“IT WAS RATHER TRAUMATIC, to say the least,” Shirley MacDow said of the formal split-up of Wausau and Paper Board in 1993. “That mill was like Siamese twins. You had to decide, ‘This pipe is yours, and this one is mine, but this one has both so we have to pay you 50 percent.’ It was a tough show. There was a lot of antagonism because we were like the enemy, so to speak.”
Pete Cardin welcomed the split: “Wausau had a strict focus. Paper Board wasn’t part of that focus. When it happened, I said, ‘We’re going to have to fly on our own, and that’s a good thing.’ Of course, it’s much more complex than that. We discovered that immediately by having to set up our own administration. This is where it started getting a little bitter. The sale had to go through at the same time that they negotiated the contract with the union, and the operating agreement with Groveton Paper Board was dissolved. So all of those things had to happen at exactly the same instant. It was very complex.”
A surgical separation, however, was not possible. As long as the two separate companies shared the same mill complex, there would be, Cardin said, “bones of contention.” “Wausau realizes that anything that we’re involved with that they operate is going to be challenged because we operate on such a slim margin. We look at our budget item by item by item. Every month we’d sit down and go over it and say, ‘What’s the reason for this few extra thousand dollars?’ If that seemed to be coming from something they were doing, we would challenge them. Nobody likes to be challenged in their management, especially in what they would consider petty. But for us, it wasn’t petty.”
Dave Atkinson thought the operating agreement Wausau inherited from JR “was very good for Groveton Paper Board.” The new agreement negotiated with Wausau was not as favorable for Wemyss’s outfit. “Wausau took the negotiation much more seriously than great, big, large James River Corporation,” Atkinson explained. “I don’t think [JR] paid much attention to the operating agreement, and therefore the Groveton Paper Board got a lot of costs not assigned to them that should have been probably. Wausau basically provided steam, electricity, maintenance services. The first operating agreement that Wausau negotiated with Groveton Paper Board made Groveton Paper Board’s costs of manufacturing paper go up considerably. A lot of the things that they got for free, or weren’t allocated properly, were allocated more properly by Wausau.”
“There were times when we had great relations,” Cardin remembered, “but when it came down to the operation of the mill, decisions were being made that would affect them and us both. Then the relationship would deteriorate.”
The Groveton Paper Board Company operated only one paper machine, Love in the Afternoon, renamed “Number 1” to avoid confusion with old Number 3 that Wausau had renamed Number 5. Paper Board’s machine crews, operators of the neutral sulfite semi-chemical mill, and stock prep crews became Paper Board employees. The two companies had always shared maintenance and utility workers. The 1993 separation required that those jobs be assigned to one company or the other.
Paper Board had to negotiate its first union contract before the official separation date of April 1, 1993. “Everything was going fairly well in the negotiations until it came to an issue regarding the folks that worked in the [wood] yard, the folks that were dealing with the chip pile, and the people that maintained the equipment out there,” Cardin recalled. “During this negotiation, the union wanted those people as union employees. I could see it from their point of view, because knowing that this was going to be a separate union, they were going to have a very small bargaining unit, and they wanted to make their unit as big as they could. We took a pretty firm stance on that one. These were salaried employees, and we were not going to allow them to become unionized. It just went against the grain. It would be like allowing our office workers to become unionized. We were talking about probably a dozen jobs. These folks felt very strongly that they did not want to be in the union. They felt like they were being used as pawns here.”
The union threatened to break off negotiations. Chicago-based lawyers for Jefferson Smurfit, at the time a large shareholder of Paper Board, wanted to call the union’s bluff. Cardin remembered Jim Wemyss “was getting pretty emotional about this. He was saying that he has lived through strikes before; he does not want another strike in this town. It’s just not worth it. The attorneys are telling him they cannot go on strike. They have no legal course to go on strike because first of all we don’t even have to recognize them as a union.”
The union negotiators knew that their bargaining leverage was limited because if everything fell apart, the company might shut down. “When we met again, the union said that there was only one person they could trust to negotiate for Groveton Paper Board, and that was Jimmy Wemyss,” Cardin noted wryly. “The rest of us were untrustworthy. They didn’t put it that kindly. Remember we have a dance going on here. And so, Mr. Wemyss enters the negotiations. The speeches were given and how he loved these folks and we’re all family here. In the end, he gave in to the union and allowed those employees in the yard to become part of the collective bargaining unit. They felt like they had been betrayed. There were bitter feelings. But it did resolve the contract issue. After it was all done, we had a big dinner with the union, and I think we invited the yard employees, and everybody was best friends, and we all loved each other. Well, we [supervisors] were [still] despicable guys. But Mr. Wemyss was pretty heroic [laughs].”
As part of the separation agreement, Paper Board had to find office space outside the mill. In May 1993 Shirley MacDow negotiated the purchase of the Weeks Medical Center building in Groveton for Paper Board’s new offices. This building, on the corner of Main Street and Mechanic Street leading into the mill, had once been the site of Everett’s Diner.1
During the transition period, Tom Bushey declined a job offer from Paper Board and remained with Wausau: “The Board Company still retained that culture of almost terrorism of managerial style. The Board Company was very 1950s in their managerial style. Take two good guys and put them in a situation where they’re going to become adversarial to one another. Whoever wins was the best guy of the two. If you ask me, that was bred with the Wemyss family, and then continued with different managers.”
Jim Wemyss’s daily involvement in Paper Board had diminished over the years, except during crises. Every day Wemyss would call Shirley MacDow or Greg Cloutier to learn Paper Board’s daily tonnage; “444, and you can see me no more,” he would tell them. “If they didn’t make 444 tons that day, they had to answer to me if I was in Florida, if I was in Tanganyika. Every day I said, ‘What’s the number?’ And if it was 398, ‘What the hell—I’m on my way; I’m coming up.’ ‘Oh, Jesus, don’t do that.’”
Wemyss spent more and more time in Florida. Even during the warmer seasons, when he returned to Groveton, he left the day-in, day-out running of the mill to his small, loyal group of managers. Cloutier believed that Wemyss had set up a management team that only Jim Wemyss could manage: “If you talked to most of these guys, I think you’ll find they’re all tough, potentially bullies, dynamic, dominant characters. They would cause chaos beyond belief and could never manage a company. Mr. Wemyss was somehow able to control these people who were exceptionally good in their skill set, but their personalities were borderline aggressive. We knew that when he called us all together, we were a team. He had that rare quality to be able to do it. There wasn’t a good replacement. Maybe he didn’t give it up soon enough. Like family businesses, the father’s really got to turn it over early.”
Wemyss had installed his son-in-law, Gene Petryk, as superintendent of the mill in the early 1990s. Initially, Petryk, a retired army captain and helicopter pilot, tried to run the mill as if it were a military operation. Greg Cloutier recalled that Petryk’s demand “You will show me respect” failed to impress union workers who were governed by seniority, union-management grievance procedures, clearly defined job descriptions, and loyalty to Jim Wemyss.
After a while, Cloutier said, Petryk “realized that the best thing he could do was organize. He started using his helicopter maintenance training to lay out procedures, so when we attacked a problem, there was a little bit more of a structured [approach]. He realized that production increased when Mr. Wemyss wasn’t meddling. Towards the end, I found [Petryk] to be pretty good. We must have come up at least a hundred tons [on the machine] before he left.”
Cloutier questioned Petryk’s savoir faire in dealing with his irrepressible father-in-law: “I remember the day [Gene] came, and it was like the third year, and they were going to build a new house, and we were all interested in how he was going to build it. He said, ‘I got a nice piece of land. Beautiful.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Right next to my father-in-law’s.’ ‘Are you stupid?’ [laughs]. [Petryk] liked to come in around eight o’clock; he’d come in before that if we had trouble. [One morning] he looked all tired. ‘Mr. Wemyss was mowing the lawn out in front of my house at six-thirty’ [laughs]. Really, what he was trying to do was get Gene to get into work. That’s the lawn mower trick.”
In 1996 Petryk decided it was time to go to Paper Board’s directors and propose it “retire” Jim Wemyss and promote him, Petryk, to president. It was, Cloutier judged, “a suicide mission,” especially since Wemyss learned of the plan before the board met. Cloutier described the bloodbath: “Mr. Wemyss was the chair of the board. These were all loyal investors with thirty years. And then [Petryk] got drinking. He never drank at work, but once he got out of work, he’d have some pretty stiff drinks. His judgment was clouded. It was merciless. They just railroaded him out of town, basically. They didn’t want you to carry out any trade secrets. A cardboard box. I could not believe that it was done that way. It was bloodshed. The comment I use was, ‘Mr. Wemyss, people of that genetic makeup, eat their young if they have to.’ And he did. It was terrible.”
Shirley MacDow retired shortly thereafter. Pete Cardin recalled her retirement dinner: “That was a nice party they gave for Shirley. It was really first class. Shirley is probably the most loyal employee to that company, I think, that they ever had. Her number-one thing was that company, period. They can’t complain about Shirley’s performance—ever.”
In the summer of 1998, Jim Wemyss finally retired. “I wanted to retire for five or six years,” he said. “And Mr. [Ray] Duffy was one of the directors, and he was an officer in Jefferson Smurfit, and very friendly with Michael Smurfit and the whole family. They owned a section of the Board Company, and they had a lot of other paper mills. I said, ‘Come on, Ray, you take it over. I don’t want to do this any longer.’ After that everything went to hell. Ray was a nice person, but he had no paper mill knowledge. I felt he could draw on the resources of Jefferson Smurfit’s, and it just didn’t work. I don’t know what the hell happened. Replacing me with my ideas and way of doing things is—I don’t think you can do it [chuckles]. Not that I’m that smart; it’s just that I did things so much differently than anybody else.”
Greg Cloutier offered a different perspective: “He was forced out. Part of it was me. He was seventy-one or seventy-two. Mr. Wemyss was not there, so we were struggling with day-to-day leadership needs. I’m in charge of operations, and really operations means how well the paper machine was running: the 444 sort of thing. We had come up from like 300 tons to 440 tons on this machine. I did not have the technical science that supported that next level of operations on the paper machine. Mr. Wemyss had that, and he’s not around. It really required somebody that understood the science. When the crew made a change, everybody understood why they were making it. Mr. Wemyss was very dynamic in being able to do that. Had he been there every day, he probably could have taught me how to do that. We got to a point where I said, ‘Listen, you’ve gotta take him off my back. You’ve gotta let me try to do it my way or find somebody different.’ Mr. Wemyss was never going to give it up. What we were basically saying was, ‘Let us have our own meetings. Let us do our own problem solving,’ and not have a person come in who may not have been involved for two days, and all of a sudden he comes in and says, ‘Do all this.’ We can’t get him to listen to the fact that we’ve already done that. [Ray Duffy] asked Mr. Wemyss to step aside. That didn’t go over well. There was clearly tension, and I felt pretty guilty that we had done that to him, but we probably did it too late.
“We had these ass-chewing, lecture meetings with Mr. Wemyss, and they would go on. The machine was struggling, and the guys were struggling. [Bruce Simonds] was a young guy who had good ideas about what to do, and we were tying his hands. He truly understood the science, and he read about it. He wanted to learn more about it—that rare individual that just loved it. It wasn’t fair. You tried to tell [Wemyss], and he just would go off. It was his legacy. I think he was struggling with a lot of personal dynamics, having to turn it over to somebody else. Seeing that he didn’t have the energy and the skill to take it to this next level. Part of it was that he just wasn’t there every day.”
“I just walked away from everything,” Jim Wemyss Jr. said. “I didn’t say I lost interest in the people of Groveton, but I had no more authority. The worst thing you can do is put somebody in your place and then try to micromanage it from there. Walk away. ‘It’s yours now.’ No excuses. It’s yours. You do it. That’s the way it should be.”
Jim Wemyss III succeeded his father as president of Groveton Paper Board, and Ray Duffy succeeded Wemyss as chairman of the board. Greg Cloutier did not miss Wemyss’s meddling, but he did miss Wemyss’s vast knowledge of how to produce paper. “Duffy really didn’t bring anything to making the company more profitable,” Cloutier said. “Monthly meetings he would sweep in for a day and leave. He went and played golf and never spent any more time really thinking about operations other than you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do. You need to go there and work the problem: ‘What do you need? What are you missing? What are we not bringing to the table that I can use my contacts to help you with?’ He didn’t do any of that.”
Pete Cardin offered a very different assessment. Duffy, he thought, was “very professional, super-professional.” Cardin explained: “Whereas Mr. Wemyss was a production guy, Mr. Duffy was a financial guy. He really taught me an awful lot about business management. My business management skills were nothing. He really showed me how to read a P&L [profit and loss] statement and make decisions. He had great people skills. He was a top-notch politician. Great negotiator.”
“Instead of just having goofball meetings, we’d actually have monthly, professional meetings,” Cardin said. “The chairman of the board would come to Groveton and have a meeting with all of his managers, and we’d actually have an agenda that we would have to sit down, and we would have a time limit on our meetings, and each department would have to report, instead of having somebody rant and rave about something. If we didn’t meet our production levels, our quality levels, instead of ranting and raving about it, ‘Let’s talk about why. Give me a reason why.’ Very severe if you didn’t meet it. He had these cold, blue eyes, ‘Give me a rational reason why you didn’t meet it, and how are we going to correct this problem?’ He wasn’t some pushover. He knew. That forced us to become better and better and better. Over the course of his chairmanship, we progressed a lot, and we improved dramatically as a business. We were very, very, very proud of ourselves for all the things that we did.”
Greg Cloutier was struggling as head of operations. He had never run a paper machine, but as head engineer, he had supervised the machine’s rebuilding: “We had changed so many things in the paper machine. By that time we had done the dryer section over. We’d done the drives over so we could go faster. We’d done the press over. We’d done part of the Fourdrinier over, so I may not have been a papermaker, but I had made the machine. I was kind of the chief mechanic for the operation. You glean a lot in the process, and what it needs to run, but you lose the finesse on how to handle fiber. That was a fairly steep learning curve.”
During the summer of 1999, Cloutier remembered, the rewinder could not be made to work reliably: “We’d had a month of poor production. We’d all worked night and day for a month, so tempers were raw. The final blow was Ray Duffy had a friend [who] sold variable speed drives. We put that variable speed drive on the winder, and it just worked terrible.”
On August 17, 1999, Greg and Rita Cloutier’s wedding anniversary, Greg’s frustration boiled over: “I basically told [Jim Wemyss III] to get f-ed, and you can’t do that. We had worked every day, eight-, ten-, sixteen-hour days for thirty days, and we were not seeing the solution to this winder problem. Our production numbers were down, and we were shipping paper that was of low quality as well. It was a perfect storm from the point of view of a one-machine operation. We were doing everything wrong, and we really didn’t have an answer. We were burned out. ‘Shoot me. The disease has overtaken me. Put me out of my misery’ [laughs].”
Cloutier, who had survived countless such blow-ups with the thick-skinned father, was fired on the spot by his boyhood chum. Oddly, Cloutier endorsed his own firing: “It wasn’t a pleasant thing,” he said. “But you can’t be in that position and be disrespectful to the president of the company and the things he wants to have done. The interesting thing is my wife congratulated me. Because up to that time, I never had had a vacation. Every vacation I was working on my hydro plants.” After his firing, Cloutier built up a successful hydropower company.
Production manager Pete Cardin explained how difficult it is to run a paper mill: “A paper mill is extremely capital intensive. It was heavy industry. You have to reinvest in this thing constantly, otherwise it’s not going to make it. So your capital outlay is huge, just your operating capital, not necessarily your projects for nice-to-do process improvement or production increase. Our operating expenses were very high. Mind-boggling. It always blew me away how much money you’d have to spend to run a paper mill because it’s such a corrosive environment; it’s such a damaging environment that everything has to be replaced almost constantly. As a manager, you really have to be able to predict; predictive failure is where it’s at, predictive maintenance. Because you’ve got to minimize your down time, and at the same time you’ve got to maximize your life on your equipment and your process. It’s a fine line, and it takes a lot of experience to get there, to know how to do it, because you’ve got to be willing to push it. You’d like to play it safe, but that’s not a luxury you have. You’re under production pressure. You can’t just take the thing down when you feel like it’s time.”
Entering the twenty-first century, Pete Cardin believed Paper Board’s operation had never run better. Management and workers had lowered costs relentlessly: “The irony is we finally got this paper machine humming. We’re putting out paper like you wouldn’t believe; we’re hitting production numbers that are just fantastic. Our up-time is really good; we’re putting out a really good product. Lowering our costs. We’re operating as efficiently as we possibly can run. Our fiber usage and our energy usage are as low as we can possibly make them.”
“We were very proud of what we did to survive,” Cardin reflected. “It was a constant battle, and, man, I’m telling you, we fought a lot of good fights, but in the end there was one battle we couldn’t win, just couldn’t win. In the end, it all came down to the fact that it’s a commodity that we were producing, and the demand was disappearing, and so because it is a commodity, we had no control over the price. The price was collapsing because the demand for boxes was going away. There were a lot of people out there that could make it a lot cheaper than we could. The newer, bigger mills down South, overseas. Wider machines, faster machines, just more efficient machines.” The decline in United States manufacturing during the 1980s and 1990s reduced demand for boxes. When Wal-Mart required its suppliers use shrink-wrap instead of cardboard boxes, prices for corrugated medium collapsed.
There was one other unwinnable battle: “The price of fuel up here just killed us,” Cardin lamented. “Energy killed us.” In 1999 Wausau had decided to build a co-generation plant for its Groveton plant, forcing Paper Board to construct its own co-gen plant. “I think they could have put the co-gen in and charged Groveton Paper Board a fair fee,” Greg Cloutier said. “And I think the capital costs would have been allocated out.”
From 2001 to 2005, the price of natural gas skyrocketed. “The thing with natural gas is just crazy,” Cardin said. “When we first went on to natural gas, we could generate all our steam and electricity, and our fuel bill for the month at Groveton Paper Board was about $15,000. When we shut that mill down, that bill was about $100,000 a month. When we first put the turbines on line, we were using 5,000 dekatherms of gas per month. When we shut the thing down, we were using 4,200 dekatherms a month. We were making more paper for less gas.”
In 2002, Box USA, headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois, bought Jefferson Smurfit’s 28 percent interest in Groveton Paper Board, and Ray Duffy departed. Pete Cardin reflected: “We missed Mr. Duffy because Roger Stone [head of Box USA] was a numbers guy. Cold capitalism. This is very cold capitalism.” Two years later, Stone sold Box USA to International Paper, the largest papermaking corporation in the world. Why, I asked Cardin, had Stone sold to IP? “Make a buck,” he answered. “This guy knows how to make money. Unbelievable.” Did Stone have any connection to the Groveton community? “Nothing,” Cardin shot back.
Initially, Cardin was hopeful the new owner would revive the small company: “Their professional papermakers made a tour of the mill, and they said, ‘You guys have potential here. We can help you. We can sink some money in this place. We can get more production out of this mill.’ We felt pretty good. ‘Finally somebody’s going to spend money here; we’re going to crank up our production; they might even put a new machine in here. Who knows?’ I’m the kind of person that loves to hear positive news. I want to be optimistic about the future. I was fifty-six years old. I wanted to know that there was a few more years left in this place, and I really wanted to make it to retirement. Plus I really care about the people in Groveton.”
International Paper did not invest in Paper Board. On July 19, 2005, corporate headquarters announced a $10 billion restructuring plan that included selling off or shutting down its higher-cost mills.2 “We’re a New England–based operation,” Cardin said, “so if you’re going to freight paper out of Groveton, you need to freight it to the New England, New York area, Canada. We were shipping paper to, in some cases, Arizona, the Midwest. There’s no money in that. We knew every month as the numbers rolled in, we were losing money; they could not keep us running any longer. That final year the numbers were just getting worse every month.”
Lack of orders shut down Paper Board for a week at the end of July 2005. Following Hurricane Katrina in late August, natural gas prices began to soar. On September 11, Paper Board shut down for two weeks. A few days later, International Paper, which by then owned 40 percent of Groveton Paper Board stock, hung a “For Sale” sign on the Paper Board mill.
Cardin’s production staff had exhausted itself in cost-cutting and efficiency improvements: “Probably starting in the late summer, early fall of 2005, no matter what we did, it was heartbreaking. I think it was in October 2005, I was talking with Paper Board superintendent Tom Pitts, and he said, ‘It’s not looking good. Something’s going to have to give here before the end of the year, otherwise we’d better be prepared for some kind of long-term outage to get through this energy crisis.’ He’s looking at the numbers on a daily basis, and he’s getting the gas bills, and he’s looking at the long-term market costs that are coming in. He keeps asking me, ‘What can we do?’
“I’m trying to think of anything, anything. I’m asking my guys, and we’re all trying very hard. Everybody knows, ‘This is it. We’re on the edge.’ The guys on the floor are asking me the same thing, ‘How are we doing?’ I’m answering, ‘You guys keep doing the best you can. What you guys are doing right now is keeping us going.’ It breaks your heart. These guys at the end of their shift, they see you, and they tell you, ‘We did great tonight; we did great today. We never had a skip. We had a real good run. How do the owners think we’re doing?’ You tell them the best you can, ‘They think you guys are doing a great job.’ What are you going to do? Are you going to tell them it’s hopeless? You can’t do that.”
In mid-November International Paper announced it must complete the sale of Paper Board before year’s end—or else. A month later IP informed Pitts it was shutting down Groveton Paper Board on December 31. “The holiday season is coming on, and Tom has pretty much told me, ‘We’re shutting down.’” Cardin said. “‘On January first, we’re down; that’s it. We’re done.’ Merry Christmas.” IP spokeswoman Amy Sawyer told a local reporter: “Unfortunately, the smaller mills with older, narrower machines tend to have less capacity and higher costs.” In the last half of 2005, United States mills with the capacity to produce a total of eight hundred thousand tons a year of corrugated medium were shuttered.3
Cardin orchestrated what he termed a “clean shutdown,” as if it were merely another temporary layoff and not the death of a mill: “What we gave for a speech was, ‘We’re gonna shut this place down. We’re going to have a real good shutdown, an orderly shutdown because there’s always hope that we’re gonna start this place back up again.’ We never want to give up hope.”
Was there any sabotage during the last days of the mill by embittered workers? “None. None. The morale was good,” Cardin replied. “Everybody thanked us for doing everything we could to keep this place running, and we made it absolutely clear that it wasn’t anything they did or didn’t do that allowed this to fail. Nobody blamed anybody.”
Right before Christmas, the local mill managers met with Paper Board workers to inform them of the mill closing and to outline their severance package. Labor laws require that workers receive sixty days’ warning of a plant closing—with pay. Accordingly, the official closing date for Groveton Paper Board was March 1, 2006. “We told them what the package was, how they were going to be treated and everything,” Cardin said. “[The last day] was melancholy, but it was a time of wishing each other well. It was like life goes on; it was kind of cheerful, in a way.”
Murray Rogers, president of Local 61, praised the efforts by Tom Pitts to protect the workers’ interests during this nightmare: “Tom Pitts—he did the best he could do. Those guys aren’t the guys who are pulling the strings. They do what they can; they take a personal stance for the people.” The eighty hourly and twenty-eight salaried workers received the sixty days’ pay guaranteed by law, and an additional week of pay for each year’s service, up to twenty years. Their medical, life, and dental insurance was guaranteed through March 2006.4
The workers in both mills belonged to Local 61, but Paper Board workers did not have seniority or bumping rights in the Wausau mill. Murray Rogers and the union did all they could to help Paper Board workers find jobs with Wausau. A few maintenance workers with specialized skills were able to move over. Dave Atkinson said Wausau would have gladly hired more, but it had been on a cost-cutting, jobs-reducing campaign for years: “Had we been in a market where we were expanding, I guarantee you we would have hired every one we could—the good ones. We wouldn’t have scooped up the bad ones. Every operation has its bad ones.”
Why didn’t Wausau buy Paper Board? “There was never a thought of buying it,” Atkinson responded. “If they had said, ‘We’ll give it to you,’ I don’t even know that Wausau would have said yes, because it would have been a higher tax burden.”
On January 5, 2006, Atkinson wrote a sharp letter to Tom Pitts outlining Wausau’s grievances with the Paper Board shutdown process: “The agreements between our companies require us to coordinate our activities and to limit to the greatest extent possible, interference with the other’s use of the facilities.” Atkinson requested “better communications,” pointing out: “Already, your actions in drawing your tanks all at once without coordinating with us has had a negative effect on the wastewater treatment plant.” Wausau Happenings later reported that the flood of discharged black liquor, chemicals, and ash had “caused a toxic shock to the activated sludge process.” Wausau shut down its paper machines for nineteen hours until the wastewater treatment plant’s pH was restored to sanctioned levels.
Without Paper Board, Wausau’s struggles for survival intensified: “It hurts us from a cost standpoint,” Atkinson explained. “We certainly shared and allocated some costs. Mostly on waste treatment at that point. They owned one clarifier; we owned the other, but they operated in concert with each other. There’s a lot of things that need to be maintained. There’s a big blower for the aeration lagoon that uses a lot of energy. So there was a fairly high cost center associated with waste treatment. I don’t think they paid their last couple of bills to us. We said, ‘All right, we’ve got to reconfigure the waste treatment facility, downsize people.’ Only one clarifier instead of two. They always paid a little bit more, and it had to do with the fact that they had a pulp mill—their waste had BOD [biological oxygen demand] in it. We didn’t have to treat our waste the same as theirs. We reconfigured the waste treatment plant, but we didn’t cut the costs in half. They only came down to about 70 percent. That certainly didn’t help.”
The mill literally became a colder place that January. Atkinson explained: “There were vast sections of the mill that were being heated by their waste heat. Their paper machines were not making paper anymore, so there’s not warm air being funneled into [the shipping] warehouse. All of a sudden, our heating costs went up.”
Groveton Paper Board ceased making payments to Wausau on December 31, 2005. On September 20, 2006, Wausau filed a $1.1 million lawsuit against Groveton Paper Board charging breach of contract. The suit alleged that Paper Board already owed Wausau $430,000 for overdue payments and other expenses. Wausau sought an additional $29,000 a month until November 1, 2007, when the three-year operating agreement expired. The suit also covered Paper Board’s share of costs for sludge disposal, utilities, maintenance, taxes, and insurance, as well as cleanup and repair costs incurred by Wausau when Paper Board’s boiler malfunctioned and forced Wausau to shut down some of its work area. IP gave Wausau the runaround.
In 2007 an outside crew of demolition scrappers began to dismantle and remove Paper Board machinery and other assets. Love in the Afternoon ended up being shipped to Vietnam—a bitter irony for many mill workers who had fought in that still-controversial war. The demolition operation caused Atkinson one last Paper Board–related headache: “The people who were in there tearing the metal out, tearing the equipment out, kind of scavenging the place, some of them [were] a little surly, don’t follow safety rules. There were a lot of battles that I had with IP at the time because the phone number I had to call was some lawyer in Memphis. It certainly was a lot of time that I, and others on my staff, needed to spend on something that wasn’t adding one ounce of value. It wasn’t helping our customers; it wasn’t helping our efficiency, but it was a necessary evil.”
PETE CARDIN: “I HAD EVERY OPPORTUNITY”
Of all the former mill workers I interviewed, Pete Cardin, who had been hired in 1968, was the most devastated by the shutdown of the mill. He had returned to the mill in 1971 following a three-year stint in the army: “I didn’t think I was going to go back to the mill. I don’t even know why I came back to the area, but I did. Typical lost soul from that whole mess. The [Vietnam] war was highly unpopular, so nobody talked about it. It was like you disappeared for a while into someplace, and you came back, and people just expected you to get on with your life. Uncle Sam had given me a pretty good check when I left the army, and I partied that away pretty quick. Somebody told me, ‘They’ve got to hold on to your job.’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll give it one year, and I’ll put some money aside. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life here, no way.’ Twenty-one years old. Little did I know. But, like all things, life has a way of going by, and you start tying yourself down, and you get married, and you have obligations. You work because you’ve got to work; it was a good job, paid well, and people were good to work for. Benefits were great.”
Pete thought he had a dream job working on the fine-papers machines from 1971 to 1974. He was progressing steadily toward the highest-paying jobs, back tender and machine tender, when he was ordered off the paper machines by his doctor: “I developed an allergy to the dies and stuff that they used on the machines. When I was told I couldn’t work on the paper machines anymore, I swear to God, my heart was broken. I loved it. Oh, I loved the paper machines. It was the camaraderie. It was that esprit de corps. The teams; we’re all in it together; it’s us against the machine. It was really never that monotonous. You never knew what you were going to get into that night. I really liked the culture of the paper machines. When I was told medically I couldn’t work on them anymore, I was devastated.”
He transferred from the paper machines to the construction crew: “I went to places in that mill that I had never known existed because we’d wander everywhere, all over the roofs, all throughout the mill. That’s when I realized, ‘This place is big, all this stuff, holy mackerel.’”
During his stint on the construction crew, Pete was on the lookout for a more permanent job. Eventually, he was hired to unload chemicals for Paper Board’s neutral sulfite semi-chemical pulp mill and for the bleach plant that bleached the stock for the tissue and fine-papers machines: “[It was] a very enlightening job. Very dangerous stuff. Extremely dangerous stuff. I learned an awful lot about chemistry on that job. Made a lot of money, worked a lot of hours. Probably the most money I ever made in the mill.”
Pete considered his transfer over to Paper Board in 1975 a “life-changing experience.” Why? “The reason I say it changed my life is that it opened up all the doors for me that I passed through later on,” he responded. “If I had stayed where I was, I never would have achieved the level of success that I [enjoyed] in the pulp mill. There were fewer opportunities on the paper machine side than there was in the pulp mill. The pulp mill was in a state of transition. They were building the chemical recovery system at that time. A lot of the older operators didn’t want anything to do with the new chemical recovery system because it was horrendously complex, a real beast. I was twenty-four. The next youngest person was probably thirty-eight, thirty-nine years old. And all the other operators were in their late forties, early fifties; some guys were in their sixties. There wasn’t that much young blood in the department.
“For a young guy, this was great; I had every opportunity in the world, and I loved the challenge. I found it more interesting than working on the paper machine, much more of a mental challenge. I got a lot of sense of satisfaction of learning the process.”
After working for several years in the pulp mill, he was made a fill-in shift supervisor, or tour boss, a part-time salaried job. The rest of the time, Pete continued to work at a union job. He was promoted to full-time shift supervisor of the chemical recovery system and the pulp mill in the mid-1980s. In 1990 he became superintendent of the pulp mill, and in 1996, after a shake-up in management, Pete became production manager for the entire Groveton Paper Board operation, a position he held until Paper Board shut down.
“[After the shake-up] I was faced with a big challenge. People were being demoted or transferred, and I had been promoted. So there was the politics of all of that. Tough times personnel-wise. Tough times for people’s feelings. But everybody knew that the more important thing was the survival of the mill, and are we the right people in the right place in the right time? You don’t just prove that by saying, ‘I’m the boss.’ You have to prove that by bringing together a team of people that had trust and respect for what you say. When things happen, and they’re not going well, and you’re up to your neck in alligators, and everybody is flipping out, somebody has got to make a decision. You’ve got to take a risk. You have to make the most educated guess you can and go for it. If it didn’t turn out right, I would always take the responsibility that it was my decision. ‘You guys gave me advice. I didn’t have to listen to it. I listened to it; I made that decision; then we get on with it. If it fails, then it’s my decision, not yours.’
“So, by behaving that way, plus I had a good rapport with the guys on the floor because I came from there. They respected my ability as an operator. They would always appreciate my help because I had spent a lot of time with them teaching the things that I’d learned. Especially the new guys; I’d work with them and make their job easier because they’d get themselves into problems, and they wouldn’t know how to get out of the problem. Instead of screaming at them and give them hell, I’d say, ‘Come on, I’ll show you what to do. This is what you do. It’s real simple’ [laughs].
“In the old days, you’d scream your way out of it. Because some of the guys that were in charge didn’t necessarily know how to fix the problem, and if they couldn’t fix the problem, then ‘I’m going to scream at you till you fix the problem’ [laughs]. The screaming rolls downhill. I’ve seen some screaming in that mill.”
When the demolition of the mill began late in 2012, Pete often drove over to the old parking area to watch and to grieve. His marriage broke up, and his health deteriorated. In May 2015, at age sixty-five, he died. His death certificate may have said otherwise, but the cause of death was a broken heart.