JIM WEMYSS UNDERSTOOD paper mills would soon have to spend millions of dollars on expensive technology to address mill-generated pollution. Groveton would have to build a much larger and cleaner pulp mill to satisfy the demands of its paper machines for pulp and to comply with recent air- and water-quality laws. Wemyss also worried that if Old Jim, still fighting him over how to run the business, should die, estate taxes could force the sale of family assets, including the mill.
During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s large, multinational paper corporations were buying up local, often family-owned, paper mills. In neighboring Maine, Scott, Georgia-Pacific, and Diamond International acquired paper mills and hundreds of thousands of acres of timberlands. The giant conglomerate Gulf and Western swallowed the Berlin and Gorham mills in 1968.
By 1968, Groveton was purchasing large amounts of dry pulp from Diamond International’s struggling mill in Old Town, Maine. This growing relationship gave Wemyss an idea: “One day, I said, ‘You know, Dad, you’re getting older, and I’m getting older. We should do something that’s constructive for us and for Groveton.’” The solution, Wemyss decided, was to merge with Diamond International: “When you get with a big company, you can raise the capital any way you want.” Young Jim and Richard Walters, son of the chairman of Diamond, were friends. Jim Jr. told the younger Walters, “‘You’ve got a stinking mill [in Old Town], and you should straighten it out.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you straighten it out?’ I said, ‘Maybe we should merge.’ He said, ‘We sure like the identity of Vanity Fair. It will help our company expand.’ So we made what I considered was a reasonable arrangement.” It was a fateful decision.
The planned merger was announced early in February 1968. Shortly before the formal signing in May, there was a glitch. “My father had his way of doing things, and Mr. William Walters had his way of doing things,” Jim Jr. said. “They were both similar in age, and they were about as flexible as blue cobalt steel. When you’re merging a company such as ours into a large company like that, you have to identify what’s merging, down to some details that seem ridiculous. Who owns the computer? Who owns the typewriter? It gets childish to some extent, but they have to identify as many things as they can.”
Old Jim had a Persian rug, a wedding present: “Father had an affection for it. For some reason, I didn’t think about the rug, so I never mentioned it. After we were 98 percent done, my father said to me, ‘Where’s my rug? Make sure I get it. I don’t want you fellows to have it.’ I said OK.
“Not thinking too clearly about a rug that was fifty years old that hadn’t been taken care of, I said to Mr. Walters Sr., ‘I just remembered, my father had a Persian rug in his office down in Canton, and I wanted you to know we are going to take it out.’ That was the dumbest thing I ever did. He said, ‘Jim, is it in the agreement?’ I said, ‘No, sir. It’s something I overlooked.’ ‘Then,’ he said, ‘it’s my rug.’ I said, ‘Mr. Walters, it isn’t really anything you’d want to put in your house, sir.’ ‘No, Jim, the discussion’s over. It’s my rug. It belongs to Diamond. If you didn’t put it in there, that’s the way it is.’ So I said to my father, ‘Dad, I’m sorry about that rug. It seems to be a big issue. I’ll buy you a new rug.’ ‘Ohhh no, you’re not going to buy me a new rug. That’s my rug.’”
The morning of the formal signing of the merger contract in New York City, Young Jim made one last pitch to the elder Walters: “I was standing out in front of the [Diamond] office, reading the newspaper, and he came down the street. ‘Well, this is the day, Mr. Wemyss.’ I said, ‘Yes sir, I’m looking forward to it. Just one question, sir. There seems to be some mild discussion about some stupid rug in Canton, and I’m sorry I didn’t think about putting it in the agreement, but my father feels very strongly that he wants it in the agreement.’ ‘Jim, if it’s not in the agreement, it’s my rug.’ Oh, Jesus. I go back over to the Plaza. ‘Dad, Mr. Walters said that [rug] belongs to them.’ ‘Goddamn you, I’m going to insist on having it.’”
Father and son arrived at the meeting with Diamond. “There’s five lawyers here, and five lawyers there. Mr. Walters was here, and my father was here, and I looked at them and said, ‘I’m very happy that we’re going to do this. I think it’s going to be good for both of us. And, now gentlemen, I don’t want to have any more discussion about a rug. Dad, will you just waive on that rug and forget about it?’ [Very loudly,] ‘NO!’ ‘Mr. Walters, will you forget about the damn rug? I assure you, sir, it isn’t worth three hundred dollars, and I’ll give you a check right now for it.’ ‘Jim, it’s not in the agreement; it’s mine.’ There was a holder with pencils, and I reached in and grabbed [a few] and I held them up and I went ‘whap,’ broke them in my hand and threw them on the table. I said, ‘The arrow’s broken, and the hell with you all.’ I turned around and walked out.”
Walters and his staff stormed out, and Old Jim headed back to the Plaza Hotel to celebrate. Young Jim continued: “Father and I and my brother sat down and had a bottle of champagne for lunch. Father was so happy: ‘I’m so proud of you, son.’ Over a Persian rug. Jesus Christ. I said, ‘Dad, they printed up in their annual meeting—Vanity Fair and how wonderful this was for Diamond. It was the right thing to do. I’m trying to straighten out a family business to make us have high liquidity in case something happens to one of us.’ He said, ‘I don’t care. We’re going to live a hundred years more.’ I said ‘OK.’”
A few days later, Young Jim flew down to Greenbrier, North Carolina, for a gathering of the presidents of many of the large paper companies. He was discussing a possible merger with the Mead Corporation when Richard Walters appeared: “Richard said, ‘What the hell happened?’ I said, ‘It’s too childish to talk about.’ He said, ‘Jim, you and I are making the deal. I’ll tell my father to go off in the woods someplace, and we can put this goddamned thing back on track.’ ‘What can we do with that rug?’ ‘Jimmy, stick it up you know where. I don’t want to hear that word again. Wrap up your father in a roll like Cleopatra.’ We made the deal, and that’s why a month later it all went back together.”
On June 6, 1968, the Wall Street Journal reported: “Diamond International Revives Plan to Buy Groveton Papers Co.” The Wemyss family received nearly four hundred thousand shares of Diamond International stock, worth $18.2 million based on Diamond’s June 5 closing price of $15.50 a share.1 Forbes ranked Diamond the 219th largest corporation in the United States.
What happened to the rug? “The rug was not mentioned, sir. It was never in the deal to start with. The rug disappeared. Maybe the rats ate it. It was very comical. Nothing had changed [in the contract] except the stupid rug. Not one dot, period, comma, nothing.”
Following the Diamond merger, employees at the mill naturally worried their jobs might disappear. Wemyss acted promptly to allay fears, telling his management team: “‘Folks, we’re going to be part of Diamond International. Not one of you are going to get fired. Not one of you are going to lose your job. I’m still the president of Groveton, and everything is going to be fine.’ I kept my word absolutely one hundred and fifty percent.” Few former mill workers recalled significant changes in Groveton following the merger because, as Fred Shannon explained, “Wemyss was still in control.”
In the accounting department, Sylvia Stone remembered, there were significant changes: “We had to adopt [Diamond’s] system. They changed a lot of the account numbers in the ledger. It was horrible, but we finally got it straightened around, and it worked out OK. It might have been five months.”
Soon after the merger, CEO William Walters tapped Jim Wemyss Jr. to run Diamond’s paper division. “He became my greatest ally,” Wemyss proudly remarked. “He would let me get away with things in Diamond that he would have had [other Diamond executives] guillotined.” The merger also liberated Young Jim from further clashes with his increasingly irascible father. Old Jim was one of Diamond’s largest stockholders, but William Walters made it clear from the outset that he was not going to play an active role in the company.
For two decades, Jim Jr. had prowled Groveton’s mill day and night, intimately familiar with its workings and forging strong bonds with the mill’s workforce. After the merger, Wemyss succeeded his father as president of the mill, and he remained in charge of overall operations, but his new corporate responsibilities limited his time in the Groveton mill. He delegated the day-to-day running of the mill to his management team, led by Charles Brand Livingstone, who assumed the position of executive vice president of Groveton in July 1968.
A year into the merger, wild nature and human error nearly put the Groveton paper mill out of business. Seventy-five years earlier, Weston Lumber Company had built a dam that created a shallow, two-mile-long pond in the swampy headwaters of the Nash Stream. The Nash Stream and Phillips Brook watershed due east of Nash Stream were sportsmen’s paradise. “John Veazey and Owen Astle went to the Nash Stream Tuesday for a few days outing,” the Locals correspondent for the Groveton Advertiser informed readers on August 1, 1919. The mill owners welcomed hunters, fishermen, and even firewood cutters, provided they had secured permission and did not interfere with the procurement of pulpwood for the mill.
By the 1960s, there were over one hundred private camps on lands leased from the mill in the Nash Stream watershed. Most of the camps were built after International Paper (IP) reserved access to its Phillips Brook lands for its executives. Groveton mill workers who were displaced approached Old Jim. Jim Wemyss Jr. remembered: “So the people in Groveton who worked in the mill said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And my father said, ‘Come on over to Odell [the township where the Nash Stream Bog is situated].’ That’s all. Just like that. ‘You’d be welcome.’ That’s how it happened.”
In February 1969 there was a record snowfall, and snow lingered in the woods until May. On Saturday, May 17, temperatures reached eighty-five degrees, and the Connecticut and Androscoggin Rivers flooded, causing an estimated $400,000 in damage in Colebrook, Berlin, and Gorham. The previous day, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department had stocked the 250-acre Nash Bog Pond with a thousand eastern brook trout. The fishing was good, Herb Miles remembered: “I was up there the week before with the boss, Ralph Rowden. Friday night, Saturday, Sunday. Took a day off. We stayed at the Company Camp. It had been raining a lot. The water got up within a foot and a half of the dam at the top. We cranked the gates up to let it down.” By Tuesday, May 20, the gates were again closed.
That morning, Armand Gaudette, foreman of the river crew, and four others were ordered to open the gates. When they arrived, the bog had already begun to overflow and had cut a channel around the western side of the wooden dam. The dam held, but the breach prevented Gaudette’s crew from reaching the dam’s gates on the eastern side. There was no telephone communication with the mill. Forty years later, Jim Wemyss was still exasperated: “There was three feet of snow in the woods; it was seventy degrees and raining. Instead of opening the gates, they didn’t want to let the trout get out, so they let the water keep building up. I came back into town. I had to fly my airplane in, and I went over to Nash Stream to see what was going on. I called the superintendent in charge of that and said, ‘You get up to that dam as quick as you can and open all the gates, and the hell with your fish!’ He didn’t get there in time. He spent the night in a tree.”
Superintendent Ralph Rowden headed up Nash Stream a short time after Gaudette’s crew had been dispatched. The earthworks adjacent to the dam washed out at 11 a.m., and a mass of water, trees, boulders, and other debris started to rumble down the Nash Stream toward Groveton thirteen miles to the south. Rowden was a couple of miles downstream of the dam when he realized he was caught in the flood. He scurried up a yellow birch, later dubbed “Rowden’s Roost,” and hung on for dear life for four hours as uprooted trees and pickup-truck-size boulders tumbled down the stream.
Construction and maintenance workers rushed out to open the gates at the Brooklyn Street Dam adjacent to the mill as the floodwaters approached. “Those old things, you had two men on a crank trying to get them up,” Hoot McMann recalled. “That was hard work. Looked up the river, and here come this thing. Looked about twenty feet high, just moving toward us. No big rush or anything, but coming right towards us. It was just a mess of trees and stumps. You really couldn’t see the water. There was so much stuff ahead of the water itself. It looked like a dam coming at you—a beaver dam.”
The flood hammered the mill’s two pulpwood piles, and hundreds of cords of pulpwood washed downstream. Miraculously the old covered bridge survived the battering. The Route 3 steel highway bridge also held up, but the abutment at the southern end washed out, and the floodwaters carved a deep ravine at the bridge entrance. The mill basement was flooded to a depth of about four to five feet.
In an ordinary year, the mill would shut down during the week of July 4 for “maintenance week,” to address annual maintenance requirements while disposing of a significant number of employee vacations with the least disruption to mill operations. Wemyss announced that May 21–27 would be maintenance week, and he ordered non-maintenance workers to take a week’s vacation.
Fred Shannon spent that first week removing roughly two hundred wet, silted motors from the basement: “All the electric motors had to come out. They had to be sent away and get dried out, checked out, to see if they were shorted. That’s what we done, remove motors, remove motors. It was just nasty.”
After May 27, the mill started calling workers back to help with the cleanup and to repair the Brooklyn Dam. The basement was a foul mess. “It was devastating when I went back in there the first time, down in that cellar,” Dave Miles shuddered. “Everything was piled up on this end. The barrels, some of them, the labels were off of them, and you didn’t know what was in them. Haul that stuff out of there.” In the wood room, Francis Roby found “mud and dirt and stuff. Oh, Jesus. Fish and everything else was in there.” Who cleaned it out? “We did,” he laughed. “With a wheelbarrow. That was a nice smell.”
The covered bridge took a pounding by the flood but survived. Photo taken from the highway bridge just downstream from the covered bridge. The highway bridge abutment (off the picture to the right) washed out. Though the highway bridge survived the flood, it was closed for twelve hours while highway crews repaired the washed-out approach. The mill’s wood piles, acid tower, pump mill, and smokestack are in the background. (Courtesy Warren Bartlett)
By late June, the mill was again making paper.
The flood was another nightmare for Sylvia Stone in the accounting department: “I remember a lot of hard work because they brought all that inventory up to me from down in the stock room—the motors and all that stuff. I had to go through my depreciation schedule and write it all off. It was a mess. It took me longer than [a month].”
She added: “[Jim Wemyss] said that if Diamond had not purchased the mill when they did, the mill would have gone under. We had that much loss. Jimmy Wemyss said that himself.” Forty years later, at a public interview I conducted with Wemyss, he quipped: “If we hadn’t been with Diamond International, it might have been very serious. Instead of a catastrophe, we had a good bath. Diamond paid for it” [laughter from audience].
Three months after labor and management pulled together to clean up the mill, the two-year union contract expired. Jim Wemyss was proud that his mill managers and union members generally enjoyed a positive relationship. Web Barnett, president of the Groveton union from 1973 to 1977 and 1983 to 1993, agreed: “We were especially lucky with the type of negotiations we had here, because everybody got along pretty good. And they got decent contracts. Once in a while you’d get a bad one. Mr. Wemyss, I had no problem with the man at all. If we’d get into real tough things, we’d get together, and we’d have an agreement. Sometimes he was tough; sometimes we were tough. But it wasn’t a war. There was arguments and disagreements; but it’s all right to get together if you’re going to disagree, but not be disagreeable.”
One former shop steward suggested some union officers were too cozy with management: “I thought that the higher ones up at the union and the ones negotiating were kind of working together, you know. Maybe the one in the middle would get a few favors, or something.”
Whereas grandfather Wemyss had fought to keep the Northumberland mill from unionizing in the late 1930s, his grandson refused to run a nonunion mill. “You don’t want to talk to three hundred people or two hundred,” Jim Jr. explained. “You want to talk to one person. Now, if they become so obnoxious and so difficult you can’t work with them, then you have a strike, and then you teach them how you are, so they understand when they have a strike with you, you’re not a pleasant person to be around. A strike was not a pleasant thing for the town, and I didn’t want it to happen. I said, ‘You’re not hurting me; you’re hurting yourself. That’s what bothers me the most.’”
Negotiations foundered in August 1969, and mill workers voted to strike on September 12. The unions insisted future contracts expire July 1, not September 1, but Jim Jr. refused to yield: “There was no reason for a strike ever to be in Groveton. All the big mills in Maine and coming across to Berlin—May, June, July, August—is when they negotiated their contract. We were in September. If they get an extra paid holiday, I knew we were going to get an extra paid holiday. If they got another week’s paid vacation, I knew we were going to have to give a week’s vacation. If they got two cents or five cents more, I knew we’d have to do the same thing.” When the union made a demand not conceded already by Maine’s mills, Wemyss would say, “That’s not negotiable.”
Shirley MacDow offered another reason management was adamant about the September deadline: “We always tried to have our negotiations in the fall because we knew all the employees were thinking about, ‘Oh, I’ve got to buy my winter fuel.’ It might have some bearing on how long they’d be out on strike.” Sounds like a cat-and-mouse game? “It was,” she chuckled. “I’m not sure who won.”
In the weeks before the strike, Joan Breault noted the change in atmosphere around town when she went shopping: “It almost seemed like every time a contract come up, prices come up in the stores. Like they’re already planning on us getting more money, so they’d get more money. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but we all thought the same thing. It cost more to live. So I guess it’s a catch-22 situation, isn’t it?”
The strike divided union members. Francis Roby refused to picket during the strike because “I didn’t want the damn strike. You didn’t gain a thing by striking. They lost.” Thurman Blodgett, who served a year as a union shop steward, had mixed feelings: “Nobody gains in the strike; nobody. But you’ve got to try to get the best you can.”
The timing of the strike was terrible for Joe Berube: “I had bought this house in mid-August of ’69, and two weeks later we were on strike down at the mill. That was not very cost-effective for me. I had a mortgage I had to pay off. I’d just come out of the military, and I was thinking of getting married, so everything was kind of snowballing on me. I was tickled pink when they went back because it meant I could start drawing a regular paycheck again.”
The union paid strikers to join the picket line. Some, like Belvah King, opted out: “[I] just came home and waited. I didn’t like the strike because there was no money coming in, but I kind of liked the time off.” Pauline Labrecque picketed on a raw night: “Brought me a little bit of money. You ought to seen the rain suit I made myself. It was rubberized on the outside, like a little cloth, and then pants. I said I ain’t going to freeze my tush off. But it was cold.”
Ted Caouette, a young paper machine crew member, remembered: “Nobody had any money. You couldn’t pay your bills. You didn’t make any money anyway, so you lived week to week. Even when the mill was running. When you’re raising your family—I had four children—it took all the money you had and then some. My wife was working at the bank; she worked at the grocery store. Even then it was hard to get by. But we did; we managed to.”
Many strikers found construction jobs during the strike. Armand Dube, a machine tender on Number 4 paper machine, worked at the Waterville Valley ski area an hour and a half to the south: “They loved us down there. I guess they never had help like we was. Oh, they loved us. Then we told them we was coming back here; they didn’t think too much of that. They said, ‘You guys know how to work.’ Because them stupid clowns they had down there, they wouldn’t do nothing.” Fred Shannon drove a big truck on a crew building Interstate 93. He supported the union, but with six children to feed, he needed a steady income: “We worked every hour we possibly could.”
Shirley MacDow, by then Wemyss’s administrative assistant, noted that despite his new responsibilities with Diamond, he “had his pulse on everything.” “He always had his own ear to the ground, especially with the union guys,” she said. “If the boys were in Dinty’s having a beer, he might be in Dinty’s having a beer with them. He’d pick up a lot of things there. I think, in truth, the union probably was in awe of him. He wasn’t about to be bamboozled by any of their antics.”
John Rich, a piper, recalled having a little fun with the boss during negotiations: “[Wemyss] wasn’t there too much, but when he was, we’d give it to him. He’d get pissed off. That was part of the deal anyways—piss them off a little because they was trying to piss you off. Jim and I was always good friends.”
Jim Wemyss claimed he settled the strike with the following stunt: “I took my Cadillac convertible. It was a sunny day in September, and I drove it right by the bank, in the middle of the street. Parked it. It has a long hood on it, and I went out and lay in the sun. The picket line was standing by the railroad track, and they all came over. ‘Mr. Wemyss, are you OK?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘It’s hot here. Let’s have a beer and talk this over.’ We all went [into Everett’s Diner], and the strike was over. And the International representative was mad as hell. He said, ‘You can’t talk to people like that. You have no right to.’ Yes, we did some crazy things. Not crazy; they were good.”
The new, three-year contract gave workers a seventy-two-cent raise over the period, including a 7 percent immediate raise. It also included increases in sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, and five weeks of vacation for employees with more than twenty-five years of service at the mill. However, union contracts continued to expire September 1.
Joan Breault said Diamond gave the union its first big pay raises: “The Wemysses never gave that much of an adjustment. A nickel was a big thing to them. After Diamond took over, the raises were in terms of dollars and stuff as well as benefits and things.”
Jim Wemyss’s position as a major shareholder of Diamond and his rapport with William and Richard Walters paid dividends for the Groveton mill at this critical juncture. “I’d say in the 1970s we spent more money on environmental problems than we did on anything in the mill,” Wemyss speculated. Was this due to recent federal laws such as the Clean Water Act or because it was the wise thing to do? “I live here,” Wemyss shot back. “I didn’t want everybody living like that. No. We have an obligation to do it. We did it. Everybody was doing it, or they were going to go out of business. It’s as simple as that.”
Throughout its history, the mill had dumped “white water,” primarily from the paper machines’ dewatering process, directly into the Upper Ammonoosuc River. In response to the 1965 Water Quality Act, the mill embarked on a two-phase pollution abatement program. Phase I, costing nearly $15 million, separated clean water from polluted water so that the mill could recirculate the unpolluted water instead of paying to clean it unnecessarily. By September 1970, the mill had reduced its daily water use by three million gallons a day.2 From 1972 to 1974 the mill spent about $600,000 on the construction of two clarifiers—110-foot-diameter cement tubs—downstream from the mill.
The workplace environment for the mill’s roughly one thousand employees was also transformed during these years. Following the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1971, the practice of shoveling toxic chemicals into wheelbarrows and shuttling them around the mill gradually ended. OSHA mandated that mill lighting be adequate and that workers wear eye and ear protection. Lolly LaPointe was one of the older workers who found the transition difficult: “There’s all kinds of noise in a paper mill. That’s why there aren’t too many of us guys, me included, that can hear anything anymore. My girlfriend, ‘Turn that [TV] down.’ I say, ‘Jeez, I can’t hear it.’ There again, when OSHA came in, they really recommended that everybody wear ear protection. Some did, and some didn’t. I hated it, but I got to the point where I couldn’t hear anything anyway, so I guess it didn’t sound too loud to me. I hated wearing the plugs. Especially when it was hot. There’s a lot of heat in a paper mill. They were hot and sweaty.”
Routine maintenance tasks henceforth had to be performed according to OSHA standards. LaPointe described how OSHA regulations transformed the process of cleaning the stock prep chests: “When I first went there, we wouldn’t even turn the agitators off. It was stupid, but we done it, and nobody ever got hurt. Then, of course, when OSHA steps in, you’ve got to get an electrician, and it takes you longer to flag out the chest and get ready to go in and wash the chest out. In these later years, you had to have a guy with an air gauge monitoring to see if there was any chemicals. And it was a good thing. But it was funny. Union people were actually the ones that instigated OSHA. A lot of the older supervisors, they hated it because they knew that five, ten, fifteen years before, you’d get into the chest and wash it out and get the hell out of there, and you were ready to go again. Most of it was good; some of it was ridiculous. But then you’d get these younger guys that didn’t want—my comment was, ‘You were the guys that wanted OSHA, not me. So get your suit on.’”
Until 1972, Groveton mill workers employed on paper machines, in the stock prep department, the finishing rooms, and the shipping department had been represented by Local 41 of the United Papermakers and Paperworkers; workers in the maintenance department and the sulfite mill had belonged to Local 61 of the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite and Paper Mill Workers. In 1972 the two unions merged to form the United Papermakers International Union. Henceforth, the mill negotiated only one union contract, with Local 61 of the UPIU, which covered all unionized mill workers.
Following the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act in March 1972, some women with considerable seniority began to bid on jobs that had always been filled by men. Jim Wemyss recalled, with exasperation, an early, unsuccessful attempt at gender integration on the paper machines: “When all of a sudden the emancipation of women came in, and they started wanting to work on paper machines, I said, ‘Oh, Jesus, well start them on Number 4.’ The girls couldn’t do it. When you’ve gotta climb up twice as high as this room and lift up a ten-ton roll and slide a felt on, they didn’t want to. If you hadn’t done it, you’d have been sued and put in jail.”
Joan Breault encountered resistance when she took a job on the wrapper machine in the finishing room: “One guy that I worked with on the toilet paper line was kind of lazy. He’d leave me doing his job as well as mine, and he’d go sit in the break area and laugh about it: ‘What can you do about it? I’m the one that gets the money.’ I finally decided maybe I could do something about it, so I signed the next bid that came up for running a wrapper machine. I got a lot of flack from some of the guys. The lead man there was against me going on that job.
“One day I went in, they had shut down the wrapper because it needed a change of film—a roll of plastic [that] weighed about a 120 pounds or so. You had to lift it into slots. I couldn’t lift it from that angle. I didn’t have enough leverage to get it up, and I couldn’t change it. They told me I might as well go home; I couldn’t do the job. I went to the boss, and I said, ‘I guess you’ve got me because I can’t lift that.’ He said, ‘No, I didn’t figure you could. It’s a man’s job.’ So I sat in the break area, and pretty quick my union president came up, and he went in to see the boss.”
Web Barnett continued the story: “I went down, and the boss came over and said, ‘Goddamn them. These women, they want this, and they want that.’ The men were sticking together, except this one guy that said, ‘They’re lying. Those girls are working like hell. They are lifting the rolls, and too bad because they can’t do it. It’s too much. The guys don’t do it. The guys always helped each other, but they won’t help the women.’”
“The thing that came out of it,” Breault concluded, “was that nobody—man or woman—was ever to lift those [rolls] alone. They were to have two people lifting. You had to get through these things. They’re natural in any environment, I think.” Breault emphasized that most of her male coworkers who had worked at the mill a long time treated her fairly. The ones who gave her trouble usually were recent hirees.
In 1971 Wemyss decided to scrap old Number 2 paper machine, installed in 1896, and to replace it with a new two-hundred-foot-long fine-papers machine—Number 6—built by Manchester Machine, a Diamond subsidiary. Wemyss dubbed it “Queen of Diamonds” in honor of the corporation that paid for it.
Machine crews on Number 2 were assigned to the thirty-man crew dismantling the old machine and installing Number 6. Wemyss noted proudly: “When we got ready to start the machine, those men knew more about the machine than the engineers did. I said, ‘Give them a job’—why lay them off and hire outside people to come in and do it? They’re your mechanics. Plus our mill mechanics. That’s why we had a very good start-up with the machine.”
The Queen, capable of making 150 tons of paper a day, started up on June 27, 1972. Dave Miles, a back tender on the Queen, thought the start-up was “an awful job.” For the first two or three months, while working out the bugs, two five-man crews worked side by side on twelve-hour shifts. Miles described the nightmare: “The first day we started Number 6 up; we tried running it until about eight o’clock. We just couldn’t keep it running. So [Wemyss] said, ‘That’s it. Shut it down; we’ll come back tomorrow and start again.’ We made a tremendous amount of broke. It would break everywhere. I don’t think it ran more than fifteen or twenty minutes steady, and it would break somewhere else. We’d try again. Once in a while a bolt might come loose, or something like that, and they’d have to tighten it up, or a rope would come off and we’d have to put it back on. It was a disaster trying to start it, to be truthful. That first day, I don’t think we made half a reel of paper. Then we got better at knowing what to expect, and we’d catch it ahead of time. It was definitely a learning process to get it running. Lots of times I’ve gone in there in the morning and set your lunch box down here, and it would be there when you come home.”
Ted Caouette was working on Number 1, and during those early weeks he would put in time helping out on the Queen. A decade later, he became a supervisor of the fine-papers operation. “It never ran well,” he said. “Number 6 machine was another headache in the mill. You were always trying to do something. If it didn’t break on the machine, it would break on the winder. It would be the same thing day after day. You never really caught up to what exactly was wrong with that machine.”
The foul-smelling, ancient, inefficient sulfite mill in Groveton was one of Wemyss’s greatest headaches. According to several former mill workers, Dr. Robert Hinkley, a much-beloved figure in Groveton, regularly complained to Wemyss about the correlation between the horrible sulfur smell emitted by the sulfite mill’s digesters and the high incidence of asthma and other respiratory ailments of townspeople. “I think Dr. Hinkley did more to clean that up than anybody,” John Rich asserted. “Because one night, I guess, [Hinkley] got a charge, and he went down: ‘Shut down the sulfur burners. If you can’t run them better than that, they don’t run.’ One guy used to get in there and fire [the sulfur burners] right up. He did it for a joke. Some people had real bad trouble with breathing, lived right here in town, lived all around. Hinkley said, ‘You kill one of them, and you’re going to pay dear.’” Jim Wemyss denied that Hinkley ever challenged him over sulfite emissions.
A single blow pit, where the digesters emptied cooked chips and their acid bath, drained about ten thousand gallons of water with a pH of about 3 into the river. “I think it would have killed fish on the Amazon,” Wemyss observed. On one occasion, he had his outboard motorboat in the Connecticut River, downriver from its junction with the Upper Ammonoosuc: “I pulled the motor out to check something, and the propeller was glistening. I said, ‘Whooo. Something’s cleaning that propeller.’”
When Diamond International’s Old Town pulp mill faced a monthlong shutdown because it could not sell enough bleached pulp, Wemyss shut down the Groveton sulfite pulp mill on April 29, 1972, and increased the mill’s pulp purchases from Old Town: “Here I am, the president of the company, what the hell would you do? I said, ‘Wait a minute. SHUT GROVETON DOWN, NOW! Not tonight, now. All pulp for all of our mills must come out of Old Town starting yesterday, now.’ All of a sudden [Old Town] had a 150- or [1]60-ton-a-day customer here, bang, just like that. We shut the [Groveton] sulfite mill down, cleaned it up, and stopped polluting the river practically overnight.”
Most of the fifty-six workers in the pulp mill’s digester building, its bleach plant, and the acid tower found other mill jobs. Gerard Labrecque began driving a Towmotor forklift that ferried five-hundred-pound bales of Old Town pulp, called “hogs,” from railroad cars to the pulpers in the stock preparation department. The four wires around the bales had to be cut and removed before dumping the bales into the pulper. “The one who drive the Towmotor had to get off his Towmotor, go cut the wire,” Labrecque explained. “The [operator of] the pulper had to hang on to the wire. And the one in the Towmotor used to push a bale in the pulper. Lots of time [wires] did go in the pulper. It would get caught on the pump underneath, down in the cellar. You had to go down there, open the pump, get them outta there and clean up the pump. [The wires] used to get in a big ball.”
Forty years later, Jim Wemyss was still sensitive about accusations that the shutdown of the pulp mill had caused job loss in Groveton: “We were going to have to spend millions of dollars in this pulp mill over here, which was antiquated and old. They had a pulp mill over there that didn’t have any customers. It’s sound business. I didn’t do it to hurt people in this town. Are you crazy? I did it to make the town a better town. Why would I want to hurt the town? I lived here. That’s just a logic of business decisions you have to make.”
Campbell Stationery, a subsidiary of Groveton Papers, played an important role in the mill because it used paper that failed to meet fine-papers standards. Wemyss enjoyed telling of the time in the mid-1960s when he was giving the president of Mead Paper a tour of the mill. His visitor remarked: “I don’t see any reject rolls here.” Wemyss replied: “‘We don’t make reject rolls.’ He said, ‘Jim, stop the baloney. Everybody makes reject rolls.’ I said, ‘We don’t, sir. Anytime we see the paper isn’t quite up to spec, we put it in the rewinder and cut it up to 34.5 inches wide.’ He said, ‘Yeah, what do you with those?’ I said, ‘Come with me.’ I took him up to Campbell. ‘That’s where you put it on the back of the ruling machines. You rule it.’ And he said, ‘Oh, my God. Every time we make bad paper, we give it to people in New York for nothing.’ I said, ‘You’re a generous man.’” A month later, Mead acquired Westab, a venerable stationery company.
Campbell had moved from the old Northumberland finishing facilities to a large new building in Groveton in 1969. At that time Campbell shifted from school-oriented products to a broader, more commercial, product line. Its business grew so rapidly that within three years it had outgrown its new building.3 The mill purchased the shuttered plywood mill in North Stratford early in 1973 and, after renovating it, moved one hundred employees of Campbell Stationery into it later that fall. The 190,000-square-foot building provided ample space for Campbell to expand; it had direct access to the Grand Trunk Railway line for shipping, and it saved the mill the need to erect a planned new Campbell warehouse at Groveton.4
The Equal Employment Opportunity Act probably played a role in the Campbell move. Relocating to Stratford allowed Diamond to pay Campbell finishing room workers at lower rates than workers doing similar jobs in the Groveton finishing rooms. The move angered union officials, and decades later, Wemyss defended his action: “I didn’t do it with malice towards the people in town. When you have a paper machine man running a big paper machine making five hundred tons a day, you pay him umpteen dollars an hour. And if you have a little girl working on a ruling machine in the tablet division, she says, ‘I should get the same pay. I work here too.’ If you gave her the same pay, you would not be in that business very long because your competitors weren’t giving that type of money to their people who were running the ruling machines all over the country. That’s a sound, simple, clean decision to make. Not with malice and hate.” A more apt comparison would have been with wages paid to finishing room workers in Groveton, not high-paid paper machine tenders.
Old Town’s new tissue paper machine, also manufactured by Diamond’s Manchester Machine, ran so poorly that Old Town’s finishing plant was operating far below capacity. Wemyss recalled: “My brother calls me up and said, ‘You’re shipping finished facial tissue over to Old Town so we can make up a car properly, and it’s costing us a fortune. What are you going to do?’ I said, ‘It will be taken care of tomorrow.’ I went into the mill here and said, ‘We’re shutting the facial tissue line down.” On June 8, 1973, mill vice president Walter MacDonald announced that the tissue converting plant would close in twenty days, and that those operations would be transferred to Old Town. Number 4 paper machine would continue to run in Groveton.
Most of the finishing room employees found work elsewhere in the mill, although not always with the happiest results. Pauline Labrecque used her seniority to bump into Number 1 finishing room, where she wrapped reams of fine papers. A coworker made her life miserable: “The fellow that was behind me didn’t like it because I bumped down there. He was dirty to me because I was new. I was learning. And he was pushing that to the hilt. The paper was piling up on me. Just made me more nervous.”
There were no jobs for college students in the summer of 1973 because of the transfer of facial tissue finishing to Maine. Bill Astle recalled: “A lot of union employees were laid off, and they weren’t about to let summer kids come in and take jobs that could have gone to a union employee. So I didn’t get to work that summer.”
When the mill announced it was closing Number 4 finishing room, union president Web Barnett, fearing the loss of a hundred jobs, urged town officials to go down to the mill and learn what was going on. Several town leaders toured the mill, and one expressed concern that there was “not a good working relationship” between Wemyss and Groveton’s municipal government.5
Barnett blamed town manager Dana Kingston and the selectmen for job losses at the mill: “I say you are against the working man in this town. . . . It will be the blackest day this town will ever see if Mr. Wemyss gets out.” Selectman Jay Gould, who had recently lost a high-paying salvage job with the mill, said, “We’re willing to talk it over; we’ll break the ice, but the ice is pretty thick.”6 Two weeks later, Barnett and Gould again exchanged insults. Shep Mahurin, a local political leader, attempted to calm Barnett: “The people of this town would do anything in their power to make sure that this mill stays. But they have to know what to do.”7
Jim Wemyss claimed the selectmen wrote to Diamond’s president, Richard Walters, urging him to fire Wemyss. According to Wemyss, Walters said: ‘Jim, tell them to go to hell, shut the mill down, and come on over to Old Town. You’ve got that big mill over there.’ I said, ‘I don’t walk away from problems. I’ll take care of them. Leave me alone.’ That’s when I ran for selectman and fired every one of them.”
Wemyss was elected selectman in March 1974, and for the next dozen years he dominated the town government. I asked Wemyss if he ever felt there was a conflict of interest between mill and town interests: “No. Absolutely no. There were no problems. There were no problems. I’m telling you there were no problems.” Did anybody challenge you with a conflict of interest over mill taxes? “Who’d do that?” he smiled. “It was good for both sides.” He once was criticized at a Diamond board meeting: “They were talking to me about taxes. I said, ‘You don’t understand. I’m the tax assessor, and our taxes are right.’”
THE DEMOCRAT’S HEADLINE on October 25, 1973, read: “Fuel Reserves Dwindle at Groveton; Mill Shutdown Narrowly Averted.” The mill used sixty thousand to eighty thousand gallons of fuel oil a day, and the oil tanker carrying the mill’s resupply had been delayed at sea. When the tanker reached Portland, Maine, the oil was speedily delivered mere hours before the mill would have run out.8 This was the first hint of the oil crisis that fall and winter. Middle Eastern oil-producing nations had set up an embargo against countries that had supported Israel during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. The price of crude oil increased by 70 percent as OPEC nations moved to secure a much greater share of the revenues from their massive oil reserves. By January 1974, oil prices had quadrupled. The era of cheap energy, one of the cornerstones of postwar American economic growth and prosperity, had expired. Skyrocketing and unpredictable energy prices would torment the energy-intensive Groveton mill for the remainder of its existence.
On December 3, 1973, the mill learned that its fuel supplier, Texaco, would reduce Groveton’s allotment for the month by 75 percent because of OPEC cuts in supply. “It was serious, really serious,” Jim Wemyss reflected. “I wasn’t sure we were going to survive. Paragon [a subsidiary of Texaco], who was selling us all our oil, told us, ‘We haven’t got any.’ I said, ‘You can’t do that to me. We’ve been with you for so many years.’ I went to military school with a fellow who was a vice president of Texaco in later years. I went down to the Chrysler Building and said, ‘I want to see him.’ ‘You have to have an appointment.’ ‘Just give him my name, and tell him I want to see him.’ I did see him, and I got my oil [laughs].”
Spurred by the 1973–1974 oil crisis, Wemyss decided to convert one of the mill’s recovery boilers to an incinerator that would generate some energy for the mill by burning mill waste and town garbage. A ton of garbage burned in an incinerator yielded the equivalent of sixty-three gallons of oil and saved the town fifteen dollars in sanitary landfill fees.9 The $250,000 incinerator began operations in October 1975.
Two or three times a day truckloads of mill trash, skids, and bad rolls of paper were delivered to the incinerator; on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, town trash was delivered. “When they put it in, they said you could burn everything, don’t even have to separate the glass,” Thurman Blodgett, one of the incinerator crew members, said. “But every Monday morning, we had to go in with a jackhammer. It melted up front, but when it got to where it dropped down on the chain, it cooled. It solidified right there and kept building back. We’d spend all Monday, four of us, digging it out. It was shut down over the weekend. It was still hotter ’n a devil.” The incinerator experiment ended in the early 1980s. By then, environmentalists were warning that incinerating plastic and other manufactured products released PCBs, dioxin, and furans.
Fuel costs would play a major role in the demise of the mill. In its final decades, the mill would convert from oil to wood chips, back to oil, and then to natural gas in a vain attempt to secure a stable, low-cost supply of energy to keep itself running.