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Sheila Feero wasn’t all that thrilled with her first job at Georgia-Pacific in Old Town:
“I started in October of 1986 working in the converting department in the repack section, which is where everybody started out.
What we did is they’d send up boxes of white tissue and then you’d get another box of color tissue and you had to split those boxes and make
them multi-color, mix the white with the colored tissue.
It was a pretty boring job but it was labor intensive, you had to keep right on it.
So that’s why the new people always got that job.”
Needless to say, when a bid came up for a job in the mill’s Number Two kraft area, Sheila jumped at the opportunity.
“It was fun compared to what I was doing because I got to drive a fork truck.
I loved driving a truck…Then I progressed up [to] a third hand position.
You stood there all day long and just put a wrapper on the bottom of the bail and you had to reload the top wrapper when it ran out.
You took care of the wire tiers, tied the machines.
It was a lot more involved then it sounds like but you had to know how to run the equipment.
I did that for quite awhile and then I progressed up to the back tender, which actually ran the machine that cut the bails [of kraft paper] into squares to be wrapped.”
Sheila then progressed to a position as Georgia-Pacific’s first female machine tender on the mill’s Number One kraft machine.
“As machine tender you take the stock from the slush consistency and form it into a sheet and run it through the dryer,”
a complicated process involving much responsibility.
Sheila continued as machine tender until the Old Town mill closed in early 2006.
She and husband Jeff, who also worked at Georgia-Pacific, are still waiting to hear whether the mill will re-open and they will get their jobs back.
If not, Sheila plans to go to school to become a medical secretary.
June 26, 2006 Interview with Sheila Feero
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