Above the Grass

We got a bit too ambitious one time and sunk a shaft about eight feet deep. At age six or seven it seemed to be that deep. It was really hard work. We had to hoist the dirt and heavy clay from the shaft with a rope and bucket.
By mid-afternoon the ‘mining crew’ had grown to eight or ten members. This crowd caught the attention of my mother at the kitchen window, and she came out of the house to check on us. When she discovered how deep we had dug the hole, she got real excited, “Fill that in right now before it caves in on you!”

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A call had been made for experienced Cornish and Irish miners to work the gold ore and placer diggings in Colorado near Pike’s Peak in Gilpin County when the shallow diggings had begun to play out. When the call went out around 1865 for more expertise, the ‘hard-rock’ miners, like James Perkins, who had been working the mines of Southwestern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and others directly from Cornwall, made the difficult trek to Pike’s Peak to replace the American miners.
These Cornish miners, who came to be called the ‘Cousin Jacks,’ had a great deal of experience in underground work “below the grass,” and contributed much to improving mining techniques in America.

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It would be a new frontier for the manufacturing industry in 1967, and any experience that I could gain in a venture such as this would definitely bolster my chances for reaching my career goal of General Manager. Most of the veteran managers opposed change. They were disinterested and some actively opposed this “computer stuff.” I was much younger––at twenty eight, the youngest Office Manager in the Division––and felt that this would be an important tool for future managers.
I was looking beyond a career in accounting and the Office Manager position was merely a means to an end. I wanted to be in the thick of things and maintain a high profile. Weyerhaeuser employed some thirty thousand people at the time, and it was my intention to stay above the grass, maintain visibility. Others undoubtedly felt more secure by blending into the work force. To them high visibility, rising above the grass, was akin to placing one’s head in the line of fire. “Make one mistake and your career is finished.” I was more risk-tolerant and willing to maintain a high profile as a means of advancement in the corporate world.

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My head was spinning at this point. A lot of thoughts came and went, all fighting for space in my brain. For one thing, why would the Menasha Corporation shut down a plant that was making money for the first time in seven years? What about all of my plant employees, to whom I had promised a winning season? It was 1980 and the national recession was especially critical in the Pacific Northwest, with twenty percent of the regional workforce unemployed. None of this made sense to me. I felt the anger rising as I sat there listening to my two superiors drone on and on with detailed plans for the shut-down.
These VP’s further intimated that the Board of Directors had made the decision the past December, and promoted me to General Manager the following February after the decision had been made! The Division VP, Len Tweedie, told me that they had done that so I would be at the top position in order to make the lateral transfer to the larger plant in Wisconsin as General Manager.

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Gene brought up the idea. It was obviously a dream. We both laughed about it. I thought he was joking but soon realized that he was halfway serious and hoping for a positive response. We had another beer and talked some more. The more we talked, the better it sounded, and the better it sounded, the more beer we drank.
After we sobered up the next day, we realized that his idea merited some more thought. We began to put a plan down on paper, jotted notes about business strategy and did some preliminary numbers crunching. The deeper we got into it, the more sense it made. Menasha had many good employees, but we would have to avoid the labor union.
A labor contract like the one Menasha had with the United Furniture Workers would be too restrictive for a start-up operation. It would be a difficult financial challenge to get a new business off the ground during this recessionary business climate. The prime lending rate was over eighteen percent. With a union out of the picture, we could cherry pick the best of the former employees from Menasha, because jobs were scarce with unemployment at nineteen percent. But the big hurdle was the money––we needed well over a million dollars.