They led me to an enormous room that contained a huge machine. I’d never seen anything like it. As an “Extra Board person”, I was almost overwhelmed. It was hot and the noise level was high and there was a characteristic smell that turned out to be hot linerboard. It smelled the same in all the other linerboard plants that I was ever in. The machine was running fast - very fast! Rolls of paper were spewing out and rolling across the floor. Men were grabbing them and on painting numbers with a stencil and then pushing them onto a little metal conveyer in the floor where they moved off to somewhere else. This turned out to be my job – stenciling and pushing rolls around. The work was not hard but was constant. I didn’t get to eat lunch or do any exploring.
The plant had begun operations in 1939, when a lap pulp machine moved there from West Virginia . In the ‘50’s, there were three machines making linerboard, corrugating medium and milk carton. The pulp machine was gone. The mill was doing just fine and was pushing 2000 employees. Later a fourth machine making a hardwood free-sheet was added. Now, in 2010, there is one machine operating, I’m told, and it is run by a Canadian Company.
A horn started blaring. All of the men ran to the other end of the machine and began crawling all over it which now had parts shut down. It looked dangerous. There had been a break. I asked a man whom I later found out was the foreman, what I could do. He said don’t get in the way … I didn’t. Eventually the sheet got through the machine…by magic I think. The last step was the men threw the paper into stacked set of steel rolls with a stick….more magic. We all went back to work. Soon there was another break and I ran down to the other end and watched again.
Later the foreman came back and asked me if I wanted to work over (overtime) to change the wire. That was time and a half. It was enough for a week and a half in college time. Two and a half weeks counting the first shift. I said sure.
I had no idea what a wire was. I was thinking of a long telephone–like wire that was on a roll and required several men (and a boy) to roll up. I found out what it was; people moved the machine out of the (screen-like) wire, then put the machine back into the new wire. My job was to hose down everything in sight for eight hours. A few years later I found out it included hosing young process engineers that happened to be walking by.
The foreman was a Georgetown (SC) person. There were an amazing number of Georgetown people in southern mills at that time. These folks had started in Georgetown , SC or came through there in the 30’s,through the 70’s and maybe longer. Most of the people did very well.
The paper industry in the US ran full during those years and delivered good paying jobs for tens of thousands of pulp and paper and forestry workers and their families. I couldn’t wait to get in school to learn what I was doing.
JF
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