It is difficult to believe a year has passed since I was let go at the mill. It has been a tough year... a year of transitions and health problems. But here I am. I made it and I'm copping with the reality of being put out to pasture. As of yet there have been no buyers for the mill. It is still idled and many of my coworkers haven't found employment. I discovered no one wanted to hire a guy in his 60s and was forced to file for Social Security and the meager pension the company offered me. Tina and I are doing fine. Others have lost their health coverage because they couldn't afford the premiums. Several have had to leave the area they've always called home. A couple have died. We've even lived through another presidential election. Life goes on, doesn't it? Here is the note I posted on my last day of employment. The date was ironic. Strange, but ironic. The clock in the department was given to me before I left that day. I pulled the battery out and the time has been 2:30 pm for a year. Today I'll put a battery back in it. It's time to stop looking back, hoping it was just a bad dream. Here is a song by Waylon Jennings that sums up my feelings better than I ever could. I hope you enjoy it. Link to Youtube.com

Friday November 13th, 2015; well, the day is done, and night will cast a long shadow across Wickliffe, Kentucky’s paper mill. For over forty five years thousands of people have depended on the making of paper here to provide them a living. Tonight equipment that operated twenty four hours a day will lay silent.

It’s difficult to imagine the magnitude of silence in a mill like ours unless you once called it your second home. It is akin to an aged loved one breathing their last breath. The reality of its passing is overwhelming.

A few of the guys who were there at startup will exit as old men in their 70s. Like the old prisoner, Brooks, in the movie Shawshank Redemption, they slowly became institutionalized and cannot imagine another life outside the mill.

For others, young people with families, they wonder what the future holds. In a few cases, both husband and wife were employed there. Now both are unemployed. Boats, trucks and homes are filling the local classifieds.

Some, like myself, were fortunate enough to land a job there at the right time in our lives and raise a family. We find ourselves on the brink of retirement with little hope our papermaking skills will be of any use in another industry. Like old horses, we are being put out to pasture.

I am the fourth generation in my wife’s family to work in the paper industry. Paper has been good to us. This month marks my thirty seventh year at Wickliffe.

When I was younger I dreamed of working for the same company until the day I retired. I began working in 1978 for Westvaco which became MeadWestvaco then NewPage and lastly Verso.. I am reminded of a lyric from one of Bob Dylan’s songs, “The times, they are a ‘changing.”. Boy, have they ever. Nowadays newspapers, magazines, books and billboards have turned to electronic media to sell their products. NAFTA, Technology and bad trade laws doomed industries like ours. Capital management groups gobbled up company after company, squeezed out every nickel and dime they could before tossing them aside when nothing else was left.

When they toss mills like ours aside they toss aside families and communities that depend on them to make a living and to keep their infrastructures viable. One needs only to look around to see the results.

Tonight someone will wrap a chain around the gates after the last pair of steel-toed boots walks through. A lock will be snapped into its links and aside from a few caretakers the equipment will lie idled. From time to time a chilly wind will probably rattle the chain on the gate and remind folks that hard working men and women once worked there. They would like to do so again in the future.

I hope that day comes sooner than later. Hope is all some of my coworkers have. Say a prayer for them, if you will.

As for me, I’ll be fine. I’m certain He has other things in store for me as I enter the next phase of my life.

_______________
Rick Algood
November 15, 2015