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

…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.

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.

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]

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

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.

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

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

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.

I was 17 years old.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Roy Paradis: International Pulp & Paper.

Yeah.

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

He worked in the wood mill, yeah.

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

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.

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

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

Yeah, right, shift.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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.

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.

I never heard of that.

Butcher paper? No.