Constant, dangerous, noisy work

MEMORIES OF THE MILL

BY HERB PETERS

I was lucky to be a Powell River boy who got to work in the pulp mill for the summers to help pay my way through university.

I took a few different breaks from university and ended up working several times from the summer of 1970 up until 1978. Since I was always working to replace other full-time workers who were on holiday, I worked at many different locations all through that great sprawling mill. I worked with a lot of nice people in the mill over those years, but after more than 40 years, their names now escape me.

My first stint was working for the riggers. I forget the name of the man I assisted. He was quite the joker who was good at mimicking short WC Field’s spiels. If we saw somebody with a flashlight he would quip “hey, I lost that nickel over there” as well as some other somewhat vulgar quips, such as “I never drink water, fish .......”. I won’t finish that one.

We rode around in a jeep-like vehicle often pulling a trailer. If something had to be moved or picked up from a warehouse we took care of it. Often we’d go to the warehouse where all the mill’s spare electric motors were stored. What an amazing collection of motors, hundreds of them, ranging from small fan motors to huge motors that drove paper machines. We seemed to visit every nook and cranny of that great big mill. Tragically I heard later that this man was killed in a pedestrian accident when he stepped out from between parked cars.

I had a few short stints working on different paper machines. What a racket as the huge sheet of paper wound its way through all those rollers and finally reached the massive calendar stack as dry newsprint.

PULP NONFICTION: End of the pulp machine in the sulphite plant, where two workers are taking pulp from the machine to stack for baling, 1952. Writer Herb Peters described this machine as “a relentless taskmaster that never stopped, so you had to keep up or else!”

Photo courtesy of the qathet Historical Museum & Archives

Sometimes the machine worked flawlessly and the paper came continuously but there was always a tricky step completing one giant roll, breaking the sheet and starting a new roll. I forget exactly how this was done, but it involved air hoses that helped guide the paper onto a new spool. Sometimes this worked flawlessly, but other times the sheet started to spool around one of the calendar stack rolls and built up a thick layer creating a gap that started the calendar stack vibrating and bouncing with a thunderous roar until the lead-hand used compressed air to break the sheet which then poured down into the basement and more compressed air to strip the calendar stack clean and try again.

When this happened the tension was high as valuable paper was going down the drain so to speak. It took a calm skilled hand to manage this job and I heard that more than a few people cracked under the strain.

I had another stint in the finishing room where giant rolls of paper were cut and sized and wrapped in the final step which finished them for loading and transport to their destination to be printed on and converted into newspapers. I worked the graveyard shift as I recall.

The men worked quickly and efficiently to keep up with production, but sometimes there was a lull due to some problem or other and some of the exhausted workers would climb up on top of the washroom structure and crawl under the paper placed up there for the purpose of keeping warm, as the finishing room was open to the outside. After a while a whistle would blow signaling the arrival of more paper and like a bunch of hamsters, the nappers would come rustling out of their paper cocoons.

JUST BEFORE LOADING, THEN OFF TO THE NEWSPAPER PRINTERS: Wrapping a roll of paper, 1948

Photo courtesy of the qathet Historical Museum & Archives

Smokers could indulge their habit in the enclosed lunch room using very heavy welded steel ashtrays made from thick pipe. One fellow had a favorite trick. He liked to creep into the lunch room on graveyard shift when many men would be sitting, almost dozing, toward the end of the lunch break. He’d pick up one of these very heavy ashtrays and position it as he dropped it so that the flat bottom would smack the concrete making a deafening noise much like a gunshot.

He was not at all popular and I was amused to hear later that one of his many victims didn’t react as passively as he would have preferred.

I worked another stint with the yard crew. That too took me all over the mill doing cleanup of the endless detritus that accumulated in all the little out of the way spots. Old pallets, bits of wire, cables, pipes, pails, and on and on. I assisted in rebricking the lime kiln which was a yard crew task I believe. That was a fascinating job as the bricks had to go around the kiln in a complete circle wedged very tightly so that the top bricks were firmly in place.

Most of the men were very good natured Italians who had the nicest polite way of dealing with each other. I seem to recall they referred to each other frequently with the phrase “dear boy”.

I had a stint on the dreaded green chain. Each worker had numerous different types of wood to deal with on several piles so the chain did not run all that fast. I was told the production chains running on the Fraser River were grueling to work on as the wood came very quickly. In the Powell River sawmill chain, I was pulling lead-heavy wet hemlock planks and incredibly light half-telephone-pole sized spruce beams. It was hard work but it felt rewarding to keep up. After eight hours, one felt pretty exhausted.

Another job I had was cutting the cables on the big log bundles that a crane lifted up onto the sawmill deck. That job was a little hairy because you had to walk out on a narrow catwalk high above the ocean, beside a big dripping wet bundle of logs that was still in the jaws of the lifting crane. It wasn’t practical to detach the cables intact so you had to use a cutter to slice through them. That was a job where you were happy to retreat back to the warm shack and watch as the jaws opened and the bundle spilled onto the deck far above the water.

One of the duties of that job was walking the flume: the water filled viaduct that floated smaller cut slabs of wood to the new digesters where the wood fibers were stripped apart using chemicals. That viaduct flowed in a great arc high above much of the mill, carrying chunks of wood that had the uncanny ability to jam up tightly and stop moving.

These jams could form a fairly large blockage that had to be pulled apart using a picaroon tool. Sometimes a jam could be dislodged with just a couple of pulls and other times you’d spend a few minutes pulling wood free until finally the jam broke and the flume flowed free.

Another fairly tough job was tending the pulp machine. This machine, from the 1930s apparently, formed a great long sheet of thick white pulp which wound its way back and forth through a dryer until finally it passed through cutters that split the sheet into four sections and chopped them to a standard length that fell into four collecting boxes.

The worker tending those boxes could wait about a minute and then manually lift the heavy contents of each box onto a conveyor, stacking them neatly. Another minute would pass and you had to build another stack.

This task was daunting because the pulp machine was designed to run continuously, a relentless taskmaster that never stopped, so you had to keep up or else!

Standing in front of the dryer over the hot stacked pulp, the sweat ran off you. Luckily there were several other steps involved in preparing the gleaming white bundles for export, including compressing, wrapping and baling, so your two hours on the boxes was split into four half hour chunks.

The cut and dried sheets of pulp had razor sharp edges so you always knew when a newbie was working because the bundles were stained with blood.

When I began working in the mill it had already been running for around 60 years. There were lots of eerie old nooks and crannies, even complete buildings that had been mothballed for decades. It was strange to realize that generations of men had worked their entire careers and gone on to retirement before I ever entered the place.

In the dim evening and nighttime hours, one felt there were a lot of ghosts haunting those old abandoned spaces.