The table was made of a poor grade of plywood with a lot of water damage and purple stain. One leg was shorter than the others. I saw a buret and some liquid in it they called “purple poison.” It turned out that I was to run “K” number tests (using purple potassium permanganate) on a sample of pulp each hour during the shift, and help out in opening the digesters. As I read the crumpled, stained, barely readable typed procedure, I could smell the aroma of pine chips and sulfur mixed together. I had smelled the sulfur most of my life at my home about three miles downwind on the river. It smelled like money everyone said…and it did. At one time in the ‘50s there were about 1500 employees and most lived and loved in my hometown - and cashed their checks there on Thursday afternoons. There are only some 200+ employees now.
There were 10 batch digesters - which are really huge pressure cookers with very large nuts and bolts sealing the top. Pine chips, steam and chemicals (sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide) were added and the cooking lasted about an hour and a half each. Round 24-hour Foxboro charts recorded the goings on. Supervision looked at the charts each morning. A valve at the bottom of the digester was opened after each cook finished, while under pressure, and the contents were “blown” into a tank. I helped take the top off the empty digesters with a huge wrench after the blow. This required some effort by me but the guys who regularly worked there did it effortlessly.
The “K” number test requires one gram of pulp. One gram is a mighty small amount to be used to represent many tons of pulp. Think of a needle in a haystack only much worse. The test is used to determine how much the cook is 'cooked'. There were limits, high and low, that were the targets of the test. I was instructed to tell the cook (what we called the operator) the result after each test. He would log it onto the daily report. Things went well until I got a test outside the limits. When I told the cook the result, he said, “Run it again.” When I finished the second test outside the limits, the cook said, “Run it again.” The third test was mercifully inside the limits and the cook dutifully wrote the last result on the log. Did the cook "cook" the books? You make the call.
Years later at another plant, an outside company wanted to automate part of our batch digester system but after examining our K- number data, they told us that we already had such excellent control that they could do nothing for us. The Foxboro charts that our plant also used, would sometimes disappear just like at my first job. The pulp and paper industry has amazing control when considering the tests are sampled between tons and tons of pulp, paper, liquids and even mud.
As an aside, one night in 1954, the digester room got bombed with an actual bomb. The bomb went through the roof but did minimal damage. It only weighed about twenty pounds but could have wiped out the whole crew. A Marine air station close to us used the plant to practice bombing - only they weren't supposed to actually drop anything on the mill. On this night, a "dummy bomb" was inadvertently released - I guess by a dummy pilot and others who were later called dummies. Too bad it couldn’t have destroyed the K-number table.
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