MEMORIES OF THE MILL: Time Clocks and a Courtship

BY ROBERT DICE

On January 28, 1941, Jack Dice, at 17 years of age, entered a five-year Electrical Contract of Apprenticeship at 16 cents an hour ($3.01 in 2023 dollars). During the war, the contract could be interrupted by military conscription on Jack’s 20th birthday.

However, Jack’s leg was amputated below the knee in a Powell Lake boating accident only months before his birthday. After recovering, Jack went to work on crutches, not letting his disability slow him. The Mill owner, Mr. Foley, noticed and said to Jack, “We’ve been watching you, and we’re proud to have you.” Later, the men in the mill took up a collection and bought Jack a prosthetic leg.

Jack rose through the ranks to become an electrical superintendent, but to get there, he had to first master all assigned tasks. Early in his career, one of these tasks included the maintenance of the company time clocks, which were kept near the payroll office, where uncharacteristically, Jack occasionally lingered.

The huge company payroll was based on the time clocks. At the mill entrance, at the beginning and end of every shift change, hundreds of men filed through an entrance foyer to ‘punch’ their time cards at a bank of clocks. Jack’s maintenance notebook shows five clocks, three for ‘incoming’ workers and two for ‘outgoing.’

The time clocks were made of ornate wooden cabinetry with a transparent glass face. A 12-hour analog clock could be seen through the window, and the clock’s punch card levers and mechanisms were situated below the glass. The levers, made of polished brass, now displayed a darker patina from the daily touch of hundreds of hands.

The clocks were beautiful, something to be admired. Still, besides Jack and the payroll clerks, most other workers were concerned only with getting past the clocks as quickly as possible.

The punch cards were collected and brought to the payroll office, a dayshift-only operation. In the 1940s, the payroll office was directly adjacent to and opposite the time clocks, separated only by a large see-through glass partition.

Alice Johnson in the Payroll Office, 1943 to 1945.

Photo courtesy of the Powell River Historical Museum & Archives and the family's personal collection.

The office staff included several young single women. While working on the time clocks, visible through the glass, a payroll clerk named Alice Johnson caught Jack’s attention.

Alice’s father had moved his Burnaby construction business and family to Powell River in 1939, and Alice went to Brooks High School. After the war began, students’ graduation was assured, but Alice wanted to ‘officially’ graduate.

“So, I was all by myself, and half of the classes were study periods. I was still taking English and trying to fill in some commercial courses. In April, they came and said they wanted someone in the (Mill) Company office, so I went down and got a job (1943) in the time office, where I worked for six years. I worked on different payroll machines.

“There was IBM, and then there was National, and then Burroughs or visa-versa. The best one was IBM, but they didn’t have anyone in Powell River to fix it. If something went wrong, you could only get here by boat, so then we’d have to type the cheques.”

Alice was thorough and flawless in her bookkeeping. Her memory to this day (at 96 years) is astonishing. As a mentalist entertainment trick, we still ask her our dad’s and other family and friends’ payroll numbers, and she still remembers them. Each payroll number began with a department number prefix, such as “12” for electrical or “15” for millwrights, followed by personal numbers.

BEFORE THERE WAS TIKTOK: Jack Dice and Alice Johnson met near the time clocks at the Powell River Mill during WWII. He later became electrical superintendent, and she became a “flawless” bookkeeper.

Photo courtesy of the family

In 2016 Alice was asked what it was about bookkeeping that came so quickly for her.

“I don’t know; I just knew it had to come out right. It’s wrong if it doesn’t come out balanced. You just have to be really careful. For the time cards, we had to add them up. Well, this guy was correcting my work, and I could tell because he had erased it, and there were some big numbers on there…but I did it again, and I was right, and he was wrong (laughter), but he was hopeless anyway.”

The guy wasn’t her boss, but Alice said, “I think he always thought he was going to be, but they always got somebody else.”

Alice was promoted and became the sole payroll machine operator, but further opportunities were limited because the bosses were all men. To make gender matters even more inequitable, if a female got married, her employment was terminated.

The mill policy was to find jobs for the men returning to the workforce after the war, and when she and Jack wed, Alice accepted that.

For info: mmerlino@prpl.ca

MEMORIES OF THE MILL BOOK LAUNCH

When & Where: 4 pm, Tuesday, April 4, at the Library

What: This memoir anthology brings together 22 unique memoirs by local writers that share memories of the impact that the paper mill had on their lives.