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Dola Hinckley, the first woman hired at Eastern to work on the mill floor, began at
the bottom as all production workers do:
"I started in October of ’74 as a broke hustler actually."
"Hustlin’ broke" means picking up waste paper trimmed from the machines, putting it
into carts and hauling them out to the beaters where the paper is then recycled back
into the beaters and put through again.
"At the time I really was the only woman that worked on the floor as a, either production
worker or doin’ the same job that men were doin’.
My foreman at the time was John Viricil, and John was a very good fella, but he didn’t
quite know what to do with me ‘cause I was a woman.
And so he put me sweeping the floors. I s’pose he figured that, well, that’s what women do.
But eventually they got to figure out that I could do just about anything the rest
of those guys did so he started putting me on the end of the Lennox which is a
cut size paper machine production line."
The next year Dola was laid off a short time, before returning to work in Eastern’s gate
house as a security guard.
She then went back to hustling broke, and worked her way up to embosser helper and embosser
operator before moving to the finishing department, where she worked on a paper trimmer
for nineteen years.
"It was rough and it was heavy but I enjoyed the atmosphere and I enjoyed the people," she says.
Later she worked as purchasing clerk, where she "ordered everything from chemicals to cartons."
Dola left Eastern in 2000 when she and partner Nancy Hatch had an opportunity to work at
a sporting camp in northern Maine.
Sixteen months later, they returned to their home in Clifton, Maine.
Dola now works at Granville Lumber in nearby Holden.
February 17, 2006 Interview with Dola Hinckley
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