do you suppose that is?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We did put a little something in to make the fluting stronger’ [laughs]. That was coal.”
The mill soon completed a new hardwood pulp mill to supply the converted paperboard machine. A pile of hardwood pulp logs arose across the river on Brooklyn Street. A conveyor transported the logs directly to the chipper. Legend has it that sometimes six-packs purchased at Cloutier’s Store also rode the hardwood conveyor.
Until 1952, most of the tissue finishing operations were performed at the Northumberland mill where four old paper machines together produced less tissue than Groveton’s new machine. The Northumberland mill building was in terrible condition by the early 1950s. “To call it rickety was a compliment,” Jim Wemyss Jr. once said, “and today OSHA would give you eleven seconds to shut it down.” Zo Cloutier was hired to work weekends as a sixteen-year-old in the mid-1940s. “I was making fifty cents an hour,” he said. “My father was an oiler down there. [Old Jim] Wemyss said, ‘You go down and help your father.’ You had to crawl in places underneath the machine. It was filthy. Aw, Jesus, it was awful. I went with a hose and pail and hauled stuff out and washed everything down and cleaned it. They were satisfied, because it wasn’t too long they gave me a ten-cent raise.”
“The whole mill shook; you could feel it quivering all over,” John Rich recalled. “You walked in down in the cellar, and there were so many posts holding it up, somebody put a sign up, ‘No Hunting Allowed.’ That always struck me funny. I was telling my uncle about that; he said, ‘They do quite a lot of hunting up there. They bring in their .22s and they shoot cockroaches on the walls’—.22 pistols. Right out through the walls, old boards, shiplap. Quite a few times they got it—fifteen feet away.”
At age sixteen, Joan Gilcris Breault, whose father, Duke Gilcris, was a supervisor in the Northumberland finishing room, was hired for the summer in the print room on the three-to-eleven shift. “You know what I made for money when I started in ’47, the year before my senior year—that summer?” she asked me. “Fifteen cents an hour. They paid it in cash in an envelope. You got cash money, and you didn’t get pennies because they kept all the pennies from everybody as part of a flower fund for anybody that had died. Might not sound like much, but nobody lost over four cents a week, and it added up.”
Working in the mill was an education: “It is a whole new way of life,” Breault said. “Some people will carry on and do things that they wouldn’t do outside. We had one napkin machine operator that watched his machine from a stool where he could look at the girls taking off napkins and see through their dresses. He was a dirty old man. Just sit there and have his evil laugh going a lot of the time.”
After Joan graduated from high school in 1948, she went to work full time on the napkin machine, unloading and wrapping packages of napkins. She took maternity leave in 1951 and was still on leave in June 1952. That spring, Old Jim and Young Jim demanded that the union extend the old contract for two to four months owing to uncertain business conditions. The United Mine Workers Union Local 50 overwhelmingly refused on May 8, 1952. The union demanded increases in wages and paid holidays and a group insurance plan that would be paid in full by the mill. The Wemyss family insisted on significant wage and holiday cuts. On May 10, millwrights moved some of the Northumberland mill’s perforators to Groveton,1 and negotiations grew increasingly bitter. Even the pro-management Democrat wondered “whether any machines so moved would be . . . returned to Northumberland.”2
Virginia Ward, a member of the union negotiating committee, wrote to the Democrat that mill workers in Groveton were paid more for the same jobs. She asked “why a man is worth from eight to fifteen cents more per hour for common labor in Groveton than in Northumberland?” The Northumberland mill’s 270 workers struck on June 1. By then, most of the finishing room equipment and machinery had been removed.3
On June 23, the Northumberland strikers picketed the Groveton Papers mill to protest the transfer to Groveton of five perforators, one roller towel machine, two core machines, and four napkin machines. The 721 members of the two locals in Groveton honored the picket lines, even though their leaders took pains to explain that they had no grievance with Groveton’s management. The Groveton mill was shut down for four shifts. The non-union wood yard and the converting plant, operating in a building beyond the mill, continued working.
Jim Wemyss Sr. returned to Groveton that afternoon, and at noon on June 24 he announced the closing of the Northumberland mill.4 The defeated pickets left town, and the Groveton mill resumed operations that afternoon. In late June, Local 50 voted to end the strike so its members could file for unemployment benefits and improve their chances of finding another job.
Jim Wemyss Jr. later explained the rationale for shutting down Northumberland: “Around that time, I had a choice to either fix Groveton up or fix that up, and that was not a mill to fix up. It had very old machines. OSHA today would tremble if they had seen it. Open belt drives would not be tolerated today in any sense of the word.” Some Northumberland employees were able to find jobs at the Groveton mill, but a great many people lost their jobs following the strike. Sixty years later, Wemyss remained sensitive to the charge that he and his father had cost people their jobs: “Never did I shut a department down in the mill to eliminate anybody. When I shut the Northumberland mill down, I had three hundred people working down there. It was absolutely archaic. You’ve got to make sound decisions as to what’s the best thing for this community. That’s what I did all my life. What’s good for here?”
Number 4 finishing room in Groveton was located just beyond Number 3 and Number 4 paper machines. Duke Gilcris was transferred to Groveton to direct the new operation. “Dad had come home one noon hour,” Joan remembered, “and he said to me, ‘Would you like to work for a couple of weeks?’ I said, ‘Doing what?’ He said, ‘Teaching new girls in Groveton how to pick napkins [off the napkin machine].’ So I said sure. I went up the fourth of June. I taught them all how to pick napkins. The second week I was there, [Dad] was shorthanded on the Teal folder, which was facial tissue, and he said, ‘I’m going to take you off the napkin machines today, Joan, and put you down there.’ I said OK. So I learned that job, and then he was shorthanded on the perforators, and I had done some of that in Northumberland, so I went to work on the perforators part time. I worked all around. My two weeks turned into forty-three years.”
“People don’t realize how hard we worked,” Breault maintained. “We worked full tilt.” Her friend, Pauline Labrecque, who was hired June 5, 1952, concurred: “I had to bend down, pick ’em up, put ’em in my case. Five rolls of toilet paper—and maybe more. The fellow who was putting the boxes down, he liked it to get a certain amount in each eight hours. You don’t sleep on that job, and you don’t sit. You’re busy. You had to watch your fingers. I told them, I lost this [pointed to her left eye patch], and I’m not about to lose [my fingers].” Every eight-hour shift, Pauline and her coworkers were expected to pack 120 cases of toilet paper. A case contained ninety-six rolls, each of which had to be wrapped before placed in the carton. To meet the quota, Joan and Pauline had to wrap and pack twenty-four rolls a minute, or one every two and a half seconds.
James Campbell Wemyss Sr., known as “Old Jim.” From a 1955 Vanity Fair sales catalog. (Courtesy GREAT)
Two decades later, Bill Astle, a student at the University of New Hampshire, worked in the mill during summer vacations. One of his jobs was to spell the women in the finishing rooms on their periodic breaks. “It was always women who took the napkins off the machine and put them in the conveyor,” he recalled. “And these women would be talking about their grandkids and what they watched on TV the night before, and they were dealing these things into the conveyor like they’re cards. And I’m there struggling for all I’m worth. All I could think of was the old I Love Lucy sitcom where she’s in the chocolate factory trying to keep up with them.”
Pauline continued to work late into her pregnancy: “I had no choice. I was brought up poor. One of seventeen in the family. I probably could have got done earlier, but I was trying to get ahead to try to have a little nest egg because my life was hard before I met up with him [husband Gerard]. I didn’t miss out on any work unnecessarily. I never called in like a lot of them did: ‘I’ve got a headache,’ ‘I’m sick,’ ‘I’ve got to go home,’ for an excuse. I worked. Because for what I didn’t have in years past, I wanted to be able to make my life a little bit easier. Follow me? So I worked right up until something here [pointed to her abdomen] told me, ‘You’ve got to stop.’ And when the boy was born, he had a cord around his neck.”
The women of that era felt it was unfair that they were paid less than the men at the mill. Joan Breault said: “That’s aggravating. Probably the women were doing a more thorough job of everything than the men were. As a rule, most women are more conscientious, maybe because we’ve had to work harder to get where we are.” Pauline’s starting pay was ninety-five cents an hour, whereas her husband, Gerard, hired shortly before her, started at ninety-eight cents an hour. “They always paid the men more anyway,” Pauline noted with some bitterness, adding: “I think because the men were mainly the head of the family. I don’t think it’s right.” Gerard agreed: “If you’re going to do the same work, you should get the same pay.”
Gerard and Pauline rarely worked on the same shift, so that one could always be home to take care of the children. When both were working, Pauline’s niece would babysit. “A lot of times he [Gerard] ended up doing the washing, take care of the kids,” she recalled with a laugh. “It wasn’t no worse for him than it was for me. I’m a hard egg, ain’t I. But I want to tell you what. Made fifty-four years last July [2009], and I’m still with the same rooster.”
The “hard egg” took no guff from coworkers or bosses: “I went into work from three to eleven, and the boss for that shift, he was at the punch clock waiting for me. He said, ‘Paulie, don’t bother to punch in. Go home. You were supposed to have been in here this morning, not now.’ I said, ‘Nobody ever told me about it.’ It was not going to end there. They had a special meeting with one of the union fellows in with the bigger boss that was in the office. I said, ‘Nobody told me to come in days. There was no list put up to let me know when I was supposed to be working. I came in for the shift that I was told to come in. I’m not about to lose a day’s pay through his fault.’ And I fought it. I had enough mouth on me. I got my day’s pay. Then they started putting the list up on a bulletin board. So and so works this shift, that shift. That straightened that out, didn’t it?”
Joan enjoyed her young female coworkers. “I can remember back, way back, we had a quota in the tissue finishing room,” she said. “Once you got to that quota, you could shut down for the night. You probably wouldn’t have been able to if the bosses had been around—but they weren’t. Probably I shouldn’t say this on tape—we’d go sit in the girls’ room and play cards. Play cribbage. Probably three-quarters of an hour, an hour. Or just visit. In fact, I didn’t have to worry about a hairdo. I had two girls I worked with all the time that were better than most hairdressers. And they liked to. We’d all work on each other’s hair. I had nice hairdos from those girls.”
By the mid-1950s Groveton was having difficulty competing with stationery firms located nearer to Boston because of high shipping costs for converted products. Late in 1955, father and son decided to relocate the converting plant to a building in Canton, Massachusetts, that was five times larger than Groveton’s converting space. Young Jim was delighted: “It was a transition. [Father] had a nice home in Stoughton, Mass. He didn’t bother me, and I didn’t know what he was doing. It was something to keep him busy.” Old Jim would remain owner and president until 1968, but he generally left the management of the Groveton mill to his son.
The move meant that about one hundred employees of the converting plant in Groveton had to choose between leaving their community or risk losing their job. Belvah King recalled: “There were quite a few single girls; a lot of them moved down. And some other men did. There was more that didn’t go than did go. It was a troublesome time. You didn’t know what was going to happen. I finally got into Number 1 finishing room. Seems as though I was out of work maybe a year.”
Bud Brown, the young supervisor of converting, was charged with setting up the new plant. His widow, Shirley, recalled: “My husband walked into an empty warehouse, and when he left it was a converting plant. He set up the whole thing. He was very, very proud of it. When Old Jim came down, Bud said to Old Jim, ‘What do you think of this?’ And Old Jim said, ‘You’ve played around enough. Now it’s time to get to work.’ My husband told him what he could do with that mill.” Neal Brown elaborated: “My father turned to him and said, ‘You can take this mill and shove it up your ass’ [laughs]. [Old] Jimmy fired him on the spot, which I guess he was prone to do. He was pretty short-tempered.”
Coleen Mills and Coleen Ledger removing napkins from the napkin machine in Groveton’s Number 4 finishing room, from a 1955 Vanity Fair sales catalog. (Courtesy GREAT)
“[Old Jim] had him blackballed all throughout New England,” Shirley Brown said. “He couldn’t get a job. Bud would have an interview with a paper company, and then we’d get this notice that the employment fee had been paid by Jim Wemyss. Old Jim would buy up the contract so he couldn’t work.” Bud Brown’s blunder, his widow bluntly stated, was that “he stood up to him.” Brown was forced to find work in midwestern mills.
Shirley MacDow, who served as Old Jim’s secretary for a while in the mid-1950s, tactfully referred to him as an “unusual individual. Very austere, but at other times he could be down to earth.” Herb Miles called him a generous man: “If he saw me somewhere to a restaurant, [he’d] buy you a drink or a meal, or say, ‘Send over a drink to so-and-so.’”
Sylvia Stone was a young woman in the accounting department in the 1950s: “The thing that I hated the most was that Mr. Wemyss Senior came in. He’d call us down, and he’d go through the cost sheets item by item. If there was anything that was a red flag for you, you’d be called down on the carpet. We’d have to look up the invoices, and I would get pretty nervous then. We had to prove everything that we set down.” Stone witnessed one of Jim Sr.’s angry outbursts in the old Red Office: “God his face would get as red as a beet. He’d come into the main office. Oh, he’d storm around; it was unreal. Boy, you knew when he was on the rampage. He came out to his secretary, kind of shouting around. I said I was glad I wasn’t his secretary.” Arguments between Jim Jr. and Jim Sr. at the mill were common, Bill Baird remembered: “I heard Jimmy and his father arguing, and I thought he was right outside the door, and he was maybe fifty feet down the aisle towards the paper machines. The two of them, you could hear a hundred yards, I think.”
Old Jim’s relations with the town were equally stormy. In 1950 the town debated building a $150,000 high school gymnasium. He issued a statement threatening to close the mill. The Democrat reported: “The company might need to seek tax abatement if its mills were to continue to operate in Groveton, where, he said, the tax rate is already too high. Offers of tax abatement have been made to the company as an inducement for them to move to the South.” The town voted not to build the gym.5
A decade later, Mickey King recalled, when the town considered a warrant article authorizing the construction of a community swimming pool, “Old Jim got up, and he was drunk. [In an exaggerated, high voice:] ‘If you think for one minute that I’m going to pay taxes for this swimming pool then you—’ Well, of course, the people voted it in, thanks to that speech. It was wonderful [laughs]. I’ll never forget that. He walked—la da-da-da—like Jack Benny.” Belvah King added: “Best thing that ever happened to this town, that pool.” In the 1970s and 1980s, Young Jim routinely dispatched mill workers to the town pool to repair its plumbing and concrete work.
In 1953 Jim Wemyss Jr., who had steadily assumed greater responsibilities from his father, took over the job of negotiating new one-year contracts with the two unions. That year, for the first time, union and management reached an agreement without any fireworks. Young Jim recognized that America was changing, and labor unions everywhere were winning higher wages, increases in paid vacations, payments for pensions and health insurance, and other benefits and perks.
For the three decades Jim Wemyss Jr. dominated the mill there were only two strikes and a short work stoppage. Young Jim was no pushover during negotiations. However, his war experience, the zeitgeist, and his carousing with many of the younger mill workers in the postwar years ensured that contract negotiations never degenerated into the sorts of battles his grandfather and father fought with the unions.
I asked Wemyss once if his war service had affected his management philosophy at the mill. “Yes, it had a great influence,” he replied. “I went into an infantry outfit, which was coal miners, steelworkers, big families, three or four kids sleeping in a bed. Peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff for breakfast. I went to some of their homes because they wanted me to see them before we went overseas. I had never been exposed possibly to the real America that was fighting this war, and seeing how people were poor, as poor as they were, because I lived in a pretty nice neighborhood in Connecticut when I grew up. I started to understand that there was another world, and it affected me greatly. I was very concerned about people who worked for me in later years and their families. Of course, having men die in your arms. . . .
“I had a lot of men in my outfit who couldn’t read or write because they grew up in the Depression era. One fellow got his nerve up and came over and said, ‘Could you read a letter for me?’ ‘Sure.’ It was a letter from his wife or somebody. He said, ‘Could you write her a letter back for me?’ ‘Yes. What would you like me to say?’ Then the word got around that I would write letters. I was amazed at how many men came to me. I’ve known a lot of guys who had to work during the Depression, didn’t get a chance to finish school. That was quite a thing. That’s what the service does to people. Everybody is the same. We’re all together.”
AS THE MILL FLOURISHED, jobs were abundant. Many of the mill workers I interviewed were hired in the postwar decade. Nearly all described the mill hiring process as a mere formality. Gerard Labrecque was hired in 1951: “My God, they put me to work right off [on the drum barker], and I wasn’t dressed up to work.” Two decades later, Bruce Blodgett recalled, “You could almost quit today and go back tomorrow.”
Greg Cloutier, a childhood friend of Jim Wemyss III, admired Jim Jr.’s commitment to the community. “He made them feel special. He also made an effort to bring in professional people, and have them stay in the community. He made an effort that you try to buy local, you try to do local. The school system, I thought, was quite good, considering that it was just a mill town. He encouraged professional people to come there and put their kids in the school, be a part of the school board.”
Mill workers who entered the workforce before World War II often had little education. When Lolly LaPointe bid into the stock prep department in the mid-1960s, he worked with an older man near retirement age who kept asking him the time: “He would come up to me, and he would say, ‘What time is it?’ I’d tell him what time. I was telling the guys: ‘Jeez, his eyes must be terrible.’ We had a huge clock in there. They said, ‘No, he can’t tell time. He’s completely, totally illiterate.’ A guy said, ‘I’ll prove it to you.’ They used to have to make a report. They’d write down what they used. Another guy said, ‘I’ll put like he made two pulpers of apples.’ That old guy would come in and relieve him, and—just beautiful handwriting—he copied what the other guy had. That’s the first person I believe I saw that was illiterate. I was dumbfounded by that.”
Sometime in late 1950s, Wemyss decided the mill would only hire workers who had earned a high school diploma: “Kids used to say, ‘Aw, the hell with it; I’ll go down to the mill, and I’ll get a job.’ I said, ‘You can’t do that anymore.’ So, they didn’t.” Older men and women who had dropped out of school during the Depression and war years to support their families were not penalized by this policy.
Wemyss realized a small New Hampshire paper mill could thrive only if it modernized in an efficient and thrifty manner: “I never stopped,” he boasted. “We had forty-two men in our construction crew, or more. I kept them busy all the time.” In 1960 the construction crew began the largest single addition in the mill’s history, a thousand-foot-long building adjacent to the two buildings that housed the paper machines. Wemyss named it in honor of Bill Verrill, his longtime plant engineer. The new offices were at the end of the Verrill Building, nearest the town and adjacent to a spacious fine-papers finishing room. The remainder of the building housed a cavernous shipping complex that included a warehouse and railroad tracks with a capacity for sixteen railroad boxcars and six docks for tractor-trailers. Shipping department crews were especially grateful for the indoor railroad-track loading facilities when it was thirty below zero outside.
The steel for the Verrill Building came from the Grumman Aircraft building in Bethpage, Long Island, that built World War II dive bombers. Wemyss crowed: “They practically gave it to me for four cents a pound, delivered to Groveton, match marked. My father said, ‘You’ve lost your mind. Do you realize how much that building’s going to cost?’ It was one thousand feet long and 150 feet wide: $580,000. That’s the price of a house today in a lot of places. Can you imagine that? There’s no buildings in New Hampshire or any place that are built as rugged as those buildings are.”
Once I asked Wemyss how he dealt with major screwups during the construction process. “We couldn’t afford them,” he snapped. “It’s a family business. You didn’t make a decision and then forget it. No. You were there too. If something came up, and a decision had to be made, you could make that decision or correct it. Everybody worked together. That’s Groveton. We wouldn’t bring in outside people to do it. We did it ourselves.” Wemyss’s policy sustained scores of local jobs, saved huge sums of money, and built up a construction crew with intimate knowledge of the entire mill.
Fred Shannon and the construction crew loved working for Jim Wemyss: “He always treated us like kings. He could have had the president of the United States in his office, but if we showed up to see him about something, he’d kick that guy right out; he didn’t care. We were important to him. That’s what made you feel good. He’d always come right up and talk to us.” When Boston-based steelworkers picketed the mill to protest Wemyss’s use of his local construction crew, he told John Gonyer, the crew supervisor: “It looks dirty around here; get that fire hose and wash that street up a little.” The soggy pickets eventually departed.
Wemyss loved his wild construction crew: “They were a tough bunch. I used to have to get ’em out of jail sometimes on Monday morning. The jail used to be right there by the railroad track.” He took pride in the crew’s ability to do anything on short notice: “John Gonyer and people like that were the steel riggers. The best. ‘John, put up a building from here to there, will you?’ That’s all you had to say to John. That’s the type of people who were in Groveton.”
“A lot of times, Jim would ask me if I could handle a job,” Gonyer recalled. “I’d say, ‘Piece of cake.’ Make it sound good. That’s my boss I’m talking to. A lot of times he’d say, ‘You know what I want, order the steel.’” Gonyer’s best friend and coworker, Fred Shannon, said Wemyss “had his blueprints right in his head.”
When the construction crew built the bleach plant in the early 1960s, it had to devise a way to install heavy machines thirty feet in the air. “We fabricated all that steel from the ground up,” Gonyer said. “It was quite a project, because it had no crane. We’d always find a way. I think we had cables strung from one building to another and would hang up chain falls from that to get a [sixty-foot-long] column up in the air. Now we’ve got to put in these I-beams for the roof part of it. You’ve got to have room above the column for your chain falls and everything to hang on. I made up a bracket that went on a column with kind of a gooseneck on it, and it clamped onto the column, and it probably went we’ll say four to six feet above the existing column, and I put my falls on that and pulleyed the beam into place. It was slow work, but we got it done.
“We had heavy equipment in there too. Some of it had to be jacked from the ground floor, I’m guessing thirty feet in the air. Eight-by-eight cribbing as we went up. It was pretty shaky work. We would stabilize the cribbing to the existing building as we went up. You’d go up a ways, and then you’d tie off to keep the cribbing from tipping. We bulled. We worked hard. I guess we put enough thought into safety, but back then you kind of stretched it a little at times.” I asked about OSHA, and Gonyer retorted: “Never heard of them.”
Despite the hair-raising nature of the work, the construction crew suffered only one fatality. On April 25, 1960, four men, including thirty-seven-year-old James Ledger, were forty feet up on a catwalk removing a high-pressure steam valve that weighed about three-quarters of a ton. The men put a chain around the pipe so that it could be lowered after it was cut loose. Inexperience led to a tragic mistake. “The falls were all rigged up ready to take this valve down,” Gonyer remembered. “And the bolts were all cut; they had to be drove out. The valve was upright, and he made a hitch on the valve, but he hooked on the bottom part of it. So when he picked it [cut it loose], the valve flipped, and it hit [Ledger], and there was an inch-and-a-half angle-iron rail in there, and it put him right through it and he went down on his head.”
Until the early 1960s, blue laws required the mill to shut down on Sundays. Dave Miles, a conscientious paper machine operator, described how the weekly work stoppage tormented him: “We’d shut down on Sunday [morning], clean the machine up, get it all ready, and then go home. I may be in bed an hour and I’d think, ‘My goodness, did I shut this valve off?’ I’d get up and go down to the mill. I couldn’t help it. I don’t think I ever failed to do something important, but it just didn’t stop me.”
Wemyss considered the blue laws a wintertime curse because boiler operators had to start up cold boilers at 4 a.m. on Monday in “goddamn twenty-five below zero.” He explained: “Every time you start a motor up that’s been down, you blew one. Starting up and shutting down is the worst thing you can do in a paper mill. You’ve got a turbine as big as this room, and you let it cool off, then you’ve got to get it balanced up and heated up and bring it up to temperature.”
Shortly after the Verrill Building was completed, Wemyss attempted to run the mill seven days a week. This provoked a brief strike on September 23, 1962. Two days later, Wemyss withdrew a controversial clause in the proposed contract that mandated work on Sundays when the mill was operating.6 The following evening, both locals voted to end the strike.
The era of blue laws ended when the mill negotiated a new labor contract in 1964. The new contract instituted the “southern” swing shift for paper machine operators and stock prep workers. The swing shift rotates four crews on three shifts. Each crew works seven consecutive days and then takes two, two, and three days off. At the end of twenty-eight days, each crew will have worked twenty-one days and had seven days off. To compensate for the roughly three hundred work hours lost annually under the new system, workers received a sixteen-cent-an-hour raise when the swing shift system was implemented. This meant that an average worker who worked no overtime and took no holidays or vacations would earn about $130 a year less under the new system but enjoy forty more days off from work every year. Few workers suffered that $130 loss, because they could quickly recoup it through overtime opportunities that also increased as the mill ran full time. Additionally, the mill hired more workers to fill out the fourth shift. Maintenance and construction crews continued to work day shifts (with ample overtime opportunities), and the finishing rooms and shipping departments remained under the old blue law schedule of closing on Sundays.
It had become necessary to abolish the blue laws, Wemyss explained, because “what happened is everybody wanted paid holidays, Christmas, New Year’s, Fourth of July. Then all of a sudden everybody wanted health care. Then everybody wanted two weeks, three weeks—we ended up with five or six weeks vacation. Either run full, or you can’t support it. The whole industry went seven days a week.” Gary Paquette, a longtime paperboard machine tender, wryly suggested: “Jimmy wanted to make more money.”
Wemyss acknowledged that working a swing shift was “very debilitating.” Research into the health risks of shift work suggests that disrupting natural rhythms often leads to diminished exercise and an increased consumption of junk food that can contribute to obesity and diabetes. The risk of cardiovascular disease in shift workers may increase. Many shift workers suffer serious gastrointestinal problems, including higher risk of peptic ulcers, nausea, diarrhea, and constipation. There is also evidence of problems with pregnancy among shift workers, and a significantly higher risk of breast cancer for women with more than twenty years on a swing shift schedule.7 Shift workers may be at greater risk of depression and mood disorders.
Swing shifts wreak havoc with family life and social activities. “Summertime, you might be mowing your lawn,” Dave Miles said, “and I’m trying to sleep. Kids might be out playing on a hot day; you’re trying to sleep. For some reason or other, you just can’t sleep.” Ted Caouette said most workers hated the three-to-eleven shift, “because it’s like the best part of the day; it’s the end of the day. The kids are coming home; things are starting to happen; you can enjoy supper together. You couldn’t; that was gone.” Workers on the night shift also usually missed out on evenings with the family because they had to sleep until about 10 p.m. “Most of the time when you woke up,” Caouette recollected, “you were grouchy because you knew you had to go to work.”
Bill Astle observed: “Studies have shown that the older you get, the more difficult it is to reset your internal clock. I can remember my dad’s comment, ‘As the years go by, I mind shift work more and more.’” That may be one reason a very high percentage of mill workers opted to retire at age sixty-two, even though their Social Security and pensions would have been 18 percent greater if they had worked until sixty-five. Astle’s father, Edgar, died of a heart attack shortly before he could retire.
Some loved the night shift. “Most people think I’m absolutely nuts,” Sandy White laughed. “I loved the night shift because I’m a night person. As hard as you worked, you could have some fun as long as you got your work done; nobody ever gave you any problem. All the foremen were good. It was quieter, nobody bombing around bugging you. You just went in there, you did your job, and that was the end of it. Day shift, there was so many people [from management] wandering around.”
When he was hired, Lolly LaPointe said, “It used to be fun to go to work. On the night shift we used to have big fish fries and corn on the cob. We used to use steam lines to cook it. And we used to have big breakfasts sometimes. We’d designate a cook. Somebody had to cover his job when he was cooking. [The supervisors] knew exactly what was going on. Most of them would have breakfast with you. It didn’t hurt nobody; everything was getting done.”
Wives tended to have their own parties while their husbands worked evenings or nights. I asked Francis Roby if the men had their own parties. He snorted: “The men never hung together. We had enough of each other down there.” Late in his career at the mill, Dave Miles had to transfer off the paper machines because of the wear and tear on his knees from four decades of working on cement floors. He took a day job and marveled at the luxury of “having the night to yourself. I never had weekends off [on shift work]. If you wanted to invite us to supper tonight, we could say, ‘Yeah, we’ll be there.’ Whereas before, it was ‘I’m sorry, Dave’s working three to eleven,’ or ‘I’m sorry, Dave’s got to go to bed.’ When I was working eleven to seven, I’d go bed as soon as I’d get home, usually sleep till ten, eleven o’clock, go back to bed usually at six [p.m.] so I wouldn’t be too tired at night, get up at ten, have something to eat, and then go to work. It was just brutal.”
THE PAPERBOARD OPERATION had been a huge success since its inception in 1951. The two highest-paying union jobs in the mill throughout the 1950s and 1960s had been “boss machine tender” and “machine tender” on the paperboard machine. By 1965, however, the venerable Number 3 paper machine could no longer compete with more modern, faster, and wider machines. Jim Wemyss approached Groveton’s customers and suggested they join him in forming a new company, Groveton Paper Board, to buy a new, specially designed, corrugated medium paper machine. The Wemyss family would own 50 percent of the new company. With Mead Corporation, St. Joe Paper Company, and Diamond International as partners, Wemyss was able to design and buy a new paper machine from Black Clausen. He borrowed an additional $7 million to construct a new building along the north wall of the Verrill Building.
During the construction of the Paper Board building, John Gonyer had a Tarzanesque confrontation with Wemyss. “Things were going good; the steel was flying,” Gonyer recalled. “They wanted us to get one bay a day. A lot of steel. You’ve got to put steel in for the ground floor. You’re putting steel in for your siding and their brace work, and it’s a lot of work. A bay is probably twenty feet between columns. I had been after my boss, Earl Livingstone, to get a raise. He said, ‘When I can get the young fella [Wemyss] in a good mood.’ This went on for a month, and so one day Wemyss come a walking down through, and I was up on top of the steel there. I timed it just right, so that when he went by this steel column I come sliding down the column, and I landed right by his feet. I said, ‘I want to speak to you.’ ‘Yes, John, what can I do for you?’ I said, ‘I want more money.’ He stopped and thought a minute. ‘Yup, I can give you more money, John, but when this job is done, I can kiss you good-bye, too.’ I had on a pair of welding gloves, and I threw the welding gloves down by his feet, and I said, ‘Plant one right here, I’m on my way.’ I struck off, and he said, ‘Get your ass back here!’ So I went back, and we negotiated. Jim and I got along good.” Tarzan got his raise, and, thanks to Gonyer, so did all the lead men from the other departments.
The crew moved the massive new paper machine parts into the new building with a forty-ton crane, and Black Clausen specialists assembled it. Wemyss named the new machine “Love in the Afternoon”: “I said, ‘I’m tired of having it called “Miss Rock Mountain” and “Mr. Granite,” and “Mr. God.”’ That’s what they name paper machines. We printed up labels, ‘Made with “Love in the Afternoon,”’ and we put it in every load that went out. The guys in the converting plants we were selling to [said], ‘Go out and get me a roll of “Love.”’ It got to be a joke with everybody.” Whenever I asked Wemyss why he chose that name, he evaded the question. One time I told him I’d read in a news story that while the construction crew was working around the clock on the Paper Board job, Wemyss would give crew members a couple of hours off in the afternoon; he smiled and said, “That could be.”8
Number 5 paper machine was dedicated to Old Jim Wemyss on July 28, 1967. When it came time for a trial run of Love in the Afternoon, the crew shut down Number 3, switched a valve, and began pumping stock over to the new machine. Gary Paquette was a back tender on the first run: “They had some high-pressure hoses that had just clamps on them. The pressure was so great, it blew the clamps right off the hoses, so we shut down. Went back over on the other side on Number 3 and started that up again. That was only a couple of days. Then we come back, and after that, we did get started up on it. We started up at around seven hundred feet a minute, seven fifty, right around there. Overall, it started fairly well. We was making paper quite well after two or three weeks.”
The new machine had fifty-four dryers, each sixty inches in diameter, whereas Number 3’s forty-eight dryers were forty-eight inches. The old machine was operated by hand. Paquette thought the new one, which was controlled by instruments, was easier to operate, but changing a felt was more difficult because felts were heavier. Many crew members wanted to remain on the slower Number 3 when it returned to action. This allowed younger, ambitious men like Paquette to bump up from third hand to back tender. It meant more money, and, Paquette said, “I wanted to make as much money as I could.”
Paquette worked on Love in the Afternoon until he retired in 1996. Many people hated Number 5 because of the heat, smell, and noise. Paquette learned to cope: “At that time I was young enough that I could take the heat. I’d hate to try to think of it now.” His wife, Beverly, recalled, “When he came home half baked, just leave him alone.” “The first thing I’d do,” Paquette said, “is sit in the chair and go to sleep because it was brutal in that heat sometimes. We had a thermometer setting there against the wall. One hot summer day, 128 degrees. You run over to the water cooler, and you run the water on your wrist; it helped a little bit to cool. That’s the hottest. Most of the time in summer, it was 112, 113, 114. But some of them days, the air just don’t want to go anywhere. That was the toughest shift in the summertime, working three to eleven, because it would be that hot when you’d go in, and it would be ten o’clock before it starts to cool off. The night shift, even in the summertime, wasn’t too bad as far as the heat goes, unless you had some trouble where you had to get right up next to the dryer.” The machine heated the building even in winter, and crews worked in T-shirts year-round.
Number 5 made “a really loud whistling sound, very shriek,” Paquette remembered. “I had to wear earmuffs.” Paquette’s hearing, unlike that of a great many former mill workers, remained “pretty good.” After his retirement, he and his wife went west in a camper: “We got into South Dakota, and they have those underground caves. I went into one [two hundred feet down], and the park ranger said, ‘I’m going to put the light out, and everybody be really quiet, and you’ll see how quiet it is down here.’ When everybody stopped talking, I heard this, ‘rrreeeooo, reeeoo, reeeoo, reeeoo.’ I was still hearing the cooch roll from the mill two years afterwards. It was really strange.”
Paquette thought making corrugated paper was easier than fine papers: “When you make the corrugated material, it just goes in the digesters. There’s no looking to see if there’s dirt in the paper because everything goes in the corrugated. But when you’re working on fine paper, you’ve got to make sure it’s good and white. It was a lot touchier job. It was a lot easier with the corrugated. It didn’t matter because they chewed up the bark and everything.” Paperboard stock was smellier because fine paper stock had been thoroughly washed and bleached.
As soon as Love in the Afternoon was running smoothly, Number 3 was rebuilt to make fine papers again. Dryers manufactured by Sandy Hill Company replaced the old dryers that had gotten out of round during the Depression. The rebuild included a new head box, an expensive new size press, and a new calender stack. When it resumed operations, Number 3 produced one hundred tons of fine paper a day, double the output of Numbers 1 and 2. The ancient pulp mill could not satisfy three fine-papers machines and a tissue machine, and the mill had to purchase bales of pulp from other mills.
The Paper Board expansion, the installation of Number 5 paper machine, and the rebuild of Number 3 were completed by the beginning of 1968. Jim Wemyss believed the small Groveton mill was “the perfect balance” in the 1960s. It produced an impressive array of tissues, fine papers, and stationery products, as well as paperboard. The world the mill had operated in, however, was in flux. Although it would be a decade and a half before people realized it, the era of local ownership was about to end.