Fort Howard
Summer 1993–1994
Children of Fort Howard employees got to work at the factory in the summer, filling in for the regular workers taking vacations. It was told to me like a gift: full-time, eight dollars an hour, which seemed like a fortune to an eighteen-year-old. I started right after high school ended in June.
Mom died July 17th. That first month was hell.
I was on Southern Swing — the rotation that put you on nights — and when I slept during the day I’d have horrible dreams about her. The kind that felt more real than waking, where she was alive and then she wasn’t, and I’d come to in a dark bedroom at two in the afternoon not sure which side of the dream I was on. Then I’d get dressed and go back to the factory.
I’d decided not to go to MSOE. I’d been accepted there, but Mom was gone and Helen was only seventeen and had to finish her senior year and Dad needed someone close. So I chose UWGB instead. That was the practical decision. The factory was the summer in between.
Dad convinced me to work in Pulp Processing. His logic was forklifts over assembly line machines, and he was right, but it was a dirty job. The bowels of the factory. Fort Howard made recycled tissue, so all the used paper came in on bales — enormous compressed blocks of old newspapers, magazines, office paper, whatever. A lucky shift meant getting on a forklift and moving bales: off a truck and into the huge storage warehouses, or from the warehouse to staged positions in front of the pulp machines.
The pulp machines were basically giant blenders set into the floor. When the top opened, it was like a big metal mouth belching steam, ready to eat. The operators in the booth behind would queue them up and dial in the right chemical recipe — glossy papers needed harsher stuff. I remember seeing buttons for caustic soda and detergent. We were the pit crew. We’d go in pairs and cut the metal bands around the bales — three or four bands per bale, eight feet tall. When you got down to the last band, the person on the holding side would yell clear, so the cutter knew to pull it and back away, because the bale would explode when the tension released. Paper everywhere. Sometimes a band was rusted in and we’d just leave it, which would cause problems for the machine and the conveyor belts below.
The forklift operator had a special attachment — a tractor tire cut in half, mounted as a scoop — to push the opened bales into the pulp machine’s mouth. Sometimes a vat would clog and we’d have to go into the basement in waders, find the fireman-sized hoses, and blast the slurry until we cleared the conveyor or the drains. That was the worst job. Knee-deep in paper sludge, the hose kicking in your hands, hoping you were pointing it at the right thing.
I relished the distractions. Paid lunch was the highlight, though the lunchroom confirmed every stereotype about factory workers — crude, misogynistic humor that didn’t exactly offend eighteen-year-old me but registered as below the line. These were salt-of-the-earth people. They had their hobbies: classic cars, Packers games, woodworking. This might have been the last period of my life where I could still fully relate to them, before I started to change into whoever I was becoming.
The real prize was getting sent on errands. They’d ask someone to take the little electric scooter to pick up lunch for the crew, and I’d volunteer every time, because it meant half an hour out of work. I’d zip that thing through the paths and halls and aisles of the factory like it was a go-kart track. The place was a behemoth — a living entity, breathing steam from every joint. I learned the map slowly over two summers. Every errand, I’d take a new route there and a different one back.
Each building was numbered in the order it was built. So I made it a mission to find every number, every building. This was psychogeography before I knew the word. I could read the layers of time by the ceiling height — some passages so low I had to duck while hot drops fell from overhead pipes. I hoped it was just water. Building 1 had tight aisles and low ceilings, and I wondered what it had done back in 1919. I could imagine how they’d made paper then — by hand, almost, compared to what came later. Building 100 had PM1 and PM2, the powerhouse paper-making rolls, probably thirty feet long. The new machines were the size of several houses. I couldn’t linger in those high-productivity areas — someone would question why a pulp kid was standing there gawking. Security was already a thing. I always had an excuse in my pocket: I got lost, or My dad said to meet him by the paper machine, even though I knew exactly where Dad worked, over on K1, a different nonwoven machine. He was a manager of those machines, so dropping the name Krumpos could help in a pinch. I never had to use the excuses. Pretending to belong while staring in awe at everything was a balancing act I was already perfecting.
Walking through the office areas was the tricky one. In my grimy clothes I stood out, but I had to see. I was curious. I’d never had an office job yet. The clean fluorescent corridors felt like another country.
The building that stood out most was the power plant. Fort Howard had its own, and I’d heard that when Green Bay needed help, they could lend energy to the city — that’s how big it was. One enormous open building, ten stories tall maybe, with piles of coal being moved by a front loader that looked like a toy at that scale. Stairs and scaffolding ramps wound up and around a center core, higher and higher. It was the dirtiest building in the whole complex, and it intrigued me the most. Even though I hated that job back then, I look fondly on moments like that — standing in the power plant, looking up, eighteen years old and grieving and amazed.
When Mom died, I took five days off. A coworker — Dave, whose daughter would later end up in my first Humana training class — said he wondered if I’d even come back after that. I told Dad, and he said the coworker meant I was taking too much time off, that most people don’t take that long. I don’t know if Dad was right, or if Dave meant it to be kind, recognizing that it’s hard for an eighteen-year-old to lose his mother. Many years later, I mostly think he was being nice. But part of me thinks Dad could have been right too.
I only worked there two summers. The veteran workers had a saying: You do this so you work hard in college, so you know you don’t want to do this for the rest of your life. They were right. It was a good job for some, but I needed to move on. I had a lot of money saved. Dad had me loan him my savings to pay off his credit cards — twenty-two percent interest from Mom’s medical bills. He gave me eight percent as a trade-off. Looking back, I should have just donated my money to the cause. But I didn’t really understand it back then. The math of grief and debt is hard enough for adults. I was eighteen.
I quit Fort Howard. I quit UWGB. And I took off on an epic road trip across the country to spend my money and find myself. The factory workers were right: I knew I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. I just didn’t know yet what I wanted instead.