Number 4 paper machine’s twelve-foot-high Yankee dryer (left and center) and dry end (right) at the time of installation in 1948. Jim Wemyss believed that the man in the straw hat at left was Guy Cushing, a longtime paper machine operator. (Courtesy GREAT)
During the war, Old Jim had ordered new tissue machines from Pusey and Jones for Groveton and the mill in Gouverneur, New York. Pusey and Jones had suspended manufacture of machines in order to construct battleships and aircraft carriers. After the war, the Wemyss family order was at the head of the queue.
The new machine, named Number 4, was installed in 1947–1948. “That was one of the largest tissue machines in the world at that time,” Jim Jr. said. Unlike fine-papers machines, this much shorter, 160-inch-wide machine had a single twelve-foot-diameter “Yankee dryer” instead of a series of presses and dryers. As the tissue came over the Yankee dryer under high pressure, it hit the creping blade, called the “doctor blade,” that peeled the thin tissue off the dryer and fed it onto a reel. Fred Shannon and his chums thought the installation of Number 4 was quite a spectator sport: “They had that great big old monstrous dryer, and they had taken out the brick wall and brought it in on a railroad and then rolled it into the machine room.”
Number 4 paper machine was a twenty-first birthday present for Young Jim, who went to work full time at the mill in 1948: “[Father] said, ‘That’s yours. Now learn how to run it.’ I said, ‘OK.’ I didn’t know anything about it, period, but it was a good learning program.” Decades later Joan Breault observed: “Jim Wemyss Jr. was probably the best man on tissue machines probably you could ever find. He could take a piece of beater pulp and chew it in his mouth and tell you if it had enough of any chemical in it.” When I mentioned Breault’s comment, Wemyss replied: “Paper to me is an observation. It’s just a trick of knowing what you’re doing.”
Jim Wemyss Jr. never attended business school, yet he claimed he earned his MBA at age eighteen: “When you have two very fine businessmen that talk to you ten hours a day from the time you’re fourteen years old, at the breakfast table, at the lunch table, the dinner table, about what happened with this, what happened with that. It’s a case history, basically, an MBA. My grandfather, how did he come out [of the stock market] before the Depression? Why did he know to get out? These things are all I heard all the time. We never talked about any ring-around-the-rosie stuff. It was always business around me, and I had to learn to run everything in the paper mill. Everything.”
“When I first went to work for my father,” Jim Jr. remembered, “I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ He said, ‘Walk around.’ I said, ‘What’s my job?’ He said, ‘Walking around.’ So I walked around one day, and I came back, and I said, ‘I walked around.’ He said, ‘Go walk around some more.’ I walked around, and I walked around. All of a sudden I was walking by, and one of the paper machines was shut down, and so I said, ‘Why is this paper machine shut down?’ I found out why and what they had to do to make it run again. I learned what was wrong with pumps, or electric drives, or steam engines. I kept walking around. I was in the digester room, and there was a problem. ‘Why are we having a problem?’ It was the greatest education I ever had. ‘Walk around.’ I kept walking around, and pretty soon I got quite knowledgeable.”
Around this time, the Factory Insurance Agency (FIA) announced it was canceling Groveton Papers’ policy. “I walked into [Father’s] office. He said, ‘Well, son, I think you’d better hear this. This is pretty serious.’ The head of FIA for this area was there. [Father] said, ‘They’re canceling our insurance.’ Because the mill was dirty. The war had just ended. It was not being taken care of. It was not what it should have been. I said, ‘You know, sir, I just came back from the war, and I got shot up a little bit. I came back to this family business, and I don’t want you to do that to me. I went to military school for four years, and I was in the army, and they have ways of doing things to make things clean and neat. I want you to give me a break. I’ll take charge of this mill, and I guarantee you, in sixty days you won’t know it.’ He said, ‘Really, soldier? Will you come down to our fire school in Hartford?’ ‘Yes. I’ll be there.’ He said, ‘I’m going to give you six months.’ And he looked at my father, and he said, ‘He’s in charge?’ ‘Yes. He’s in charge.’ And Genghis Khan came to work [laughs].”
After he returned from fire school, Genghis went to work: “We had the women in the finish room shutting off sections and taking the sprinkler heads out. They were all corroded. They were cleaned with wire brushes and washed out, and all the pipes were blown out, and the steam pumps and the high-pressure water pumps in the mill were all taken apart and put back together in perfect shape. Every paper machine once a year had to be cleaned and painted. This place was sparkling. When I got through, the president of FIA said: ‘Any mill you have, Mr. Wemyss, we’ll insure.’ I was fanatic about it. I think the disease caught. Everybody had pride in the mills here and wanted the mill to be clean.” Wemyss’s longtime assistant, Shirley MacDow, called him “a real neatnik.” “Cleanliness in the mill was godly to him,” she added.
“It had to be immaculate,” Wemyss emphasized. “There was no excuse for it not to be immaculate. And if you did, you were talking to me, and you didn’t want to talk to me about that [laughs].” A clean mill was a safer, more profitable mill: “It pays in safety. It pays in maintenance. It pays in everything.”
Most of the mill workers of that era approved of the policy, often contrasting it with the filth they encountered in other mills. “I’ve had all kinds of people come up to this mill,” John Rich said. “‘How the hell do you keep this mill so clean?’ And I say, ‘When you ain’t doing your job, you grab a broom. They’ve got all kinds of brooms setting around. You use it.’ And they did. He was fussy about that, and it was a good thing. You know how it is; dust builds up. You cleaned that finishing room every day, every shift. Three times a day. Blow that out, clean it out.”
Jim Wemyss Jr. starting up Number 4 paper machine in 1948. (Courtesy Jim Wemyss)
Dave Miles remembered the chemicals they used to clean the floor once a week: “They would burn you if they got on, but you had a spotless floor when you got done. It smelled kind of bad, but it did the job. I was sent to a couple of other mills. I thought the Berlin Mill was very dirty as compared to our mill.” Lawrence Benoit also recalled cleaning the floor: “You’d wash the floor with [Oakite]. That stuff was so strong, if you had rubber soles on your shoes, you’d feel it stick to them. When you got done washing that off with a hose, that cement would look just like brand new. It’d eat the stuff right out of the cement. If you left that too long on the side of the paper machine, it would eat the paint right off on the bottom.”
Puss Gagnon was not an admirer of Genghis Khan’s campaign: “[Jim Wemyss was a] miserable son of a bitch. I never liked him; he never liked me. When we were over in the new fire room [c. 1948], he come out one day [and said], ‘You ought to clean up these feeder motors.’ I said, ‘You got a cleaner here to do that stuff.’ He said, ‘It wouldn’t hurt you a bit.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘probably not. But it wouldn’t be within now or June, it would be just as fuckin’ dirty.’ ‘I’m gonna show you different,’ he says. He gets himself a bucket and some cleaning stuff. He starts cleaning the motors. The cleaner happened to come by. I said, ‘Go up on the top floor and take the air hose and blow the top floor down. The shit started to come. [Wemyss] throwed the fuckin’ bucket. He told [head of the union, Dick] Currier, ‘Come back at three, and I’ll show you these fuckin’ motors are clean.’ When [Currier] come back, he says, ‘I wonder where Jimmy is.’ I said, ‘I don’t think he’ll be back.’ He said, ‘What did you do to him?’ I told him. ‘You dirty son of a bitch,’ he says.”
JAMES C. WEMYSS SR. dominated the Groveton mill throughout the 1940s. “He’s a man that worked twenty-four hours a day,” his son recalled. “That’s an exaggeration. But he was up at five o’clock in the morning. He was there, and he knew everything about
everything. Until he got seriously ill, he was purchasing director; he was the sales manager; he was the plant engineer. That’s probably why he broke his health. He had to have absolute control over everything. He lived nicely, but he was not a playboy. He was a fellow that really wanted to be there and see things done. He was respected by the men in the mill; they liked him; they knew what he was capable of doing.”
Young Jim described his father’s early morning routine: “He’d be up at six thirty in the morning, and he’d meet the machine tenders and the back tenders and the pulp mill men walking home and stop and talk to them. By the time he got to his office, he knew what happened all night long. I’d walk in about seven o’clock. ‘Did you know this?’ ‘No, I didn’t. I haven’t had a chance to look around. How’d you know?’ Then he told me. I said, ‘Hey, that’s pretty good. I like that.’”
Young Jim came in late one morning, and his father said: “‘So we’ve got a banker in the family?’ ‘Well, gee, I was up the last five nights in a row here.’ He said, ‘You want to stop that? When they call you in, call everybody else. Call everybody. You’re in there; you don’t want to be alone.’ Pretty soon they stopped calling me.”
John Rich described Jim Sr. as “a temper-y old boy.” Edgar Astle, a machine tender on Number 1 paper machine in the early 1950s, told his son about one of Old Jim’s outbursts: “[He] would walk through the mill every now and again, and boy, people would tremble. I guess they’d run over the chests and the stock had come out on the floor, and he threw a fit. He took a handful of change out of his pocket and threw it into the gutter, and he said, ‘You guys are throwing my money away.’”
Shirley Brown, whose husband had a celebrated run-in with Old Jim in the mid-1950s, thought: “He wanted to take Willie Munroe’s place, because Willie Munroe—his famous saying was, ‘I own this town and everybody in it.’ When Old Jim, as we used to call him, came, I think he wasn’t as fair as Willie Munroe was, because whatever Willie Munroe said, people knew that was a fact. But with Jim, it depended on whether he was sober or not [laughs]. I’m sure you’ve heard some of these stories.”
After decades of hard work and hard drinking, Jim Wemyss Sr. nearly killed himself. The Democrat reported on August 17, 1949, that he was seriously ill in the Weeks Memorial Hospital in Lancaster. Jim Jr. vividly recalled his father’s brush with death: “My father became gravely ill. Had two-thirds of his stomach removed with ulcers. My father was bleeding internally, and he passed out. I drove my father to the hospital, and [Dr. Merriam] put a needle in my arm [to draw blood for a transfusion], and we lay down on the street, right in front of the hospital. He stabilized him. He came out of shock. I sent a message to the mill; we all had dog tags from the war with your blood type on them. Mine was O, so I said, ‘Any man with O that wants to come down and help my father out, just walk off your job and get down here as quick as you can.’ They liked him; there was fifty people down here in twenty minutes.”
Young Jim was not yet twenty-four years old: “When [Father] was back, rational in the hospital, his brother-in-law walked in, Dr. Hyatt. My father looked at him and said, ‘I had a serious operation, didn’t I?’ He said, ‘Yes, Jim, a very serious operation.’ He said, ‘I suppose I won’t to be able to eat properly or do anything the rest of my life.’ [Dr. Hyatt] said, ‘No, no. Within reason, you can do that.’ And then he said, ‘But there’s one thing you can’t do. You have to walk away for one year. And never look back. Hire a professional manager to run your companies. Get a manager and go someplace. Or you’ll be dead within a year.’ Just like that. So [Father] said, ‘I’ve taken care of that matter already. I’ve hired the man.’ I happened to be in the hospital room, and I said, ‘Who’s the new manager?’ ‘You.’ I was in charge, but nobody knew it. My signature and his, you could not tell the difference, except I would drop off the ‘Jr.’ Every time somebody came to me and said, ‘What do you think about this?’ I said, ‘My father’s not feeling well, and he’s up at the company house. I’ll go up and ask him.’ He wasn’t there, but I’d go up and then come back and say, ‘Do this.’ Who would question me? So that’s how I fell into it, so to speak. I owe that to my grandfather and my father. It really wasn’t that difficult for me. My father basically left me alone from then on.”
Interview with Irene Bigelow, conducted by her daughter, Gloria White, on October 14, 2010.
Democrat, September 18, 1946.
Democrat, October 9, 1946.
Democrat, September 18, 1946.
Democrat, September 25, 1946.
Democrat, November 6, 1946.
Chapter Eight
THE PERFECT BALANCE
When Jim Wemyss Sr. had recovered his health and returned to the mill in 1950, the family embarked on a second major project to diversify the mill. Father and son were not happy with Number 3 paper machine. “It had old presses, and it was not a good [bond] machine,” Jim Jr. said. The old digesters could not make enough pulp for three fine-papers machines and the new tissue machine. The mill was paying high prices for additional pulp.
There was a nationwide shortage of the fluted, corrugated medium paper that gives cardboard boxes their strength. Friends from the Mead Corporation suggested Number 3 would make an excellent corrugating machine. Old and Young Jim Wemyss “revamped” Number 3, installing two new suction presses and a new suction cooch. Several New England region box manufacturers committed to buy a certain tonnage of the new product. The mill began to manufacture paperboard in the summer of 1951, and soon it was producing 125 tons a day.
For years, the mill had been dumping improperly cooked pulpwood, called “screenings,” down by the river above the Weston Dam. Old Jim decided to dig them up and use them as a cheap source of pulp. The mill had also been dumping hard coal screenings from the old Hynie boiler on top of some of the pulpwood screenings. One day Jim Jr. received a phone call from a customer with a problem: “I go out to his corrugated box plant. All the men standing around were black. White circles around [their eyes]. ‘What do you suppose that is?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We did put a little something in to make the fluting stronger’ [laughs]. That was coal.”
The mill soon completed a new hardwood pulp mill to supply the converted paperboard machine. A pile of hardwood pulp logs arose across the river on Brooklyn Street. A conveyor transported the logs directly to the chipper. Legend has it that sometimes six-packs purchased at Cloutier’s Store also rode the hardwood conveyor.
Until 1952, most of the tissue finishing operations were performed at the Northumberland mill where four old paper machines together produced less tissue than Groveton’s new machine. The Northumberland mill building was in terrible condition by the early 1950s. “To call it rickety was a compliment,” Jim Wemyss Jr. once said, “and today OSHA would give you eleven seconds to shut it down.” Zo Cloutier was hired to work weekends as a sixteen-year-old in the mid-1940s. “I was making fifty cents an hour,” he said. “My father was an oiler down there. [Old Jim] Wemyss said, ‘You go down and help your father.’ You had to crawl in places underneath the machine. It was filthy. Aw, Jesus, it was awful. I went with a hose and pail and hauled stuff out and washed everyth
ing down and cleaned it. They were satisfied, because it wasn’t too long they gave me a ten-cent raise.”
“The whole mill shook; you could feel it quivering all over,” John Rich recalled. “You walked in down in the cellar, and there were so many posts holding it up, somebody put a sign up, ‘No Hunting Allowed.’ That always struck me funny. I was telling my uncle about that; he said, ‘They do quite a lot of hunting up there. They bring in their .22s and they shoot cockroaches on the walls’—.22 pistols. Right out through the walls, old boards, shiplap. Quite a few times they got it—fifteen feet away.”
At age sixteen, Joan Gilcris Breault, whose father, Duke Gilcris, was a supervisor in the Northumberland finishing room, was hired for the summer in the print room on the three-to-eleven shift. “You know what I made for money when I started in ’47, the year before my senior year—that summer?” she asked me. “Fifteen cents an hour. They paid it in cash in an envelope. You got cash money, and you didn’t get pennies because they kept all the pennies from everybody as part of a flower fund for anybody that had died. Might not sound like much, but nobody lost over four cents a week, and it added up.”