My First Experience at Factory Work

The year I graduated from college (1967), I took a job in a paper mill for the summer. I was planning to be married at the end of the summer, so I wanted to earn as much money as I could before the wedding. The mill paid it's laborers in excess of $6.00 per hour, when most other jobs paid $2.00 to $3.00 per hour, so it was sheer greed that steered me on that course. I was 22, 5' 1", probably weighed 115 pounds, and had no clue what life in a paper mill was like.

My first night on the job--yeah, night, the midnight to 6:00 am shift, to be exact--I was introduced to my first paper machine. This particular gadget spit out one size of meat trays: the kind hamburger, chicken, pork chops, etc., are packaged in when you buy them at the supermarket. The trays were coming out of the machine on a track on each side, and the machine automatically inserted a little strip of blue paper after each 25 trays. My job was to take 100 trays at a time, put them in a bag, put the bag in a box, and put the box on a conveyor belt, and send it on it's way. I was instructed that occasionally, the machine would tear a chunk out of a tray or two, and if that happened, I was to remove the damaged trays, drop them down a hole in the floor to be reformed, adjust the blue paper back to 25, and continue with putting them in a bag, in a box and on the conveyor. Easy enough, right? NOT!

The first 10 minutes went smoothly; I would take the trays out of the dispenser, 50 at a time, put them in the bag, put another 50 in, then put them in the box, and put the box on the conveyor belt. (Did I mention the boxes were flat, and I had to shape and form them first?)

After that first smooth 10 minutes, when I was pretty proud of myself--I could do this!--Satan took control of my machine. Damaged trays started appearing; that meant pulling out the damaged trays, moving the blue paper back in the row the number of trays I had removed, (the trays were being added at the far end of each row, and the trays were advancing toward me), damaged trays dumped in the "recycle" hole, the adjusted count put in the bag, the bag in the box, and the box on the conveyor belt. Of course, once I had moved the blue paper, I had to keep moving each new strip, to keep the 25 count standard.

That demon machine kept spitting out trays, with damaged ones appearing with greater and greater frequency. I was frantically trying to keep the count straight, and keep up with the machine. The stress started to get to me! My bowels started to churn--OH NO! I had to leave my machine and run to find the restroom. In my haste and desperation, I had run into the men's room by mistake--no doors on the stalls. I had absolutely no hope of turning back to find the ladies room without disaster! I used the men's john, and prayed that no man would come in and catch me in an embarrassing situation. If Satan had taken over my machine, the good Lord was in charge of the bathroom, because no males walked in while I was there! (Thank you, God!)

This crisis dealt with, I ran back to my machine, where trays were falling on the floor because no one was there to remove them. I hurriedly picked up the trays that had fallen off the machine and dumped them into the recycle hole, and rushed to catch up with the endless line of trays. All of the above were repeated, over and over (including the mad runs to the restroom--at least I finally found the ladies room!) , over and over for six hours! Don't ask how many perfectly good trays got desperately dropped into the recycle opening! I began to think if there was a hell, this must be it! I somehow survived, exhausted and drained--both literally and figuratively--my first night in the paper mill.

The next experience I recall was another tray machine. This one, however had about four different size fruit trays which accumulated verrtically instead of horizontally. There were no bags involved, you merely took stacks off the machine and boxed them, and then put the box on the conveyor belt headed to shipping. I can't recall the details--if there was a counter system or not, or how many trays went in a box. (Must be my subconscious protecting me from excessive trauma.)

The challenge, or course, was to keep the different sized trays separated, put them in a box, and stay ahead of the machine. (Did I mention these trays were formed from wet paper, were dried by HEAT on a conveyor belt on the way to my machine, which resulted in a 120 degree working environment?)

Early on, this task seemed reasonable; it did require a bit of quickness, but, hey, I was young and energetic--a piece of cake! For a while things went quite smoothly. Grab the trays, from one stack, and put them in the box. Grab trays from the matching stack, and put them in the box--and yes, the boxes were flat and had to be assembled. I would say there were about eight stacks of fruit trays accumulating at the same time--two stacks of each size and four different sizes; you merely had to be sure you put trays of the same size in the same box. I was all over this job! Grab a box, grab a stack of trays and put them in the box, grab another stack the same size, add them to the box, put the box on the conveyor belt; repeat with another size; repeat with a third size; repeat with the fourth size; begin again.

After a few hours of this activity, I noticed it was getting easier; I was able to keep up with the unending tide of trays. If there had been someone there to "high five," I would have been high fiving! But everyone was busy with their own machines. I reached the point where I had time to wipe the sweat off my brow with my shirt sleeve! I was ahead of the machine!! Euphoria mixed with pride filled my body--I had done it! I had not only kept up with the machine, I had gotten ahead of it! I was awesome!

Then it happened. Somewhere, an alarm went off: Blaaaah! Blaaaah! The sound kept getting louder and I looked up to see a frantic foreman running toward me. He ran past me to the side of the machine, pulled a switch and the chug, chug, chug of the machine came to a stop. (Did I mention that the noise level of these dozens of machines all chugging and wheezing at the same time was deafening?) Well, almost as loud as the voice of the foreman yelling at me, "Didn't you see the flashing lights? What the hell is wrong with you??"

Hey, I'm only a little over 5 feet tall--those flashing lights to which he was referring were 'way above my head! My attention had been focused totally on those fruit trays. Then he took me around to the right of my machine (MY machine--I think we had started to bond!), and showed me the problem. The trays were fed into the machine on a conveyor belt which was about six feet wide. Somewhere out of sight, the trays were spit out wet onto this belt by another machine, carried through the drying area, and then were deposited into MY (there's that bond again!) machine, where prongs would grab them, move them upward so another tray could be stacked under the first, etc.

The system wasn't perfect. Occasionally, the machine doing the spitting at the other end of the conveyor belt would misfire and a tray might land sideways. This would prevent it's entering my machine, which would eventually cause a tray jam (that's TRAY jam, not TOE jam). Those overhead lights would flash to alert the machine operator (in this case, me) of the jam. No one had informed me of this little detail. As a result, there was a tray jam behind my machine the size of Mt. Everest, and this was the reason I was able to get ahead of my machine. And here I thought I had mastered the skill! NOT.

We set about clearing all the trays in the jam off the conveyor belt, which was no small task--as I said, it was the size of Mt. Everest. Once the jam pile was removed, and all the damaged trays dropped in the "recycle" opening in the floor, the foreman turned the machine on again. This time he instructed me to sit by the conveyor belt with the trays coming towards me, watching for a renegade--a tray out of place--to determine if what had happened was a fluke, or if the spitter machine was malfunctioning regularly.

I sat there watching lines and lines of fruit trays go by, all of them properly positioned for my machine for 20 to 30 minutes, until I got motion sickness and had to run to the ladies room and vomit. Needless to say, I may have bonded with that machine, but the foreman and I weren't destined for a warm relationship.

The weird thing is, even though I worked there all summer, I remember only three days out of the whole summer. (I mentioned earlier, I suspect my brain has blocked out most of the memories to save me further trauma.) These three days are the fodder of this story. I don't know if they happened in any particular order, I just am relating the details as I remember them.

For this day's tale, I tried to draw a diagram of the machine called the compressor, which was one of the tools I used on this particular day, but, unfortunately I'm not exactly a gifted artist, so you'll have to use your imagination. My duties on this day (or week? I have no idea) entailed standing in front of a bin which caught paper plates as they fell off the dryer conveyor belt, stack them in piles of 125, put them in the compressor, a lovely gadget that squeezed all the air out from between them so they would take less space when packed into a box for shipping, and pack them..

I've always been pretty good at counting--I could count to 100 before I went to kindergarten--so this should have been a "cream puff" assignment. The counting part was. Things got a little tricky at the compressor. (Explaining it is tricky, as well, which is why I unsuccessfully tried to draw a diagram!) The compressor was a tube-like gadget perched between two poles. At the bottom of the tube, which was about three feet off the floor, was a round flat surface on which I was to place the stack of 125 (no more, no less) paper plates. The front of the tube had a rounded screened door which when pulled closed, was designed to keep the stack of plates in place as the weight from the upper pole came down on the plates to compress them--force out empty air space--so they could fit into the packing box.

The tricky part of this process was to keep the stack of paper plates straight while closing the screen door. The door closing caused the upper pole to come down slowly on the plates. It was necessary to use your left hand and arm to keep the plates perfectly stacked while you pulled the screened door shut. The door was curved, like the plates. Once the door came within a short distance of being closed, it would close the rest of the way automatically and lock, then the vertical pressure would be engaged, squeezing those mothers together for packing. It all depended on timing; you had to hold the stack in place with your left hand and arm while closing the door with your right hand, and yank your left arm out at the last minute before the lock engaged.

For a time, all went well. I was able to tune out the chugging and wheezing of the machines around me, focus on getting the right number of plates in a stack, get them compressed, and slide them in the box. (Did I mention most people who worked here for years ended up with varying degrees of hearing loss, due to the constant noise level?)

I'm not sure what happened next. Maybe the heat was getting to me; maybe I was getting tired; in any case, on one of my compression steps, things went awry. I wasn't quick enough pulling my arm out of the compressor door before the lock engaged. There I was, arm held fast between the round paper plates and the round screen door. The screen wasn't the soft screening like you have in a screened door in your home. It was more like stiff chicken wire with half-inch square holes in it. I couldn't open the door, and I couldn't withdraw my arm. Little half-inch squares of flesh were being pushed out the half-inch squares of the screen. The skin wasn't broken--no blood pouring out, thank goodness, but it hurt like the dickens!

I yelled for help, but in the cacophany of chugging and hissing and wheezing of all the machines, it was several minutes before the foreman came running to my assistance. (yeah, the same guy who had yelled at me previously! He just loved me, by now!) He also tried unsuccessfully to open the door, but the lock was engaged; it would not budge. Ultimately a technician was required to disconnect the machine, which released the pressure, which released the door lock, and they carefully opened the door. I was holding back tears at this point--I wasn't about to let that jerk of a foreman see me cry!

I was taken to the infirmary, where an x-ray determined that nothing was broken. The doctor said I had suffered "muscle trauma" and prescribed ibuprofen and three days of rest--Music to my ears! I actually got three days off with pay because it was a work related injury! Yes, Eva, there is a Santa Claus!

I somehow made it through the remainder of the summer, with gratitude that a teaching job awaited me in September, and I wouldn't have to spend another day in that paper mill.