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Shirley Jewell began working at Eastern in 1991:
“I went as a temp through PAGE Employment to do technical/secretarial work to
fill in for vacations for two weeks.
And I did that, and they asked me to come back for a couple of days just to tell
the lady what I had done and everything, and she had had a family emergency and
they said ‘Can you stay a couple more weeks until she comes back?’ and I said
‘Sure,’ so I stayed.
And then summer vacations were starting so they said ‘Would you mind staying?
And you know, if it works out then we might keep you for the whole summer,’
and I said ‘Well sure,’ so I went to the customer service department and did
order entry on like two hours training and it just, it worked, and I liked
working there, and they liked me, and that’s, I just went from department to
department doing different things.”
In fact, they liked Shirley so much that they created a new “floater” position at
the mill to keep her there as a permanent fill-in person.
“Sometimes I’d do three different jobs in one day, just go in and doing this for a
little bit to get the basics done for that job and then I’d go someplace else and
do the basics for that job if it had something to do further on down the line for
somebody else so it wouldn’t hold them up and I did that for five years.”
Shirley says she enjoyed the day-to-day variety her “floater” position offered, and
the unique perspective of the mill she gained because of it.
Later, she was made administrative assistant of the technical departments for
fine and coated paper, and the environmental department, where she stayed until
2003 and the first round of lay-offs.
“One of my bosses came up to me, he says ‘Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.’
And I said ‘What’s that?’ And he goes ‘Well, you didn’t get laid off, that’s the
good news.’ I said ‘Okay, what’s the bad news?’ He goes ‘Your job doesn’t exist
anymore.’”
Shirley was transferred to the shipping department, where she worked until the mill closed in 2004.
She now works at Brewer Automotive Components in Brewer, and lives in Levant with her husband and sons.
June 14, 2006 Interview with Shirley Jewell
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