You Had a Job for Life

  Toward the end of February 1945, as American forces pressed toward Germany, Young Jim was badly wounded: “It’s not like in the movies. You’re running down the streets, throwing hand grenades in windows at night, and the tanks are firing, and the glass is flying around, and all of a sudden you’re lying on the ground. They said, ‘Who shot you?’ ‘I didn’t catch his name.’ I don’t know what happened. All of a sudden I’m bleeding like hell, and hurting like hell, and they put a tourniquet around my leg and rolled me against the building and said, ‘We’ll try and come back and get you.’ They gave me a couple of toothpaste tubes full of morphine [and] said, ‘When it gets too bad, don’t forget to relieve that thing.’” Wemyss would be on crutches until September. Ever after, he walked with a limp, and he had to have additional surgery on the leg years later. I asked him about the pain after all these years; “It never stops,” he answered.

  “WE MADE OUR OWN FUN”

  Rosa Gaudette Roberge vividly recalled her childhood during the war years. She was about seven when her father died in 1942: “The night my father was sick, he was having such pains. He sent my sister up to the doctor’s office to have him come to the house. Back then they’d go to your house. [The doctor] was drinking; he wouldn’t come. So my father walked from behind the high school down to that house where [the doctor] lived. He knocked on the door, and the doctor opened the door, and my father dropped dead right on the doorstep. You always heard that line about, ‘You opened the door and fell on the floor.’ Well, it happened to my father. He was dead before he hit the floor.”

  Old Jim Wemyss had closed the company store on October 31, 1942, and shortly thereafter Rosa’s mother moved the family to one of the apartments above it. “When my mother went to get [an apartment], the guy came there. He says, ‘My goodness, you’ve got five kids. Isn’t that a lot of kids?’ She said, ‘What am I supposed to do? Shoot ’em?’ [laughs]. He didn’t want to rent that to her with all those kids. We never destroyed anything. We were taught different.”

  Her father’s World War I pension and Social Security could not support the family. Her mother strung a clothesline from their apartment across to the mill’s converting plant, and she took in washing and ironing. “We didn’t have any money,” Rosa said. “I remember every once in a while we’d take a cart up to the town. Behind the bank there was a barn there. We’d get surplus food. If it wasn’t for that—we didn’t eat very good.”

  “Across from the company block, on the mill side, there was great big stacks of coal dust. It was like sand almost,” she said. “We’d take an old cardboard box and cut it down and slide down the coal pile, winter and summer [laughs]. It was fun living there. I enjoyed it because we had all kinds of kids to play with, and everybody knew everybody. Everybody got along with everybody.”

  It is inconceivable today that small children could roam freely around the mill premises. Rosa and the neighborhood kids would sneak into the mill on Sundays, when blue laws required the mill to shut down: “We used to go in and play around the paper machines. We used to hide under them. Just to get in there and see what was in there, trying to get away with something.”

  “Behind the blacksmith shop there were these big iron [tanks]. There was a hole in the top. I guess they filled it with some kind of chemicals or something. I thought I’d be smart one day, and I got down in the hole,” Rosa recollected. “It was empty. And I was short. I couldn’t get out [laughs]. I was panicking; I’ll never forget that. Finally, I don’t know if I jumped up to grab way the hell above me. Scared me. Nobody was with me, so nobody knew I was there.”

  The lumberyard sawdust pile was another dangerous but irresistible place to play. “They had a thing that brought the sawdust up into the boxcars. It was like a conveyor belt, and we used to go over there and jump in the sawdust in the boxcar. Of course there was probably air pockets in there. We could have sunk right into the sawdust and suffocated.” And then there was the river: “They used to have the boom logs to keep the pulp from going down the river. We weren’t supposed to be on them, but we played on them. Never fell in or nothing.”

  Rosa witnessed the same prejudice against poor families that Shirley Brown had suffered: “My oldest brother was blamed for robbing a store, Bouchers. Somebody broke into the store, and they stole beer and cigarettes and stuff. First thing, the cop comes to the house and says something about Arthur was supposed to have broke into the store. [Mother] said, ‘I don’t see how he could have. He was in bed.’ Come to find out it was [Boucher’s] own relative that broke in the store.”

  Despite the family’s poverty, Rosa remembered the war years with fondness: “We didn’t have much, but we made our own fun.”

  Diary of Cy Hessenauer, 1938–1942, August 13 and 18, 1940. Photocopies in author’s possession.

  “Transfer of Paper Mill Is Probable This Week,” Democrat, August 14, 1940; Democrat, January 8, 1941.

  “Northumberland a Thriving Village,” Democrat, March 31, 1937.

  “Police Guard Paper Mill,” Democrat, October 18, 1939; November 15 and 22, 1939.

  “Friendly Relations at Wyoming Mill,” Democrat, January 8, 1941.

  “Strike at Paper Mill,” Democrat, October 1, 1941.

  Hessenauer diary, 1938–1942, September 23, 1940, and January 15, 1941.

  “Union and Company Agreement,” Democrat, July 9, 1941.

  Democrat, October 31, 1945.

  Democrat, July 19 and 26 and August 2, 1944.

  Chapter Seven

  CROWN PRINCE

  “THE WAR HAD JUST ENDED,” Jim Wemyss Jr. recalled. “Gas stamps, rationing and shoes—you were allowed two pairs of shoes a year. [Rationing] went off pretty quickly, but there wasn’t the supplies in the pipeline to make any difference. It was a tremendous revolution in this country after the war ended. A lot of women didn’t want to leave their good jobs. They were getting paid pretty good, and everybody was worried that some soldiers coming back wouldn’t have any jobs because the women wouldn’t give them back to them.” Old Jim Wemyss’s plans to modernize and expand the mill guaranteed abundant jobs for returning soldiers. Many of these hirees—“the class of ’46”—would remain at the mill for the next three or four decades.

  Because of his responsibilities to his family, Ray Jackson was discharged before war’s end. He immediately returned to the mill. Soldiers were permitted thirty days off before they had to reclaim their prewar job. Len Fournier, discharged in January 1946, thoroughly enjoyed his free time: “[I was] full of piss and vinegar.”

  Neal Brown’s father, Bud, was hired shortly after the war: “I don’t think there was a lot of mobility in those days,” Neal said. “You grew up; you were familiar with your surroundings, and you didn’t feel the necessity to go someplace else to check out the pastures to make sure they were greener on the other side. A lot of those guys never finished high school. They went into the war. They came out, and they had a lot of skills that they didn’t have when they left; they had the leadership skills; they had the work ethic skills; they had everything else that was highly regarded. Of the kids that I grew up with, every one of our fathers had served. They didn’t talk a lot about it, but we knew where they had been.”

  Neal’s mother, newlywed Shirley Perkins Brown, recalled the postwar prosperity that allowed the Browns to buy their own house: “When Bud got out of the service and went to work in the converting plant, he was making $39 a week. We paid $2,000 for the house, and we paid $200 down and $13 a month. Some of those months that $13 came hard. Then the pay started increasing and benefits started coming in like life insurance and health insurance.”

  The converting plant produced stationery and school supplies such as spiral notebooks, blue test booklets, and graph paper. Its rapid postwar expansion meant jobs for young women, including sixteen-year-old Irene Paradis Bigelow. When she received her first pay envelope, she was on top of the world: “You didn’t have to make out an application for work or anything. If they needed somebody to
work, they hired you right there. When I went to work in there, oh God, it was fifty-two cents an hour and I thought I had the world by the ass with a downhill pull. I’ll never forget, Polly Sawyer had a store, and the first paycheck I got I went in and bought a red trench coat.”1

  James C. Wemyss Sr. became head of the family paper mill business during the war when his father’s health began to decline. On April 17, 1946, James Strembeck Wemyss, age sixty-seven, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His grandson revered him: “I had a very positive relationship with that man. To say he was like my father—he was. He and I, just he and I. He got along with the other grandkids. He was polite to them and nice, but he really, I guess, enjoyed my company as a young boy. He called me the Crown Prince. He wanted me to be head of these companies, and he made no bones about it.” “When my father walked down the street, they took their hats off,” Young Jim asserted on another occasion. “Not me, but they did for him. And my grandfather, definitely!”

  After the war, prices had begun to rise steeply, and, all across the country, labor demanded significant wage and benefit increases to compensate for wartime wage freezes, lost work time due to prolonged military service, and inflation. In early 1946, most New England paper mills gave workers raises of at least fifteen cents an hour, even though labor contracts were not due to expire until June.

  The average minimum wage then paid to a male mill worker in Maine and Berlin, New Hampshire, exceeded the Groveton mill’s rate by twenty cents an hour. In May, Local 41 of the International Brotherhood of Papermakers and Local 61 of the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite and Paper Mill Workers requested that Groveton also grant raises in advance of the termination of the labor contract. Following lengthy negotiations, Old Jim offered a ten-cent increase to be paid in three installments: five cents on June 1, 1946, three cents on September 1, 1946, and two cents on January 1, 1947. The six hundred Groveton mill workers rejected the proposal and called a strike on September 12, 1946. Jim Wemyss suggested the strike didn’t phase his father: “He said, ‘Everybody needed a rest after the war anyhow, including me.’”

  The unions demanded a twenty-two-cent-an-hour increase; time and a half for Saturdays and double pay for Sunday; a Christmas bonus of forty hours for employees with more than five years’ service and twenty hours for all others; and increases in paid holidays.2 A representative of the International union stated: “The workers at Groveton are not asking any more than has already been granted and is being paid by employers elsewhere.”3

  Old Jim agreed to the Christmas bonus but rejected the wage increase. Mill management suggested that Groveton workers, by working forty-eight-hour weeks, instead of the forty-hour weeks in the other mills, were actually being paid a sum “equivalent” to the weekly pay of workers in other New Hampshire and Maine mills. The union declined the honor of working six days for five days’ pay.4

  The union also demanded that future contracts expire in June to keep Groveton on the same schedule as other mills in the region—and to accelerate wage increases by three months. Wemyss insisted on retaining the September deadline. That later date allowed Groveton Papers’ management to see what concessions the other mills had made; and it discouraged long strikes that stretched into November and December. As winter approached, workers on a tight budget became nervous about paying the winter heating bill. Electrician Herb Miles was friends with the Wemyss family: “I never was for strikes. I wasn’t a striking man. But when it come fall, Mr. Wemyss said, ‘They’ll be back when the weather gets cold.’”

  While some strikers picketed, others found jobs at the Gilman, Vermont, paper mill twenty miles to the south; a few families picked potatoes in northern Maine. “My husband and I had gotten married in June,” Shirley Brown remembered. “The men picked potatoes on their hands and knees with baskets. We spent all our time trying to clean up the hotel because it was awful. It was not a happy time.”

  During the second week of the strike, a small fire broke out in some bales of waste and scrap paper in the Number 3 paper machine room. Firefighters, including fifteen striking mill workers, quickly extinguished it. Fire chief Thomas W. Atkinson blamed “spontaneous combustion.”5 Because of the hard feelings during the strike, Dave Miles’s father grounded his teenage son: “My father just said, ‘Dark, you stay home. You don’t go down street.’ And I didn’t go down street.”

  Jim Wemyss relished sharing the family version of how his father ended the strike: “Father didn’t give a goddamn if they went on strike. He cared, but he wasn’t going to take any bull from anybody. He was a very tough guy. I was going to college at the time, and the union couldn’t find him for about three weeks, and they came down to the college. ‘You’ve got to find your father.’ I said, ‘I don’t know where he is.’ I had dinner with him every night [laughs]. They said, ‘You’ve got to find him. We’ve got to talk.’ So I talked to him. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Tell them we’ll have a meeting at the Parker House [in Boston] next week.’ I set it up. They had some real tough guys from New York and Boston. Some of the men from the mill. Father walked in with a big paper bag of walnuts and a hammer. And he sets down and one of the guys starts making a speech, and my father is rustling in the bag, and takes out a walnut and positions it like this and ‘bang!’ Breaks up. And this guy is speaking, and he breaks another walnut, and finally, [someone] said, ‘Jim, are you listening?’ ‘Oh, yes, I’m listening.’ He [the union representative] said, ‘We’re not getting anyplace, are we?’ [Father] said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Could we all have some walnuts?’ [laughs]. He opened the bag and said, ‘Now, this is the way it’s going to be, gentlemen [he thumps the table several times in cadence to “this,” “way,” “going,”“be”], or I can disappear again for another six months.’ That’s the end of it. That’s how he negotiated.”

  The strike ended on November 1. All employees received an immediate twelve-cent-an-hour increase with another five-cent increase to take effect on March 1, 1947. Minimum wages were raised thirteen and fourteen cents per hour. Workers received three holidays with pay and three more, if worked, at time-and-a-half pay. In a victory for management, the contract ran until September, not June, 1947.6

  Jim Jr. claimed the government paid for the strike: “Taxes were tremendous at that time to pay for the war. And we were making money during that period of time. I actually think the six-week strike, the United States government paid for the whole strike, because you didn’t have to pay any taxes that year. The strike didn’t financially hurt Father that much. And, he kept saying, ‘Don’t do it.’”

  Postwar construction at the mill. (Courtesy GREAT)

  “Wemyss don’t want to give nothin’,” Puss Gagnon remembered. “Wemyss would go down to the diner and drink with the boys. They’d get drunker’n hell. He wouldn’t give. Oh, no. He said you was going to get so much. You could go on strike if you want to. It wouldn’t amount to a piss hole in the snow.” Zo Cloutier said: “Back then you had to fight for what you wanted. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t get nothing. They used to go out on a strike for three or four cents. After a Depression, people want a little bit more money. The only way you could get it was to fight for it. The unions, to me, were a great thing. Back then you needed to have people all stick together when you wanted something.”

  Once the strike was settled, the transformation of the mill commenced. Fred Shannon’s father was part of the construction crew that was replacing a leaky cement wall by the filter plant. They had installed rebar for the eighteen-inch-thick, new walls, but they had dropped some short wooden sticks among the rebar, and they needed someone small to retrieve them. “Somebody come over and asked me if I thought I could crawl in there, because I was just a little fellow; I probably didn’t weigh only forty pounds,” Shannon recalled. “I was able to crawl right down through all that stuff, and pick out all those sticks. I got paid a whole dollar for that.”

  “Everybody knew everybody,” Fred remembered. “Everybody got on good, as far as I can see.” Young
Fred and his mates thought the mill was a wonderful playground. On occasion, they commandeered a railroad handcar from behind the mill: “We’d push that all the way up on the main tracks, way up, and then get on, and ride all the way down through behind the mill—have a good ride. Hey, back then, no television. There wasn’t much to do, except find things to do.”

  “We did everything we could to make a penny,” he said. “All summer long we’d pick berries and sell them, and we’d go to Emerson’s and buy a couple of boxes of .22 shorts. Then we’d go up to the dump and spend the rest of the day shooting rats. It kept us out of trouble. After a while they wouldn’t let you shoot at the dump anymore. Too close to town. They’d see kids up there throwing a bottle up in the air and then shooting at it with a .22. That could be kind of dangerous, I guess.”

  The mill’s river crew was casual about leaving explosives lying around the riverside woodpiles. Fred and his buddies took notice: “By every pulp pile, there was a little shack where they used to have dynamite. Three or four of us got this little half stick of dynamite and a piece of fuse. We went way up Bag Hill somewhere and set it on a rock and stuck a hole into it and put a fuse into it and lit the fuse, and we run like hell. We waited and waited and waited, and nothing happened. We didn’t know you had to have a cap on that fuse. The dynamite was smoldering, but there was nothing to make the dynamite blow. One of them that we was with—I won’t mention his name—picked it up, carried it down, and set it on the road. One of us had a .22. So we was pulling up with that .22 trying to hit it. PEEEEYOUUUU. PEEEEYOUUUU. About the third time, the whole earth shook. The loudest noise you ever heard. Now there was four young guys going down that Bag Hill Road right in a race. I never was so scared in my life. That .22 bullet set that off.”

  Jim Wemyss Sr. installed a large new boiler in 1948 and a new General Electric turbine. The old paper machines had been run by steam-driven shafts. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, mill electricians installed electric motors to operate the older paper machines at faster rates. On one occasion, Herb Miles was using uninsulated pliers: “I reached in to get hold of a wire. I had a hold of the conduit. Of course, a conduit is grounded. There I hung. Pulled me right up—pulls your muscles right up. The fellow with me there—I said, ‘Pull the switch!’ That’s all I could say. ‘Pull the switch!’ There’s another fellow stood down there looking up at me. If he’d taken me by the pant leg, he could have pulled me off. He thought he was going to get a shock if he got ahold of me. If I’d had a weak heart, I’d have been dead. Finally I kicked the eight-foot ladder out from under me, thinking I might drop. But the [wire] kept me right up there. Finally the wire broke, and down I went kerploof, right on the cement floor, weaker than a rag. After that we got insulation for the handles of our pliers.”