EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series on this week’s 90th anniversary of the Port Angeles paper mill now owned by Nippon Paper Industries USA.
Part 2 will appear in Monday’s editions.
By Paul Gottlieb
Peninsula Daily News
PORT ANGELES — Eric Childers was 10 or 11 when he pressed the magic button.
As a child, he was a frequent visitor to the Crown Zellerbach paper mill in Port Angeles where his father worked.
But this was something special — his dad let him start a winder, which rolls finished paper onto giant spools at 60 mph.
“Being able to have my dad say push the button right there and watch the machine start up was pretty cool,” Childers, 38, recalled recently.
“It was fun being able to see what he was doing, too.”
Childers, a father of three, works where his father worked, and his father before him, at the plant in Port Angeles now owned by Nippon Paper Industries USA.
The mill– which now produces about 160,000 tons of paper annually — will mark its 90th anniversary Tuesday by serving cake to each of the departments in the plant that employs about 200 people.
As the anniversary of the mill approached, the third-generation paper maker stood about 20 yards from where he pressed the start button as a child, explaining why he continued a family tradition that goes even deeper than father to son.
Both of Childers’ grandfathers were machine tenders at the plant, retiring the same day.
His mom worked there, too, and an uncle, Larry Wilson, still does, Childers said as machines hissed, whined and clattered in ear-numbing, nonstop unison.
“What I like is the fact that, for one, we are making paper in America, and we are sending paper to Australia, sending paper everywhere,” he said.
“It’s kind of nice instead of having stuff being brought in from China.
“The pay is good, too,” he added, noting he makes about $23 an hour.
“I won’t lie about that.”
After working at Nippon for more than four years, he’s also taken a liking to “the whole aspect of being able to just basically hustle and get the job done that you need to get done,” Childers said.
“It is rewarding at the end of the day,” he said.
For 90 years, owners of the plant have hustled and gotten the job done — defying the odds where other Port Angeles mills, including Merrill & Ring and Rayonier, have fallen by the wayside.
“The waterfront was just full of sawmills,” mill manager Harold Norlund said.
At its peak in the 1930s and ’40s, the mill employed between 460 and 470 people, Norlund said.
“It was very manually intensive in the beginning,” he said. “Since then it’s become more automated — better equipment, a better process and more efficient — so it’s not as much manual work as it was in the beginning.”
The company today manufactures telephone book paper and other lightweight products, such as paper for advertising inserts, flyers, directories, as well as newsprint, including newsprint that makes up the Peninsula Daily News.
But vestiges of the mill as it was during the days of Childers’ grandfathers remain, Norlund and technical manager Steve Johnson said during an hour-long tour of the facility.
Newsprint first rolled off Paper Machine No. 1 on Dec. 14, 1920.
The machine’s parts were strewn across a beach just a year or two earlier.
Paper brokers Isidore Zellerbach and his son, Harold, had picked up the pieces, purchasing the assets of bankrupted Canadian lumbermen George and James Whalen — including the machine on the Port Angles Harbor beach — and along with those assets, the Elwha Dam.
The Washington Pulp and Paper Corp. mill, the name of which changed to Crown Zellerbach as the Zellerbachs bought other mills, was sold in 1986 to James River Corp. and in 1988 to Daishowa America, which merged with Nippon Paper of Japan in 2003.
The mill buildings owned by Nippon are valued at $20.7 million, according to the Clallam County Assessor’s Office.
Also, Daishowa owns 68 acres the mill sits on that are valued at $7.4 million and $683,489 in improvements at the site, along with 26 acres on Monroe Road east of Port Angeles that are valued at $291,610.
These days, safety concerns would prohibit a worker from bringing a child into the plant and starting a machine like Childers did more than two decades ago, Norlund said.
Here’s another sign of changing times: In the early 1920s, shoe soles were made of leather, which slips on wet floors — so some workers went shoeless, something not seen anymore.
In addition, equipment with spinning parts, such as massive rollers and paper-cutting razor wheels, were often open rather than covered.
Norlund walked through the steam plant, over steel-grated floors, past original, barrel-shaped abandoned industrial boilers also known as dutch ovens and interior brick walls that the mill manager said could contain asbestos, now a forbidden product.
Red warning ribbons attached to the bricks warn workers to stay away.
A 60-year-old boiler — the main boiler now used by the plant — is fed by bark and other biomass, producing flames pictured on a boiler control-room computer monitor, making the real flames look like a popular screen-saver.
Another monitor shows a horizontal corkscrew churning bark and other woody detritus forward into the boiler’s belly.
“It throws it out over the grates and it burns there,” control room operator Don Burnette said.
The boiler, which heats steam to warm the mill and to make paper, used oil until Crown Zellerbach converted it in the 1970s to burn hog fuel — also known as biomass.
That helped cut the plant’s oil consumption from 200,000 barrels of oil a day to 7,000.
Over the years, the plant has been upgraded in other ways, too.
A mechanical pulp mill was built in the mid-1970s, and Nippon built a recycling mill in 1992 for $40 million.
It plans a major upgrade of its primary boiler by installing a new biomass boiler that is expected to be operating by August 2012.
The $71 million project has been opposed by environmental groups who recently lost an appeal of the city of Port Angeles’ shoreline development permit, and who plan to appeal the city’s environmental assessment to the state in the spring.
The new boiler will be more efficient than the present burner, Norlund said.
The changes made by Crown Zellerbach in the 1970s to the original boiler from the 1950s “wasn’t an ideal conversion, as a boiler originally designed for oil does not have the proper air flow characteristics in the combustion chamber necessary for burning biomass,” Norlund said.
The plant also has two smaller boilers, both of which burn oil, which are used only when the main boiler is shut down for maintenance twice a year; and a electric boiler used in colder months instead of the oil-burners.
Logs were once boomed through a lagoon just south of the plant for processing. That lasted until about four decades ago, when the facility began using wood chips from area sawmills.
“Now there are just ducks going back and forth” in the lagoon, Norlund joked as two ducks paddled down the tiny waterway.
In addition, in its early days, the plant transported paper products directly from Port Angeles via ships.
Now, export product is barged to Seattle, stuffed into 40-foot containers, and shipped on container ships primarily to Australia, Mexico and Southeast Asia.
U.S. bound product is typically trucked to Tacoma to be railed to the final U.S. destination. The return trip truck from Tacoma brings back old newspapers to be recycled.
On Monday: What’s in the future for the mill?
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Senior staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
