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Linda Elliott Esten grew up in Orrington, just over the South Brewer line and less than a mile up the hill from Eastern Manufacturing.
Her father, Percy Elliott, had already worked at the mill for at least a decade when Linda was born in 1945.
As a teenager, Percy nearly lost his life when the pulpwood pile he was working on began to shift, and he tumbled down with the logs.
“One of the men went back and pulled him out,”
Linda remembers her father telling her.
“He had broken his shoulder. His leg was completely twisted around back, and from then on he had back problems and he couldn’t raise his arm higher than shoulder height.”
Still, Percy went back to work as soon as he could, and shortly thereafter secured himself a position inside the mill.
“On his lunch hours he would read, and taught himself about boiler repair,” Linda says. He also worked in the power plant, periodically checked the local mill dams, and assisted with the unloading of oil from the tankers that would dock along the riverfront behind Eastern. He also played on the mill’s baseball team. In fact, Percy spent so much time at Eastern that
“he got the name ‘Two Checks’…even after he [went] home, sometimes in the middle of the night he’d get called back in. So that was a joke, that he must have gotten two checks.”
Linda’s father wasn’t the only family member employed at Eastern. Her uncle George Elliott worked at the gatehouse, and was union president for a number of years. And Linda’s maternal grandfather, Reuben Kenney, worked there about 1915-1917.
“He was from Boston, and went to Boston College. He deaf but he had been on the football team, and after college, he was in Vaudeville, a strong man,”
Linda says.
“The story goes that the train cars that came into the mill had to be moved, and they knew that he had been a strong man.”
So they called him in.
“He had had a bet placed that he could push one of the railroad cars, and I guess he finally ended up pushing two at a time.”
Linda, who now lives with her husband in Newport, Maine, has spent quite a bit of time researching her family’s paper mill history.
Percy Elliott retired from Eastern in 1970, and passed away thirteen years later.
Linda says of her father,
“He was well-known and well-liked, and I was very proud of him.”
February 22, 2006 Interview with Linda Esten
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