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Judith White Boothby, another “mill child,” echoes many of Mildred’s sentiments.
Judith was born in 1935, and shortly thereafter, her father John William White began working as assistant paymaster at Eastern Manufacturing in Brewer.
“He was involved with paying the [mill employees],”
Judith recalls.
“On Thursday evenings he went around the mill to pay the workers who were there for that shift, and then the rest of them [received their paycheck] when the office was open during the day.”
According to Judith, her father worked at the Brewer mill for more than a decade, but didn’t really talk a lot about his work.
“I suppose that during the war it may have been a security matter.
He was almost young enough to have been drafted, but he was married, had little kids, and whatever they did at the mill was considered ‘strategic industry.’
Those were big words that I learned at the time.
So I think the mill was doing more than just [producing] nice letter paper for people to use.”
Like Mildred and other children whose parents worked at the mill during the first half of the twentieth century, Judith remembers being tucked in
under woolen blankets, and dressed in skirts and blouses made from unbleached linen, both used in the manufacture of paper at Eastern.
“That was a nice element of the [mill] work because there were these cast-offs that were perfectly good for home use.
Papa brought home quite a few and my mother used the good parts.”
One of Judith’s most vivid childhood recollections is of a Christmas Eve party at Eastern, which her father attended.
When she and her mother went to pick him up,
“my father said ‘No, I’m not ready to go home yet. You tell mama come back in an hour.’
So I went down, told my mother, and we went back an hour later.
My mother had coached me and I was supposed to go up there and sing,
Father, dear Father come home with me now.
The clock in the steeples strikes one.
You promised that you’d come straight home from the shop
As soon as your day’s work was done. Come home, come home,
Father, dear Father come home.
I was supposed to fake weeping. The group at the party thought it was hilarious!”
John White passed away in 1974, and today, Judith lives with her husband Charles in the same Bangor home her father built while working at Eastern.
January 10, 2006 Interview with Judith Boothby
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