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Lois Andrews worked at Eastern for 43 years, beginning in 1956.
"I went to the mill two weeks after getting out of high school so at the time
I thought I wanted to go on to college but my folks said no that’s ridiculous;
that if you go to college all you’ll do is end up getting married and you’ll waste all that money."
Lois was hired as a secretary in the mill’s purchasing and traffic departments.
Funnily enough, Lois says,
"I never even went looking for a job.
A girl that graduated with me had gotten this job at Eastern, tried it for a few days
and said ‘I can’t do this’ and so they asked her, I guess they had a hard time to
fill the position and they asked her if she knew of anybody and she said well she
thought maybe I could do it."
After taking several months off with her children, Lois returned to Eastern, where she
worked in the stores; personnel; accounting; and shipping, before bidding on a job in the
laboratory in 1967, where she tested the quality of pulp and later, the paper itself.
Following the mill’s closure and re-opening in 1967-68, Lois was offered a position
as executive secretary of the sales department, a very prestigious position that she
held for 23 years.
In the late 1980s, Lois became executive secretary to the mill’s owner, Joseph Torras,
where she remained until retiring in 2000.
Lois’s husband and two children also worked at Eastern:
"My son [Mark Andrews] actually still worked there at the time the mill shut down.
[He] was a color boss out in the paper machines.
He worked there almost 23 years.
My husband worked at the mill too for a little while. He worked in the lab.
For eight years until he had a stroke and he used to call himself the ‘solution to the pollution.’
He used to go take sewer samples and run tests on them.
And then my daughter also worked there…Cyndi Wass."
Today Lois lives with her husband in Bangor, Maine.
January 6, 2006 Interview with Lois Andrews
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