Article and photos by Edgar Llivisupa
Just before graduating from George W. Stearns High School in Millinocket, John Davis participated in a decades-long tradition for graduating seniors. A week before receiving his high school diploma, he joined his classmates in applying for a job at the mill; they either lined up in the school gymnasium to meet the plant manager from Great Northern Paper Company or down the hill at the plant itself.
Each student received a pair of steel-toed boots and a number that determined their seniority at the paper mill, the town’s dominant employer.
During its heyday, Great Northern employed about half of the town’s population of approximately 8,000 people. Virtually anyone in town who wanted a job at the mill could get one. (Related content: Town’s former economic engine sits derelict)
Starting in the 1980s, increased foreign competition, mismanagement and poor financial performance led to a series of layoffs. Mill workers suddenly found themselves separated from the jobs that were widely believed to be “for life,” said Davis, who is now the town manager.
A few mill workers, like Davis, managed to recover and build productive careers after the fall of the mills. When he lost his job in 2011, Davis saw an opportunity to get a degree in public administration. He became the town manager of Frenchville in 2013, before assuming the same role in Millinocket.
However, most Millinocket mill workers were unprepared to look for new jobs. “The mindset was like the Titanic, no one thought the mill was going to close down,” said Mary Alice Cullen, another resident who made the switch from working at the mill to a new career; she is now the town’s treasurer.
Many town residents, young and old, continue to struggle with the town’s shrinking fortunes. Some have moved away in search of other opportunities. Some are barely hanging on; the unemployment rate in town was 9.6 percent in 2016, an increase of 63 percent from 2000, according to the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions at the University of Maine.
The luckiest ones were those who realized early that the jobs would eventually go away and seized the opportunities offered by Great Northern for retraining. Gilda Stratton, a member of the town council, who worked in the central typing pool before becoming administrative assistant at the company’s training center, said that the company paid for courses she took the University of Maine to earn a degree in business administration and paralegal studies. “I am glad I took courses every single year so when I got [fired] I only had a few more courses to graduate,” she said.
Indeed, there were plenty of signs, long before the mills closed that the company and its workers were living on borrowed time. As early as 1970, when Great Northern merged with Wisconsin-based Nekoosa Edwards Paper Company, it closed its research and development department, and shifted its investments from the Maine plant to those situated in the South.
Cullen, the town treasurer, remembers a meeting with management in the early ’80s that “set the tone that things were going to change in this community and it was very sobering…that really burst our bubble that the industry was changing, the town was changing.”
Around this time, workers saw the first round of massive layoffs. The union began to lose power with the introduction of new “multicraft” work rules that required workers to perform a variety of tasks, not just a single specialization. Gone were the days, said Cullen, when the line stopped to wait for a pipe fitter to fix a “one-second task.”
Those who got laid off early often had the easiest time making the adjustment. “It really forced them to have to seek another opportunity and leave the area,” said Cullen. “While we started dealing with this, they are like: ‘glad I got out of there, I am glad I dealt with sooner rather than later.’”
Added Stratton, the typist who relocated to the company’s training center, the men who took advantage of retraining opportunities and got their certification in plumbing, electrical and plumbing acquired “the skills to move to move forward.”
By the early 1990s, the mills were caught in a downward spiral of changing owners, many of them real estate or venture capital companies. Some bought parts of the plant, only to sell them for scrap. Others promised to revive the company but fell short. By the time the plant closed in 2008, the workers and townspeople had experienced multiples round of layoffs.
Many remaining mill workers were shell-shocked. Even with a federal retraining program and an option to go back to school, some decided to chase the paper mills around the state, according to Davis. “We were older and it was hard for people to hit the books,” he explained.
Others stayed in town and never found gainful employment again.
For workers anywhere, retooling after a plant closing can be tough. In Millinocket, where Great Northern owned most of the land and maintained a monopoly of its labor force by blocking other firms from moving to town, the situation was particularly dire. “The company actively discouraged a culture of entrepreneurial and business development,” said Mindy Crandall, a forestry economist at University of Maine at Orono.
Added Davis: “We were never diversified, they didn’t want other businesses coming in and competing for the workforce.”
Some workers maintained their belief that the mill jobs would come back. Herbert Clark, former town councilman, said he knew several mill workers who not go to school because they believed they would be called back to work.
The toughest thing for residents of the town was that that their children had to look for prospects elsewhere, tearing the social fabric of a community that once worked, lived and played together.
This is the first generation of Millinocket residents without a major employer or the security and prosperity that went with one.
Cory Osbourn 29, a server at Paddy Murphy’s restaurant in Bangor, comes from a family of Millinocket mill workers who pushed their children to attend college and pursue careers wherever they could find them. Osbourn holds a degree in music from the University of Maine at Orono, and plans to move to Portland.
After the closure of the mills, Osbourn’s father and uncle bought one of the town’s bowling alleys. It was an unsuccessful venture; his father left in 2000 and now lives in Vermont.
In addition to losing their jobs, the Millinocket region is losing its young people as opportunities in the region disappear. This is a statewide problem for Maine, which has among the oldest populations in the nation. For Davis, Clark, Cullen and Stratton, their children live in places such as San Francisco, Boston and Portland, Maine. Clark’s daughter in Fort Worth “will never come back the way [the town] is now,” he said.
Jared Robbins, a student at Northern Penobscot Tech Region III in Lincoln, who grew up in Millinocket, recently obtained an A+ certification in IT as a computer technician. This is as valuable as having five years of experience in the field, according to instructor Donald Raymon. Robbins is now pursuing a Network+ and Network Pro, certifications for network technicians.
He plans to move for work. “There’s not much here,” says Robbins.
Davis sees it as a bittersweet benefit. “If not so much for the parents, but maybe for the kids, it’s a blessing not going to the mill because they had to do other things,” he said, adding that some are making such good money they are buying camps on Millinocket Lake.