The Cement Plant

The Cement Plant

Thomaston, Maine is rich in maritime history, being the home port for many ship captains and the launching place for many wooden sailing vessels of the 19th century. It was also the retirement home of Major General Henry Knox, Secretary of War under George Washington, and a land baron after the Revolution.

10 High Street

To this day, stately federalist architecture from as far back as the 1700’s lines Main Street and the Mall. In particular, many homes had the fan window over the main door with two narrow sidelights, on the long side of a rectangular two story building with a hip roof. Add to that two windows on either side of the front door and five windows on the front side of the second floor, each framed with black or green shutters contrasting to the white clapboard siding and you have the typical ship captains home in Thomaston. When Al and Sybel Mills first bought one of these federalist homes at 10 High St. in Thomaston, the town’s main thoroughfare was lined with stately elms, great tall trees that arched all the way across the street, creating a cathedral of green. In the 1970’s those elms succumbed to Dutch elm disease and fell or were cut down and replaced with shorter maples.

The house at 10 High St. had a wing off the north side that was large enough to be a second home, so Al and his brother Doug collaborated on the purchase of the house. But they soon discovered that perhaps living and raising babies in the same house was a little too close for family comfort, so Al bought out Doug’s share and Doug bought a house a quarter mile away, a small cape near the beginning of Old County Road where he and his wife Margie raised Peggy and Dougy. 10 High Street was two doors down from Montpelier, the replica of the Knox Mansion, and had deeds that dated back to a grant from King George of England. During renovations in the 1950’s we dug into the walls and found pennies and other memorabilia such as newspaper that dated from the time of the American Revolution Dad saved those pennies for years, but, as with many things, they got lost somewhere along the way.

10 High Street was on the brink of a small valley that dropped down to the Mill River, or as it was called by locals, “the Crick.” From the crick, main street went up the steep Crick Hill toward town. 10 High Street looked across The Crick toward other similar federalist style homes on the other side, as well as other more recent construction interspersed.

If you travel eastward from the center of town, down Main Street toward the crick, at the top of Crick Hill you see Montpelier straight ahead. To the left is a giant cape that was owned by Mrs. Moody, and to the left, somewhat down the hill, was 10 High Street.

The Cement Plant

But Montpelier and the grandeur of High Street is no longer framed by trees and sky. Instead, considerably less picturesque, and dominating the skyline with smoke stacks and storage elevators is the Dragon Cement Plant, Thomaston’s gray behemouth and testimony to the unbridled development of the industrial age. With the decline of wooden boat construction as a source of employment, the cement plant became the prime employer of the working men in Thomaston. The plant was built over great limestone ledges, as deep as one could imagine, ledges into which they built quarries to mine the stone and haul it uphill into the cement plant where it was ground up, cooked, and ground up again into the fine powder known as Portland cement, the same cement that formed the foundations of homes and buildings, and the surface of new roadways.

Chemistry Assistant

Thomaston became an industrial town in the 20th century, dusty, smoky, clanky, and ugly. The cement plant was a new source of work for a town after the war, and Al found work there. At first he worked in the chemistry lab. He collected samples of the product, mixed them, formed them into hardened cement patties, and generally prepared them for the chemists. Those patties and the cement dust that they were made of would then be subjected to chemical analysis, to engineering stress tests, and the results recorded and used for furthering the research and development and quality assurance of the product.

Repair Crew

After a few years Al found his work uninspiring. Combine that with the lure of higher wages and he was prompted to bid on a job in the repair crew. When he was selected, he found a niche that satisfied him and challenged him for many years. The repair crew was not your typical grease monkey in a garage, fixing mufflers and brakes. The repair crew bore the responsibility of getting broken industrial machinery fixed or replaced as quickly as possible in order to keep production flowing: machines like powerful electric motors, draglines, the crushers, the mills, the giant rolling kilns, blowers, and dust collectors. The cement plant mined huge boulders of rock, lifted them out of the quarry and dumped them into a series of crushers and hammers that reduced them into grains that could be flushed as slurry through pipes and into the kilns for cooking. After that the clinker was cooled and dragged to storage elevators and then ground by huge rolling mills into progressively finer and finer powder. Then the powder was shipped by truck or rail for bulk construction, or bagged for retail sale. Anywhere along that system there was potential for failure, jammed crushers, broken draglines, burnt out motors, pumps that wear out, chains that break, gears that snap their teeth or bearings that overheat and freeze up. Machines were sometimes caked in cement dust, or severely rusted into place. Sometimes they were in tight quarters, or way up in a tower, or inside the drum of a mill, or inside the smoke stack, or inside the kiln where the temperature was blazing hot, outside when the temperature was below zero, or in the snow or rain, or in the summer sun over 90 degrees. These were the challenges for Al Mills and the repair crew: fix those broken machines, where ever they were, whenever they broke.

Overtime

For Al, jammed fingers, conks on the head, strained muscles, and smashed toes were a painful but all too common expectation. But Al would never let an injury put him off the job, because he was committed to getting the job done right, and as soon as possible. Some of those jobs were massive undertakings. Al might start a job in the morning, work all day, all evening through the second shift, all night through the third shift, and partway through the next day, just to finish a job. Though that was not common, it happened enough times in his 30 years on the job that there were lots of stories to tell. Sometimes he would come home to sleep a shift, and go right back to the same job, almost as if he had never left it. Of course, from an income perspective, that meant he was earning over time: time-and-a-half, double-time, double-time-and-a-half, and sometimes, if the job was on a holiday, triple-time.

Our Cars

All that overtime meant that Al could provide for his family, and they lived like a good working class family in the 1950’s. There was a new washing machine, paid for on time during weekly trips to Sears and Roebuck. There were used cars (one at a time) such as a 1947 Plymouth, a 1952 Buick with a Straight 8 engine that purred so quietly you might forget it was even running, a 1957 Chevy Bel Air that today would be worth a mint, a 1960 Ford Station Wagon that carried the whole family to Arkansas and back, a tiny compact foreign car called a Simca (in which Danny learned to drive and took his drivers test at age 15), a Dodge Charger, and then another Dodge Charger, and then another Dodge Charger. Dad was loyal to his car dealer.

Our First TV

There was a new television in the early 1950’s, a big black-and-white floor model with an antenna on the roof that had a rotor, a motor that turned the antenna to get the best reception. The antenna was top line, anodized aluminum, and looked like a couple of bowties. We got three channels, Channel 2, Channel 5, and Channel 8, which were (and still are) NBC, CBS, and ABC. There was no such thing as color TV, but this big floor model was about as big a TV as they made. We saw some in the sales shop that had huge wooden cabinets with a little 12” round screen in one corner. That was not the one Dad wanted. We got the top line set.

The first thing I remember seeing on television was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which was June 2, 1953. I would have been 4 years old. There was no such thing as satellite communications in those days, so any film needed to be shipped to America for viewing. The coronation of Elizabeth was such a huge international sensation that it was credited with kicking television into a world wide phenomenon. More television sets were sold in England in the two months prior to the coronation than ever before or probably since. CBS was able to broadcast the coronation on the same day, by developing and editing the film on the plane back to America, and rivals NBC and ABC claim to have beat CBS to the punch by a few minutes by grabbing a version from the BBC which had been flown to Canada on a Royal Air Force jet.

Favorite TV in the 50’s

Other things we watched in those early years were Saturday morning cartoons, including “Loonie Tunes” which were animated characters set to classical music. I remember seeing dolphins diving then jumping up out of the water to sing a few bars of some opera, then diving back down for the orchestral interlude. We also watched the Mickey Mouse Club each afternoon. My favorite part was the cartoon, but they also had kids singing and dancing, and we learned to love characters like Annette, Darlene, and Bobby. Annette later grew up to be Annette Funnicello, a teen idol movie star, and Bobby as an adult danced for years on the Lawrence Welk Show. We also enjoyed the adventures of Rin Tin Tin, a story about a boy who grew up on an Army post in the Western Frontier, fighting Indians. His trusty dog RinTtin Tin, or Rinty, would save people from terrible escapades by running home to Rusty, who would also go to help, who would then get in a worse scrape, until the Cavalry would come riding to the rescue with the bugle blowing “Charge!” To this day, at baseball and basketball games, they still play that same bugle call. Mom made me a “Rusty” uniform, and I wore it to school proudly. We watched The Little Rascals, with Spanky, and Alfalfa, who were kids about our age (albeit from the 30’s) getting into scrapes. We loved the Three Stooges, although I thought all their hitting was too violent to be funny. And the funniest of all was Laurel and Hardy. We watched Sky King, a law officer who flew an airplane. We watched Superman --“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, ‘Look, up in the air, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s superman! Yes Superman, a strange visitor from another planet with powers far beyond those of mortal me,. And who, disguised as Clark Kent, fights a never ending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way,” they would say as he stood, fake muscles bulging slightly under his blue tight suit, arms on hips in front of a waving American flag. Steve Reeves would save someone, then jump out a window. The next shot would be of him flying through the clouds, his cape flapping behind. We watched “The Lone Ranger” a Texas Ranger Law man who hid behind a black mask, used silver bullets, and rode a silver horse. His partner, Tonto, an Indian, spoke broken English, as though he had learned English as a second language, and a third partner, Pat Butrum, rode around the wild west in an army jeep. Gosh that was anachronistic. Everyone else was on a horse, except Pat. They always met beside this same, huge boulder, where the ground was absolutely perfectly flat, and where there was an echo, like it was being filmed on a sound stage instead of in the wild west. We watched Roy Rogers, who wore a white hat and fought bad guys who wore black hats. There was often a fist fight scene in a saloon where someone got thrown out through the double swinging half-louvered doors, someone had a chair broken over his head, and someone broke through a railing on the second floor. Roy rogers and his wife Dale Evans were the only married people I ever knew as a child who had different last names. My mother said that is common in Hollywood where stars have an identity with their name that they hand onto. Anyway, they were a singing couple, and they always ended by singing “Happy trails to you, until we meet again.” And we watched Fess Parker as Davey Crocket, King of the Wild Frontier, and every kid could sing his theme song about killing a bar when he was only three. I especially remember the episode, or was it a movie later on, when Davey led the last stand against Santa Anna at the Alamo. David Bowie, designer of the Bowie Knife, which was every kid’s favorite shape for a hunting knife, was sick and dying, but when Davey Crocket asked men to cross the line in the sand if they wanted to stand and fight to the death, everyone, including David Bowie crossed that line. They all died in the battle.

Making Hay

Anyway, the cement plant funded a decent lifestyle for our family, mostly due to the overtime and to the rise of the union, the AFL-CIO, which pushed for higher wages, job security, and the benefits of seniority for men who had worked there the longest. It took a few strikes and threats of strikes to gain those benefits, and those strike times were hard times, but ultimately they reaped benefits for the families of the workers. During one strike, I remember that Dad worked for our neighbors, the Wallaces, on their farm in Warren, on the haying crew. Because they were our friends, we kids would play at the Wallace farm while dad worked the field. I remember him coming into the farmhouse for a drink and for lunch all sweaty and hot, his overalls and hair caught up with strands of hay. It was hard work, slinging a pitchfork and heaving hay bales into the truck in the summer heat.

School Field Trip to the Cement Plant.

As a kid, we sometimes would take a school field trip to the cement plant, and stand behind iron rails looking down into the giant bell crusher. It was a solid steel bell shaped bulb several feet in diameter that swung around inside a steel bin. Huge boulders, as big as half a cow would drag up from the quarry on a conveyor belt, and tumble into the crusher. The subtle but powerful movement of the crusher would crack those boulders until the were small enough to slip down through to the next set of hammer crushers below. It was always fun to see my dad there. He must have made it a plan to see that group of school kids and just happen to be walking by. I’d wave, and tell the other kids, “That’s my Dad.”

Blowing Off

We would often drive in the car to the plant to pick up Dad after work. I knew the way down the concrete road, through the rows of pine trees, to the building where Dad would assemble to punch out. Usually he would stop before coming over to “blow off” which meant he grabbed a high pressure air hose and turned the pressure onto himself, blowing dust off his clothing. Guys would line up before the 3:30 whistle to blow off. Then the big steam whistle would blow, and man appeared from everywhere, walking across the dusty streets to the locker room to punch out. To me, all the men in their dusty blue pants and green helmets looked like Dad, but Mom could tell Dad from the others at quite a distance, just by the way he walked. He would come to the car, kiss Mom, and sling his lunchbox into the car, and get in, smelling like cement dust, but always glad to see us. He never wasted any time before getting right to the story about what he had been repairing today, and it usually included some bragging about how he was the only one who really knew how to do it right. To listen to Dad tell it, the cement plant could not possible function without him.

Characters

There were other characters at the plant. Smitty was the lead man of the repair crew, and he assigned jobs to men each morning, and Dad felt Smitty did a good job of doling out the work in a fair way. Of course, it helped that Smitty gave Dad the jobs that might require overtime, as he knew that Dad would stay and work until the job was done. After all, overtime was voluntary, and some guys didn‘t work past the 3:30 whistle if they could help it.

Grossy and the Welded Door

Then there was Grossy. Grossy worked his life at the plant, and with seniority he was well protected by the union. But he was odd, and Dad often came home with stories about Grossy. By today’s jargon, Grossy had an obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD. But in the work-a-day world of the 1950’s there was no excuse-making for people who behaved oddly. Grossy had habits that he would not break. One habit was that he always walked into the mill through the steel door. It didn’t matter if the giant overhead door was wide open right beside the steel door, making it appear as though the entire wall had been lifted away. Grossy still went to the steel door, turned the knob, and went through. One day some guys played a prank on Grossy. They rolled open the overhead door, exposing the entire interior of the mill room. But they then welded Grossy’s steel door closed. Then they stood back to laugh as Grossy tried to go through the door. He absolutely refused to walk around it and go through the open wall a few feet away. Grossy struggled with the door, banged and kicked, and swore. Guys invited him to walk around. He refused. I don’t remember how it finally turned out, nor do I know if Dad even knew, because he would not be the kind to sit around and laugh at another man’s misfortune, nor would he be the kind to be pulling a prank rather than working as assigned. Nevertheless, he got a kick out of retelling the story about Grossy and the welded door.