WHEN SEVERAL HUNDRED people converge morning, afternoon, and night to labor under exhausting and harsh conditions, there are bound to be social problems. The smell, noise, heat, chemicals, swing shift, stress of meeting production expectations, breakdowns in machinery, labor-management conflicts, dangerous work environment, and human frailty test one’s endurance.
Some conflicts were inevitable under old-school management practices. A member of a paper machine crew bid onto another job to escape his supervisor: “He treated everybody like a dog. Hollers. Bellow at you. After I got out of there, oh, I don’t know—quite a while—I wouldn’t even speak to the man. How many times would I see him in the store, ‘Hi.’ I turned my head and walked right away; I had nothing to do with him. I was ready to quit any day of the week. Otherwise than that, it weren’t too bad.”
Union representatives handled grievances of their members—mostly small matters involving a few hours of overtime or issues of seniority. The union and management usually worked out a compromise on more serious issues such as chronic absenteeism, personality conflicts, drinking, and stealing. Joan Breault sadly recalled an occasion when the union could not protect a worker who was being bullied by coworkers: “We had a squabble once from some finishing room people. A couple of guys were harassing a fellow that wasn’t too bright. It ended up he threatened to kill a whole bunch of them. The company had to get rid of him because he could not work around those guys. Even though they were told to leave him alone, they wouldn’t leave him alone, and nobody could prove when they were harassing this man. We tried our darnedest to get the company to find some way to keep him. We knew what was going on. We couldn’t get proof of it. Not all things are fair.”
A few mill workers teased a colleague by alleging that Web Barnett, head of the local union, was cutting a deal with management to hurt this fellow. The victim of the prank was so angered he took a gun to Barnett’s house to shoot him. Fortunately, the Barnetts were out of town, and the following day the union president was able to convince the man of his innocence.
Mill managers tolerated the inevitable pranks and stunts pulled on fellow workers because they helped release pressure and stress. When a convert to the Jehovah’s Witnesses stood atop some bales and began preaching to his coworkers, a couple of them “got the high-pressure hose and turned the hose on,” the widow of one of the pranksters laughed. “Then they put the hose back, and they ran so he wouldn’t know who did it. They never saw him get up to preach to the boys again.”
Mill workers were allowed to take home a couple of rolls of toilet paper, and supervisors tended to turn a blind eye when employees also took flashlights, gloves, and other low-cost supplies. I asked one longtime worker about pilfering. He replied: “Nobody ever stole nothing. Nobody ever stole nothing.” “Borrowed?” I suggested. “Yes. Nobody would say anything if you went up and took a couple of rolls, four rolls [of toilet paper], put ’em in a bag and took ’em home. But always somebody, ‘I’ll take a case.’ After a while it gets out of hand.”
One 1960s-era college student was having car engine troubles. His wife described how it was repaired: “His older coworkers, longtime mill employees, [said] ‘Why don’t we see what we can do.’ This man took it upon himself, and through the mill ordered the part that [he] needed, and one in reserve. [My husband] said, ‘I can’t take that.’ ‘Yes you can’ [laughs]. [My husband] felt he didn’t have a choice because it was the standard mores. If he had refused it, it would have been an insult, so you kind of have to go along with it. But [he] was very nervous that he had pilfered this part, that it might someday come back to haunt him. He was under the impression that it was done all the time.”
Alcohol consumption in the mill posed a more serious problem. “The Wemysses didn’t care as long as you done your job and behaved yourself,” Herb Miles thought. “You could bring beer in. Up on the paper machines, on Number 4 and 3, they had a sink with a spigot of water running cold all the time, floating with beer. The guys would go along and have a beer, think nothing of it.”
The pipe shop was one of countless celebrated hiding places, Thurman Blodgett said: “You could put your hand in any piece of pipe or elbow or something and pull it out with a jug. A lot of times you went in there sober and came out drunk.” Lenny Fournier said electricians encountered hidden bottles in every nook and cranny of the mill: “We used to get around a lot, changing lightbulbs. It was all screw bulbs—big black ones. We’d go behind some of those tanks, and God, there’d probably be a case of beer cans and beer bottles. Bottles then more than cans. They’d be in someplace where there wouldn’t be any light.”
The old warehouse was another celebrated spot for hiding the evidence. Bill Astle became superintendent of shipping in the 1980s: “I recall Leo Rich, whose position I took over when he retired, telling about adding on to the warehouse [around 1960]. There was a section that had an old wooden floor. When they came in to tear the floor out, he said, ‘My God, you’ve never seen such a stash of beer bottles and whiskey bottles.’ It was everywhere. Everyone threw it when they were done consuming it.”
Thurman Blodgett’s earliest job was as a pool laborer on the construction crew. One day he was running a jackhammer; the next day he was moving cement. Often there was temptation: “Down in construction—‘Hey, come on over here behind this wall and have a drink.’ Sometimes if you’re working with a wheelbarrow, it gets pretty crooked down there.”
Older mill workers often sent the younger men on booze runs. “When I was working at the mill driving the bark truck, a lot of times when the boys were doing a lot of drinking on weekends, they’d send me to get them a couple of cases of beer,” Hadley Platt recalled. “Boucher’s Grocery Store was right across the street. I drove up there with the bark truck and picked up two cases of beer and put them in the truck, and who walked out of the Eagle Hotel [across the street] and saw me doing it was Jimmy [Wemyss]. I took it back to the boys on the drum barker. He never said a word, and I never said nothing either.”
As a fifth hand on the paper machines in the early 1950s, Lawrence Benoit often was sent on errands: “They used to send me to the liquor store all the time. Castile’s and, I think, Fleischmann’s. Pints mostly. Most of the time they’d go on the back side of the paper machine because all the bearings were water cooled. You had water going in and water coming out. They’d take that pint and lay it right in the gutter. Nice cold water. When I first went in there, just about everybody drank on the job.”
Gary Paquette spent over four decades on the paperboard machine: “I wasn’t much of a boozer. Once in a while a guy would bring in a bottle or two. But you don’t want to be fooling around with booze on the paper machine.” Puss Gagnon advanced the counterintuitive theory that the mill was a more dangerous place when one was sober: “I never heard of anybody getting hurt drinking. They’d get hurt quicker sober.”
Christmas was the one occasion when drinking in the mill was sanctioned. “At Christmas it was the supervisors, the big superintendent of the paper machine, all the tour bosses would chip in,” Lolly LaPointe, who was hired in 1966, remembered. “After you got the machines shut down, and everything was washed up, they’d open up the laboratory down there, and they’d had a shelf completely full of liquor that they’d buy for the crew. Some of them guys would get totally, absolutely shitfaced. It ended up some guy fell down, got hurt, or something. He was still on the clock. I don’t think Wemyss ever came in there; I never saw him in there, but I’ll guarantee he knew what was going on.”
Wemyss had his reasons for not attending the workers’ Christmas parties: “I couldn’t get involved with them because anytime people that aren’t used to drinking have two drinks, all of a sudden they’d decide to become argumentative or start to tell me everything that was wrong with me. A lot of genius comes out of a drink. To avoid their later embarrassment, [it was best not to] be there. But I did hear they were dingers.”
Cat-and-mouse drinking at the mill frequently masked more serious drinking-related problems at home where alcoholic husbands verbally or physically abused wives and children. Neal Brown recalled: “I think perhaps behind closed doors, things weren’t always as pleasant as they could have been, either due to the mill [or] the stresses of not having a lot of money. A lot of men who came back from the war, and had significant life-changing experiences in the war, perhaps had found alcohol as a way to get past it. There were some kids that you knew that were beaten pretty regularly, but you didn’t talk about [it]: ‘We know that what’s his name drinks and beats his wife and kids.’ But it wasn’t something that you would openly confront. In retrospect, you would recognize if one of your friends came down to play and had a black eye. You knew they had been batted around a little bit.”
Mickey King and Bill Astle were sons of lifelong mill workers. In the 1970s both served as social workers at Alpha House, a home for troubled and abused boys that operated from 1971 to 1977 in Lancaster. “I remember [working with] a number of kids whose fathers worked at the mill,” King told me. “Alcoholism was the problem. There were those people that died young, too, because of alcoholism. It complicated things like diabetes. Just so wrapped up in the alcohol that they couldn’t deal with the illness of the diabetes. I saw a number of cases like that.”
“There’s a certain amount of negativity that took place [at the mill],” King said. “Just dealing with the lack of safety in the early days; there were a number of deaths and amputations and all kinds of things. Working with the pollution, and there was a very high rate of alcoholism. I think the anger sometimes from the monotony of the work ended up coming home with a lot of men. There was a fair amount of abuse of families, children, and wives. People needed work, but it tended to be monotonous. It was not always cheery.” Although abuse occasionally was physical, usually it was verbal, he thought, adding: “It’s unbelievable how much resilience children have.”
“There were hair-curling stories of people that didn’t live that far from where I grew up,” Astle recalled. “I can remember a family that I was friends with. The kids basically were fending for themselves. They were as close as a little town like Groveton would have to street kids. They did have a house, and there was an older sister who held things together. But the father was no longer in the picture, and I’m thinking the mother died, or she was very sickly. She wasn’t functioning as a parent. Not to say that Groveton was a bad place to grow up. It was more of an enlightenment for me; what seemed like such a quaint little town, that everybody meets at the church social, and gets along, and belongs to the same fraternal organization. There was a lot more to it than that, and there still is.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, Astle remembered, heavy drinking was considered socially acceptable at the mill: “You worked hard, got the loads out; once the work was done it was OK to send somebody over to town to pick up some beer, and they’d kind of finish up their shift that way. The drunk was considered an amusement. ‘Gee, did you see so and so at the Christmas party. My God they had to carry him out.’ And everybody would chuckle. If that was to happen today, it would be, ‘My God, can you believe the scene that this guy made. He needs help.’ It was kind of a culture of drinking was glamorous.”
“An awful lot of people who worked at the mill were very passive folks,” Mickey King observed. “They were raised here; they stayed here; they lived through the Depression, although the Depression didn’t hurt people here anywhere near as much as it did in urban settings. People had gardens here; they survived. No one was jealous of anyone else because everyone was in the same boat, and you put up with it. Then you were taught all kinds of values at home. ‘If you want to eat, you’ve got to work.’ It sort of transferred to the mill. ‘I’ve got money; I’m making money.’ The reason that the town was bubbling and moving was that it needed just hands. It didn’t need anything more complicated than that. You had bull teams; you had forty, fifty men—well, they weren’t building pyramids, but it was similar. You had to have strong back and good hands.”
His mother, Belvah, interjected that workers did not have to use their minds. “Nothing up here,” she said as she pointed to her head. “They were jobs that maybe people shouldn’t have been doing anyway,” Mickey continued. “It was like—dehumanizing. It’s like, ‘You’re a cog in a wheel.’ And I’m sure that really affected people’s minds and attitudes. You’d come home, and you weren’t really satisfied with things. ‘All day long I’ve been doing this.’ I’m sure people were soaking their feet. And the dust—I’m sure it caused a lot of medical problems. I remember, even as a kid, that there was a lot of hand shoveling done of chemicals. Talc and stuff. And a lot of guys—on their way home—they’d look like ghosts. They were just covered.”
I remarked that I had expected to hear many more negative stories about the mill than I had been told. King responded: “Perhaps somewhat more from my generation you’ll hear it. There’s not a lot of reflection on the part of people; they were just happy to have work. A lot of the negative stuff, they would push it out of their mind. There was a lot of drinking on the job. And there were a lot of people who came in on their shift who were not able to work, and their peers would protect them. ‘Go lay down in the corner, and I’ll watch your machine.’ The company knew it. They wanted you to have your job, and you probably did your job pretty good. But they didn’t realize what they were allowing to happen. It wasn’t until I think really the Wemysses left that that was not tolerated anymore. You really needed to get help for these people. They really needed to deal with their issues because they were not going to be valuable employees, and they were risking their own health. Then actually the company would be put at risk.”
Television, radio, and automobile travel in the postwar years expanded the worldview of Groveton’s children. Perhaps there were options in life that did not involve working in the mill. As children of the town’s doctors and mill bosses aimed for college, many daughters and sons of mill workers also began to dream of pursuing higher education.
Greg Cloutier’s parents made it clear they wanted “a better life” for him. “I wasn’t going to learn any French,” he recollected. “I was going to learn how to speak English correctly, and I was going to get an education, and I was going to leave Groveton. I found them to be disappointed when I returned. Not unhappy to see me. Their view was that success was somewhere beyond, that it was going to be a better success somewhere else. I think it was that post–World War II group that fought the war, worked very hard to recover from the war, catch up, and didn’t want their child to work as hard as they did. Which, in some respects, probably is not good.”
Enrolling in college or pursuing a career in the military service gave many Groveton boys and girls opportunities denied their parents. There was, however, a poignant cost to this liberty—the classic “brain drain.” “We developed certain skill sets that we did not bring back to Groveton because all that was here was the mill,” Neal Brown reflected. “A lot of people from my group, particularly the class of ’64, went away. They never came back.”
In September 2010, nine months into the mill oral history project, I shared some of the liveliest stories I had gathered at a public presentation on the mill’s history. During the subsequent discussion, Kathy Mills Frizzell, who never worked at the mill, urged me to investigate the impact of the mill’s presence on the lives of children. I immediately contacted her to ask just those questions, and I continued to ask every subsequent interviewee about her or his childhood memories of the mill.
“I was from a poor family,” Kathy began. “My father did not graduate from high school. He was very intelligent, as were both my parents. My mother aspired to be a nurse. That didn’t happen. They were married at quite a young age. And my father just had a series of temporary, seasonal jobs. He loved being outdoors. He loved kind of being his own boss, but he moved from construction jobs, to logging, to driving the oil truck. Related businesses to the mill, but not an employee of the mill. . . .
“I am a social worker; I was a born social worker. Everything I’m going to tell you is going to seem strange coming from a kid’s perspective, but it was how I felt and how I thought at the time. I was the middle of three children, and I was aware of how poor we were, how little we had. And I always thought life would be so much better if my father could have worked in the mill.”
Kathy said the oral history project had altered her understanding of why her father had never worked at the mill. She had always been told it was because the mill only hired people who had earned high school diplomas. At the conclusion of my presentation, she spoke with Jim Wemyss, who remembered cavorting with her father when they were young. Wemyss recollected that Kathy’s father had never worked in the mill. “I didn’t want Jimmy to feel bad, so I said, ‘That’s because he wasn’t a high school graduate, and you had that rule that you couldn’t work there unless you were a high school graduate, and that is a good thing—it kept people in school.’ Jimmy interrupted me, and he said, ‘That wouldn’t have applied to your father. We could have gotten rid of that rule in an instant. That applied to people from 1950 on. Anybody who grew up in the hardscrabble times of the ’30s and ’40s could have gotten a job here anytime.’”
Kathy continued, “I grew up with the belief that my father could not work in the mill, wished he could have worked in the mill because things would have been better in terms of a stable income. This was a life-story script changer. I think my father was prideful enough that he would not have asked his friend, Jim, for a favor. The other thing is my father was an outdoors person and liked working on his own terms and kind of being his own boss. He never really was his own boss. He drove somebody else’s trucks and things, but he worked on his own. And I cannot see him punching a time clock and going to work inside. I cannot see him conforming. So I have since thought, ‘Well, maybe my mother knew all that, and to save face for my father, or offer something like a more reasonable explanation, we were just told, ‘No, he couldn’t work in the mill.’ But it shook up my story, my sense of my childhood and what could have been. I don’t think there was a misunderstanding; I think it was by choice that my father didn’t ask for that favor.”
I suggested that she seemed to have “adult-like concerns in a child’s body.” She responded: “That was true of me. Maybe in my family because there was such a concern about the bills and enough money and paying for things. That was not kept secret. Maybe we did not know all the details, but we knew when there were money issues. Tapping into that, there’s still a sadness in me that in elementary school, maybe around third grade, we had an opportunity to say if we wanted to learn to play an instrument. I badly wanted to learn to play the clarinet. As a kid, you would censor your own self: ‘Should I ask for this?’ Or, ‘I know they can’t do it, so should I even ask?’ And if it was something that you really, really wanted to do, then you would ask, but there was not enough money for me to get an instrument. Same with Girl Scouts. There wasn’t enough money that I could afford a uniform or the materials or the supplies.
“Now my brother says—and I agree with this—to some degree [we] have an advantage because we knew whatever we were going to get out of this life we have had to work for. Nothing was going to be given to us. I got a special permit to work in the drugstore with Bob Styles, when I was young, fourteen or fifteen, whatever the rules were—it was before I was sixteen. And from that point on, I bought my own clothes, I started going to the dentist because I could pay to go to the dentist. I wasn’t taken care of in a lot of ways children might expect that they would because there wasn’t that much money in my family. It went to alcohol and cigarettes; I mean there was always that in my family. And as a kid, I really resented that, but I just kind of understood my place. I think we were raised as my parents were raised, that you didn’t necessarily get anything from your parents. You did it for yourself. My brother thinks we’re better off for it. . . .
“I don’t even think that we as kids knew why we were moving so much until we got in high school. Then it was a little embarrassing. But it did not make a difference in town what you had, or how much money your family had. We kind of all had this notion nobody had very much, and some of us knew that we had less than a lot of others. But nobody threw that in your face or anything like that. . . .
“My mother got married at a young age, family right away, and when my father was unemployed, she would work in the drugstore. [In] the early ’60s’ Manpower Development and Training Act, she got to go to school, and she was thrilled. She did some sort of secretarial, clerical course. Then she finally got a skill that would make her employable at the mill. It was the beginning of my high school years where my mother was employed in the mill, and from that point on, there was a steady income. . . .
“We never had health insurance, but she must have gotten it when she went to the mill. She worked in the mill office in production. My mother was proud of herself, and that was very nice to see. I don’t think she would have said that about herself prior to that, because I think she felt as though she wasted a lot of potential or lost the opportunity for a different kind of life. But she, I think, had a wonderful time working in the mill. She worked with Tom Atkinson in production, and would love to tell us the stories of what happened that day in the mill. She was very good in her job, and the steady income made a difference in our family. And for her.”
Kathy could not wait to escape from her family’s poverty: “Throughout my years, I was raised with the belief: Try to get out; don’t settle for life in Groveton. Don’t stay here. This was parents—I think because they wished they had gotten out. It was teachers; it was family, friends. It was, ‘Don’t stay here, there’s nothing for you.’ It kind of came to represent a little fear, the way coal miners’ families talk about the coal mines, like, ‘I’m willing to do it for my family, but I hope for better for my kids.’ So it really was an expectation and a belief that you had to leave, that it would be better for you to leave. I definitely got the message that if I stayed, people would consider me a failure.
“I had a freshman year at UNH, but I felt like I was thrown in there unprepared. I felt like I didn’t know how to take advantage of it, and I ended up getting married to my current husband, also a Groveton guy, after my freshman year. Everybody who saw me said, ‘Kathy, you’re making a mistake. You’ll never go back to college. You shouldn’t be getting married.’ That kind of steeled my will even more. But I definitely had the feeling I was letting them down. You could sense the pride of the townspeople if someone did get away. I don’t really mean in any way to put down people who stayed. It’s a choice. It’s a difference. And in many ways, I think quality of life might have been better here.”
She was pained by the low self-esteem of many of her classmates: “I think my age mates would have expressed it as, ‘What are you going to do after high school?’ ‘I’m just going to go to work in the mill.’ They would say it without pride, without gumption.” She added: “It wasn’t I was ashamed coming from Groveton. I’m very proud to have come from there. We had wonderful teachers, wonderful school. Not that I appreciated it then as I appreciate it now. Some of my teachers were my parents’ teachers. They knew my family. They would always ask me if I could sing because my mother was such a good singer. Achievement was of value in town, and of value in my family.”
Kathy and her husband, Leon Frizzell, raised a family in Illinois, but they always felt that Groveton was home. They built a vacation and retirement home on Maidstone Lake in Vermont, about twenty minutes from Groveton: “Many of us find a way to come back because you realize what’s up here geographically, and quality of life, and how it’s unique, and you can’t get the quiet and solitude and the clean lake anywhere else. And it feels like home. I kind of chuckle to myself as I’m driving down the roads, ‘Whoever would have thought I would be here and happy to be here?’ We’ve arranged burial spots in the Northumberland Cemetery, and I’ve found a quote that we’re going to have engraved on the gravestone, and that’s, ‘Bound to the place we have come from.’ And that’s what it feels like.”