$1.09 an hour and glad to have it... (eBook)

Conversations with seventeen mid-20th-Century Crown Zellerbach millworkers

Sandra Hickson Carter (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
432 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-2425-3 (ISBN)

Infos

This spellbindingly authentic oral history of pulp and paper making, told by the people who lived it, paints a moving picture of work in Oregon heavy industry in the mid-20th Century. Their stories describe in detail their jobs-varied, physically challenging and often dangerous--from sorting logs on the wide Willamette River to tending the giant machines that produced paper for America's favorite magazines. They used trees from Willamette and Columbia Basin forests and the power of mighty Willamette Falls. Share the experiences, hopes, and regrets of these 17 men and women who spent decades at the West Linn Crown Zellerbach mill at a time when the Crown and Zee symbol dominated the west coast market in household paper products.

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This spellbindingly authentic oral history of pulp and paper making, told by the people who lived it, paints a moving picture of work in Oregon heavy industry in the mid-20th Century. Their stories describe in detail their jobs-varied, physically challenging and often dangerous--from sorting logs on the wide Willamette River to tending the giant machines that produced paper for America's favorite magazines. They used trees from Willamette and Columbia Basin forests and the power of mighty Willamette Falls to make paper towels, business staples like cash register tapes, Crezon backing paper for construction, thousands of tons of newsprint and telephone directory stock, and mulch paper shipped to Hawaiian pineapple plantations. Share the experiences, hopes, and regrets of these 17 men and women, who spent decades at the West Linn Crown Zellerbach mill at a time when the Crown and Zee symbol dominated the west coast market in household paper products. Look back with them at a working environment before safety committees, environmental consciousness, and equal rights, at the base of a broad horseshoe of waterfall that periodically brought the destruction of historic floods into the mill's buildings. This expansive oral history of mill work in Oregon is food for thought for all readers, from engineers to sociologists. This collection, transcribed from more than 30 hours of videotaped interviews, honors mill work's culture and the deep contributions of mills to the building of the middle class after World War II.

Textauszug

William ‘Rosie’ Schultze

Interview October 27, 2005

Died June 9, 2006

…And they had a lot of trouble on a machine over there [in Holland], so out of the organization they picked me to go. And the mill manager called me into the office. You know, they don’t call you into the office unless they’re going to give you hell.

Fire you.

Yeah. But he told me what they wanted, and I says, “What are you doing, getting down to the bottom of the barrel?” “No, we figure you can do some good.” So I was over there for about a year. That was really interesting. You know, Holland and England, and I went to Hamburg, Germany, and I went all over.

Did you get to take your family?

Yeah, 1975. Took the wife. I’ve been to Spain, too. I went from Spain over to Africa. Morocco, yeah. It was interesting.

[Roy Paradis sat in on the interview]

Are you a storyteller?

Oh, I’ve got a few that I could tell, I guess.

I’m going to ask, for the record, your name and your age and what year you retired.

Okay. Well, my name is William Sherman Schultze. I got the nickname of Rosie when I was in high school. I went through all my life, working years, by the name of Rosie. I had a fellow come in from the watchman shack. I was working with a crew of about six men. Asked for Bill Schultze, and they didn’t know who it was. So I went by the name of Rosie all my years. And after I retired, I told them that my name was Bill.

And how old are you?

I’m 96 years old. I went to work in the middle of May 1927.

What was your first job?

My first job was a roll bucker on No. 7 paper machine.

Do you remember what you did on your first day at work?

Well, I was the lowest part of the paper machine. That’s the roll bucker. I was to wrap rolls and transport them out to the finishing room. Put the paper, roll your roll, put them on a dolly, push them through the machine room on to the other room, the finishing room.

How old were you?

I was 17 years old.

Wow, it sounds like it was hard physical work.

Well, the job was easy, but I was going to tell you a little story now. Okay. The machine tender on No. 7 paper machine was a fellow by the name of Al Fredericks. Al Fredericks…told me when I left that job that night, to be sure to bring in a can of Copenhagen and a packet of Beechnut. And so I did. I took him seriously. So the next day when I came in, I brought that in and handed it to him. He said, “No, kid, that’s for you.” I says, “You mean I’ve got to chew that?” “Yes, you’re going to chew it if you’re going to be a papermaker.” So to please him, I took a chew. And in five minutes I was white all over, and I says, that was enough of that. I never chewed any more after that. And I never smoked all my life.

You started in ’27?

Yeah, 1927. I retired in 1972. That would be 46 years. I only worked for one company, Crown Zellerbach Corporation. The whole time. I had a number of different jobs. That’s important?

Mm-hmm.

Well, I worked on No. 7 maybe three or four days, and they transferred me to No. 5 paper machine. And I was on No. 5 paper machine, and they transferred me over to No. 6 paper machine. And while I was on No. 6 paper machine a short time, an opening come up on No. 9 paper machine for a second helper. And the scale was only about two or three cents more, so nobody would take it, but I took it. And I stayed on No. 9 from then on.

So what was the pay, do you remember?

The pay? The base pay, yes. It was 43 cents an hour. And the Depression came along in 1930, and they cut that back five cents, to 38 cents an hour. But after well, maybe this is a little too early but the unions came in in 1934…And first I didn’t join, but I joined the union right away. There was two paper mills, one, Publisher’s Paper Company in Oregon City and Crown Zellerbach in West Linn. I was elected president of the papermakers’ union in 1939. I held that for two years. Both mills was the same union.

What was it back then?

Roy Paradis: International Pulp & Paper.

Yeah.

When was the big strike?

Well, my dad worked there; I don’t know what year that was.

Your dad did work there before you did?

He worked in the wood mill, yeah.

And so that’s when the big strike was, back in his time?

That was a big strike. They had quite a fight, yeah.

Did you like that job, being the union president?

It was pretty good. I got to go to a wage conference and help get the wages up a little bit. And the year I went to the wage conference—see, they have paper machines on the coast in Stockton and Port Angeles—well, there was several paper companies and they brought them all up to scale. That was the first time. And then things got better. When I got to No. 9 paper machine, I worked there as a second helper, not too long, and I got to—there was three helpers: first helper, second helper and the roll bucker. I got advanced to first helper not long after that. And I wasn’t long as the first helper too long, years go by, but I got promoted to third hand on the paper machine. That was the winderman. See, there’s a back tender, machine tender and a third hand. And they had three helpers on No. 9.

Is No. 9 one of the new machines or one of the old machines?

It’s an old machine. It’s been there a long time. But I guess it’s still running sometimes.

So each machine had like five or six men on it per shift.

Well, No. 5 and 6 each had five men. And No. 1, 2 and 3 had four men. No. 4 had five men.

But that’s per shift, right…

Yeah, right, shift.

…so there would be like 15 men who knew how to work that machine all together?

I got to be on the winder. I ran the winder there, the third hand, for 16 years. And they finally got mad at me. I always always in the back of my mind was to learn the next job. “What’s coming up?” So I always paid attention and tried to do that. When it come to being promoted, I was ready for it. So I run that winder for 16 years, and machines, and over the period of that time, there was a lot of wires, felts, dryer felts and stuff been put on, so I was pulled off there and put on the bull gang. …I went back and worked day shifts instead of shift work. But then I was on the bull gang for a while.

Now, you have to tell me what that is, because I don’t understand. A bull gang?

A bull gang is a group of men that comes in and helps put the felts and wires and stuff on. That’s always—we called it a bull gang.

So did the machines ever catch fire?

Well, No. 9 had caught fire on the back side. It run out of oil, and the bearings got too hot or something. But most of the fires were from the dust and stuff up in the rafters or someplace. They’d get a fire once in a while. But paper machines were pretty good … but I can recall No. 9 having a fire on the back side.

I’ve been through there and seen how big these things are. They must have been so noisy.

Yeah, they were noisy…we wear earplugs now. When I first started, nobody wore earplugs or anything like that, you know, and those couch rolls and the machines make a lot of noise.

So you never worked down in the pulp-making part of the mill?

No. Well, when I was a kid and I first started, I think I piled wood for a couple of days. And I told the boss, I said, “That’s not for me.” The blocks were about this long and about this square, and it was waterlogged. So they put me on the machine.

You went from machine 4 to 5 to 9?

Yeah.

And you liked that?

Yeah.

What kind of paper were you making?

On one and two we run telephone directory, yellow paper and white paper mostly. No. 3 you could run telephone directory and butcher paper and, oh, several other grades of paper. No. 4 run toweling and newsprint. No. 9 was only on newsprint. No. 5 and 6 are the first—when I first started they were both running newsprint.

I read in some booklet that the mill used to make guncotton. Were you involved in that?

We made a trial run on No. 3 for paper to wrap dynamite in. We just made a trial run on it one time on No. 3. And No. 3 used to run butcher paper, a lot of butcher paper. And No. 9, 5 and 6 were all running newsprint at the time I started.

Donna Dunn, daughter of Rosie Schultze, posing for magazine photo with a roll of telephone directory paper.

So you weren’t there when they were making any guncotton?

I never heard of that.

So doesn’t butcher paper have a coating on it?

Butcher paper? No.

There was no...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.1.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-2425-2 / 1667824252
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-2425-3 / 9781667824253