Working in the mill was an education: “It is a whole new way of life,” Breault said. “Some people will carry on and do things that they wouldn’t do outside. We had one napkin machine operator that watched his machine from a stool where he could look at the girls taking off napkins and see through their dresses. He was a dirty old man. Just sit there and have his evil laugh going a lot of the time.”
After Joan graduated from high school in 1948, she went to work full time on the napkin machine, unloading and wrapping packages of napkins. She took maternity leave in 1951 and was still on leave in June 1952. That spring, Old Jim and Young Jim demanded that the union extend the old contract for two to four months owing to uncertain business conditions. The United Mine Workers Union Local 50 overwhelmingly refused on May 8, 1952. The union demanded increases in wages and paid holidays and a group insurance plan that would be paid in full by the mill. The Wemyss family insisted on significant wage and holiday cuts. On May 10, millwrights moved some of the Northumberland mill’s perforators to Groveton,1 and negotiations grew increasingly bitter. Even the pro-management Democrat wondered “whether any machines so moved would be . . . returned to Northumberland.”2
Virginia Ward, a member of the union negotiating committee, wrote to the Democrat that mill workers in Groveton were paid more for the same jobs. She asked “why a man is worth from eight to fifteen cents more per hour for common labor in Groveton than in Northumberland?” The Northumberland mill’s 270 workers struck on June 1. By then, most of the finishing room equipment and machinery had been removed.3
On June 23, the Northumberland strikers picketed the Groveton Papers mill to protest the transfer to Groveton of five perforators, one roller towel machine, two core machines, and four napkin machines. The 721 members of the two locals in Groveton honored the picket lines, even though their leaders took pains to explain that they had no grievance with Groveton’s management. The Groveton mill was shut down for four shifts. The non-union wood yard and the converting plant, operating in a building beyond the mill, continued working.
Jim Wemyss Sr. returned to Groveton that afternoon, and at noon on June 24 he announced the closing of the Northumberland mill.4 The defeated pickets left town, and the Groveton mill resumed operations that afternoon. In late June, Local 50 voted to end the strike so its members could file for unemployment benefits and improve their chances of finding another job.
Jim Wemyss Jr. later explained the rationale for shutting down Northumberland: “Around that time, I had a choice to either fix Groveton up or fix that up, and that was not a mill to fix up. It had very old machines. OSHA today would tremble if they had seen it. Open belt drives would not be tolerated today in any sense of the word.” Some Northumberland employees were able to find jobs at the Groveton mill, but a great many people lost their jobs following the strike. Sixty years later, Wemyss remained sensitive to the charge that he and his father had cost people their jobs: “Never did I shut a department down in the mill to eliminate anybody. When I shut the Northumberland mill down, I had three hundred people working down there. It was absolutely archaic. You’ve got to make sound decisions as to what’s the best thing for this community. That’s what I did all my life. What’s good for here?”
Number 4 finishing room in Groveton was located just beyond Number 3 and Number 4 paper machines. Duke Gilcris was transferred to Groveton to direct the new operation. “Dad had come home one noon hour,” Joan remembered, “and he said to me, ‘Would you like to work for a couple of weeks?’ I said, ‘Doing what?’ He said, ‘Teaching new girls in Groveton how to pick napkins [off the napkin machine].’ So I said sure. I went up the fourth of June. I taught them all how to pick napkins. The second week I was there, [Dad] was shorthanded on the Teal folder, which was facial tissue, and he said, ‘I’m going to take you off the napkin machines today, Joan, and put you down there.’ I said OK. So I learned that job, and then he was shorthanded on the perforators, and I had done some of that in Northumberland, so I went to work on the perforators part time. I worked all around. My two weeks turned into forty-three years.”
“People don’t realize how hard we worked,” Breault maintained. “We worked full tilt.” Her friend, Pauline Labrecque, who was hired June 5, 1952, concurred: “I had to bend down, pick ’em up, put ’em in my case. Five rolls of toilet paper—and maybe more. The fellow who was putting the boxes down, he liked it to get a certain amount in each eight hours. You don’t sleep on that job, and you don’t sit. You’re busy. You had to watch your fingers. I told them, I lost this [pointed to her left eye patch], and I’m not about to lose [my fingers].” Every eight-hour shift, Pauline and her coworkers were expected to pack 120 cases of toilet paper. A case contained ninety-six rolls, each of which had to be wrapped before placed in the carton. To meet the quota, Joan and Pauline had to wrap and pack twenty-four rolls a minute, or one every two and a half seconds.
James Campbell Wemyss Sr., known as “Old Jim.” From a 1955 Vanity Fair sales catalog. (Courtesy GREAT)
Two decades later, Bill Astle, a student at the University of New Hampshire, worked in the mill during summer vacations. One of his jobs was to spell the women in the finishing rooms on their periodic breaks. “It was always women who took the napkins off the machine and put them in the conveyor,” he recalled. “And these women would be talking about their grandkids and what they watched on TV the night before, and they were dealing these things into the conveyor like they’re cards. And I’m there struggling for all I’m worth. All I could think of was the old I Love Lucy sitcom where she’s in the chocolate factory trying to keep up with them.”
Pauline continued to work late into her pregnancy: “I had no choice. I was brought up poor. One of seventeen in the family. I probably could have got done earlier, but I was trying to get ahead to try to have a little nest egg because my life was hard before I met up with him [husband Gerard]. I didn’t miss out on any work unnecessarily. I never called in like a lot of them did: ‘I’ve got a headache,’ ‘I’m sick,’ ‘I’ve got to go home,’ for an excuse. I worked. Because for what I didn’t have in years past, I wanted to be able to make my life a little bit easier. Follow me? So I worked right up until something here [pointed to her abdomen] told me, ‘You’ve got to stop.’ And when the boy was born, he had a cord around his neck.”
The women of that era felt it was unfair that they were paid less than the men at the mill. Joan Breault said: “That’s aggravating. Probably the women were doing a more thorough job of everything than the men were. As a rule, most women are more conscientious, maybe because we’ve had to work harder to get where we are.” Pauline’s starting pay was ninety-five cents an hour, whereas her husband, Gerard, hired shortly before her, started at ninety-eight cents an hour. “They always paid the men more anyway,” Pauline noted with some bitterness, adding: “I think because the men were mainly the head of the family. I don’t think it’s right.” Gerard agreed: “If you’re going to do the same work, you should get the same pay.”
Gerard and Pauline rarely worked on the same shift, so that one could always be home to take care of the children. When both were working, Pauline’s niece would babysit. “A lot of times he [Gerard] ended up doing the washing, take care of the kids,” she recalled with a laugh. “It wasn’t no worse for him than it was for me. I’m a hard egg, ain’t I. But I want to tell you what. Made fifty-four years last July [2009], and I’m still with the same rooster.”
The “hard egg” took no guff from coworkers or bosses: “I went into work from three to eleven, and the boss for that shift, he was at the punch clock waiting for me. He said, ‘Paulie, don’t bother to punch in. Go home. You were supposed to have been in here this morning, not now.’ I said, ‘Nobody ever told me about it.’ It was not going to end there. They had a special meeting with one of the union fellows in with the bigger boss that was in the office. I said, ‘Nobody told me to come in days. There was no list put up to let me know when I was supposed to be working. I came in
for the shift that I was told to come in. I’m not about to lose a day’s pay through his fault.’ And I fought it. I had enough mouth on me. I got my day’s pay. Then they started putting the list up on a bulletin board. So and so works this shift, that shift. That straightened that out, didn’t it?”
Joan enjoyed her young female coworkers. “I can remember back, way back, we had a quota in the tissue finishing room,” she said. “Once you got to that quota, you could shut down for the night. You probably wouldn’t have been able to if the bosses had been around—but they weren’t. Probably I shouldn’t say this on tape—we’d go sit in the girls’ room and play cards. Play cribbage. Probably three-quarters of an hour, an hour. Or just visit. In fact, I didn’t have to worry about a hairdo. I had two girls I worked with all the time that were better than most hairdressers. And they liked to. We’d all work on each other’s hair. I had nice hairdos from those girls.”
By the mid-1950s Groveton was having difficulty competing with stationery firms located nearer to Boston because of high shipping costs for converted products. Late in 1955, father and son decided to relocate the converting plant to a building in Canton, Massachusetts, that was five times larger than Groveton’s converting space. Young Jim was delighted: “It was a transition. [Father] had a nice home in Stoughton, Mass. He didn’t bother me, and I didn’t know what he was doing. It was something to keep him busy.” Old Jim would remain owner and president until 1968, but he generally left the management of the Groveton mill to his son.
The move meant that about one hundred employees of the converting plant in Groveton had to choose between leaving their community or risk losing their job. Belvah King recalled: “There were quite a few single girls; a lot of them moved down. And some other men did. There was more that didn’t go than did go. It was a troublesome time. You didn’t know what was going to happen. I finally got into Number 1 finishing room. Seems as though I was out of work maybe a year.”
Bud Brown, the young supervisor of converting, was charged with setting up the new plant. His widow, Shirley, recalled: “My husband walked into an empty warehouse, and when he left it was a converting plant. He set up the whole thing. He was very, very proud of it. When Old Jim came down, Bud said to Old Jim, ‘What do you think of this?’ And Old Jim said, ‘You’ve played around enough. Now it’s time to get to work.’ My husband told him what he could do with that mill.” Neal Brown elaborated: “My father turned to him and said, ‘You can take this mill and shove it up your ass’ [laughs]. [Old] Jimmy fired him on the spot, which I guess he was prone to do. He was pretty short-tempered.”
Coleen Mills and Coleen Ledger removing napkins from the napkin machine in Groveton’s Number 4 finishing room, from a 1955 Vanity Fair sales catalog. (Courtesy GREAT)
“[Old Jim] had him blackballed all throughout New England,” Shirley Brown said. “He couldn’t get a job. Bud would have an interview with a paper company, and then we’d get this notice that the employment fee had been paid by Jim Wemyss. Old Jim would buy up the contract so he couldn’t work.” Bud Brown’s blunder, his widow bluntly stated, was that “he stood up to him.” Brown was forced to find work in midwestern mills.
Shirley MacDow, who served as Old Jim’s secretary for a while in the mid-1950s, tactfully referred to him as an “unusual individual. Very austere, but at other times he could be down to earth.” Herb Miles called him a generous man: “If he saw me somewhere to a restaurant, [he’d] buy you a drink or a meal, or say, ‘Send over a drink to so-and-so.’”
Sylvia Stone was a young woman in the accounting department in the 1950s: “The thing that I hated the most was that Mr. Wemyss Senior came in. He’d call us down, and he’d go through the cost sheets item by item. If there was anything that was a red flag for you, you’d be called down on the carpet. We’d have to look up the invoices, and I would get pretty nervous then. We had to prove everything that we set down.” Stone witnessed one of Jim Sr.’s angry outbursts in the old Red Office: “God his face would get as red as a beet. He’d come into the main office. Oh, he’d storm around; it was unreal. Boy, you knew when he was on the rampage. He came out to his secretary, kind of shouting around. I said I was glad I wasn’t his secretary.” Arguments between Jim Jr. and Jim Sr. at the mill were common, Bill Baird remembered: “I heard Jimmy and his father arguing, and I thought he was right outside the door, and he was maybe fifty feet down the aisle towards the paper machines. The two of them, you could hear a hundred yards, I think.”
Old Jim’s relations with the town were equally stormy. In 1950 the town debated building a $150,000 high school gymnasium. He issued a statement threatening to close the mill. The Democrat reported: “The company might need to seek tax abatement if its mills were to continue to operate in Groveton, where, he said, the tax rate is already too high. Offers of tax abatement have been made to the company as an inducement for them to move to the South.” The town voted not to build the gym.5
A decade later, Mickey King recalled, when the town considered a warrant article authorizing the construction of a community swimming pool, “Old Jim got up, and he was drunk. [In an exaggerated, high voice:] ‘If you think for one minute that I’m going to pay taxes for this swimming pool then you—’ Well, of course, the people voted it in, thanks to that speech. It was wonderful [laughs]. I’ll never forget that. He walked—la da-da-da—like Jack Benny.” Belvah King added: “Best thing that ever happened to this town, that pool.” In the 1970s and 1980s, Young Jim routinely dispatched mill workers to the town pool to repair its plumbing and concrete work.
In 1953 Jim Wemyss Jr., who had steadily assumed greater responsibilities from his father, took over the job of negotiating new one-year contracts with the two unions. That year, for the first time, union and management reached an agreement without any fireworks. Young Jim recognized that America was changing, and labor unions everywhere were winning higher wages, increases in paid vacations, payments for pensions and health insurance, and other benefits and perks.
I asked Wemyss once if his war service had affected his management philosophy at the mill. “Yes, it had a great influence,” he replied. “I went into an infantry outfit, which was coal miners, steelworkers, big families, three or four kids sleeping in a bed. Peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff for breakfast. I went to some of their homes because they wanted me to see them before we went overseas. I had never been exposed possibly to the real America that was fighting this war, and seeing how people were poor, as poor as they were, because I lived in a pretty nice neighborhood in Connecticut when I grew up. I started to understand that there was another world, and it affected me greatly. I was very concerned about people who worked for me in later years and their families. Of course, having men die in your arms. . . .
“I had a lot of men in my outfit who couldn’t read or write because they grew up in the Depression era. One fellow got his nerve up and came over and said, ‘Could you read a letter for me?’ ‘Sure.’ It was a letter from his wife or somebody. He said, ‘Could you write her a letter back for me?’ ‘Yes. What would you like me to say?’ Then the word got around that I would write letters. I was amazed at how many men came to me. I’ve known a lot of guys who had to work during the Depression, didn’t get a chance to finish school. That was quite a thing. That’s what the service does to people. Everybody is the same. We’re all together.”
AS THE MILL FLOURISHED, jobs were abundant. Many of the mill workers I interviewed were hired in the postwar decade. Nearly all described the mill hiring process as a mere formality. Gerard Labrecque was hired in 1951: “My God, they put me to work right off [on th
e drum barker], and I wasn’t dressed up to work.” Two decades later, Bruce Blodgett recalled, “You could almost quit today and go back tomorrow.”
Greg Cloutier, a childhood friend of Jim Wemyss III, admired Jim Jr.’s commitment to the community. “He made them feel special. He also made an effort to bring in professional people, and have them stay in the community. He made an effort that you try to buy local, you try to do local. The school system, I thought, was quite good, considering that it was just a mill town. He encouraged professional people to come there and put their kids in the school, be a part of the school board.”
Mill workers who entered the workforce before World War II often had little education. When Lolly LaPointe bid into the stock prep department in the mid-1960s, he worked with an older man near retirement age who kept asking him the time: “He would come up to me, and he would say, ‘What time is it?’ I’d tell him what time. I was telling the guys: ‘Jeez, his eyes must be terrible.’ We had a huge clock in there. They said, ‘No, he can’t tell time. He’s completely, totally illiterate.’ A guy said, ‘I’ll prove it to you.’ They used to have to make a report. They’d write down what they used. Another guy said, ‘I’ll put like he made two pulpers of apples.’ That old guy would come in and relieve him, and—just beautiful handwriting—he copied what the other guy had. That’s the first person I believe I saw that was illiterate. I was dumbfounded by that.”
Sometime in late 1950s, Wemyss decided the mill would only hire workers who had earned a high school diploma: “Kids used to say, ‘Aw, the hell with it; I’ll go down to the mill, and I’ll get a job.’ I said, ‘You can’t do that anymore.’ So, they didn’t.” Older men and women who had dropped out of school during the Depression and war years to support their families were not penalized by this policy.