Some are attempting to make a divisive issue of our mill, which long has been a symbol of community unity. 

It was the summer of 1945. I was 16. I applied for full-time work at the local paper mill (then Crown Zellebach) and was hired on at then base pay of 90 cents an hour. I joined the union, Local 175, IBPS&PMW, and earned time and a half for overtime. The mill tended to hire my sort of summer help partly because we were the children of their regular employees—seeking in many cases to sock away a little college money. But we were not coddled. There also was still a shortage of manpower there around the end of World War II. We got some of the dirtiest jobs—such as chipping slag out of still-warm furnaces on the black gang. My buds and I welcomed the work and whatever challenges it might involve. Camaraderie was in the air. I was thrilled with one interlude during which I was able to voluntarily work four 16-hour double shifts and clock in a 72-hour week.

My first day on the job, I  (seriously acrophobic) assisted Tony Angelo in tarring the mill roof. Tony was from from one of the early Italian families who arrived to anchor the town in the 1890s. He and his wife lived in a modest home in “garlic gulch,” which was an Italian neighborhood off Monroe St. near Chetzemoka Park. He invited me to his house one day when I was older and gave me a sample of the wonderful dandelion wine he used to make. That is the type of little memory I have of early P. T. days, memories that actually go back to late 1933 . . . of people largely long forgotten and events now of little interest to certain late-comers absorbed in pursuit of elitist social prominence and others of related ilk. 

Over two summers at  the mill I was pressed into a wide variety of work—wet plant, finishing room, chip barges, on the dump with Shorty Byers, spudding logs in the chipping plant supervised by F. Cecil Brown  . . . We were the bull gang and were assembled by the 8 a.m. mill shift-change whistle for assignment to the day’s work. Pay was up to $1.10 an hour by my second year, pretty good for a hog-slopping child of the Great Depression.

I still look back on it all fondly, old as I am. It’s carved into my bark. During school terms I returned to working as a part-time printer’s apprentice at the Port Townsend Leader—about 15 hours a week at 40 cents an hour, later up to 60 cents. I had begun there at age 15. My very first regular job was when I was 12. I chopped wood with a big double-bitted ax and filled a massive indoor woodbox every day after school and weekends for the working mother of one of my 7th-grade girl classmates—Janet Preece, herself a memory of early innocence and naiveté. The work paid $3.00 a month and I made it to and from the scene via bicycle. Before that I had just done family chores such as milking the cow, feeding the hog and chickens, etc. Later I also was a carrier boy for the Seattle Star and The Seattle Times. During early World War II, I put my youthful savings into U. S. War Bonds.

In my day, kids pretty much grew up with a strong work ethic. About the only time in my life I ever was without at least one job was the summer after I had joined the U. S. Naval Reserve while I was a high school senior. I spent much of that interlude training aboard a destroyer in the North Pacific not long after World War II. Even during college, I found a way to earn a little something from a variety of intriguing small jobs—including ghost-writing term papers for others, bus-boy, newspaper printing aide, test subject in a psych lab, etc. 

All of this merely Illustrates a little of what life was like for someone emerging from a childhood during the Great Depression in Port Townsend.  Things were somewhat rustic in the neighborhood, but our town fared better than a great many others, thanks mainly to National Paper Products Co. (NAPPCO) that built its paper mill here in 1927-8, provided an around-the-clock payroll and underwrote construction of the town’s water transmission line. The town was literally “up a creek” in the latter regard at that point, drawing water through rotting infrastructure from Snow Creek. I spent some of my early childhood in a house with an old-fashioned outhouse toilet of pre-mill vintage.

The Great Depression struck not long after I was born in 1929. The stock market crashed and banks closed. But Port Townsend’s paper mill—whioh my grandfather helped build and where my father had found work—already was dishing out paychecks. As time passed, my father was one of the founders of an employee credit union at the milll. He eventually retired as head of production programming.

One standout memory of mine dates from around 1939 or so. There was a major forest fire somewhere in the Big Quilcene River area where the city’s water transmission line was located. The main fire-fighting source was mill employees, including my father who was absent from home for an extended period.  He eventually came home and took two baths in a row to get rid of the fire’s smoke, ash and grit. I was fascinated. The mill had accepted responsibility of the water line via it’s water-use lease with the city—and it came through when the chips were down. My father was a camp cook among other things during the fire-fighting. He was always a go-to guy.

The mill, by the way, ran a shuttle bus for its employees during the gas-rationing days of World War II. It stopped at San Juan and F St., not far from our home back then. 

i’ve taken the long way getting here, but perhaps this will illustrate to some  of today’s hedonistic self-absorbed why we feel thankful kinship with our paper mill, rather than whining about getting an occasional whiff of something other than roses and wildflowers when a vagary of weather comes our way. Of late some odor undoubtedly has been an offshoot of global warming—the growing incidence of wildfires.

For a while  recently we were waking up to a red sun—caused not by any haze of smoke from our mill, but from drifting smoke from wildfires in Oregon, eastern Washington and British Columbia. That smoke umbrella also trapped the comparatively slight emissions from our mill—no big deal in comparison to the fires, but enough to incite our local johnny-come-lately bonus babies and others who have never worn a blue collar. They are ever at the ready to pounce on any straw of rationale for their own self-interest—with total disinterest in the principles and morality involved in the growth of our community family.

Our mill is now about 89 years ago, and I’m 88 with deep local roots. Our town, and I, grew around the paper mill—with boosts in later years from the military, the arts, the marine trades. The Hood Canal Bridge opened us up to tourists and refugees, some of whom undoubtedly came as would-be conquerors. Values and loyalties of old are cast aside as convenient by some. Plum-pickers are ever at the ready to harvest the fruits of those who planted and nurtured the orchard in years past. 

We townies of long standing, my contemporaries and I—both older and a bit younger—used to describe it as “the sweet smell of prosperity” when catching an occasional whiff of the mill. That comment had its roots in the mill’s timely arrival here as the Great Depression descended upon the country.  As I mentioned elsewhere in editorial comments recently, I have seen the mill cut back drastically all through my life on all manner of atmospheric emissions, effluents, whatever. Comparatively, for instance, the smoke of old now is basically steam. 

Describing what remains as “noxious emissions” or “toxic chemicals” is both irresponsible and a disservice to the public—as well as an outright insult  to our mill. Yes, this is “our mill.” And this community is not suddenly someone else’s by ill-founded decree of the self-anointed. 

I could write on here for some way . . . but I will chop it off here—and continue my discussion up close and personal with my children, grandchildren and kindred spirits of all ages. I visualize all the while individuals who have fled overcrowding, traffic, land-locked boredom devoid of any natural splendor, etc. They have brought that baggage with them—including the financial rewards of their sufferance in a competitive rat race of some sort. (These aforementioned may be more than a few but are far from “all” arrivals of course. Many relative newcomers for instance, may have been inspired by merely wanting their children to be raised in a land of virtue, opportunity and relative tranquility—or, if older, just seeking a little peace and tranquility of their own.) Whatever the break-down, I just wish some would take a more philosophical and long-range outlook. Give a kind thought to both the past and the future—and get off their carpe diem kick.

We’re getting too many newcomers these days who will eagerly cut down trees to accommodate their view of the forest. Think about it.