THE ROMANCE OF PAPER

Mr. Canada

John Fisher 1912 - 1981

A Broadcaster and traveling reporter.

He aired his broadcasts three times a week as "John Fisher Reports"  He called his scripts "pride builders' as he reported on the wonders of Canada as he found it from 1943 to 1955.

In 1949 he zeroed in on the Abitibi operations from Lake Nipigon to Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay).
The boats and the wood you saw in Business Was Booming post  could have been part of this scenario.

I will say it is a colourful rendition of lake operations.  Note the announcer's build-up...the part about care of the forests. This write up came from Bob Matchett's family to the Nipigon Museum Archives.

The People's Paper

Canada, March 16, 1949

John Fisher Scans:

"Pretty Catty"

These men are rough and tough. They boss rivers. They run the rapids and shout defiance at the world's biggest fresh water lake. They know the Sleeping Giant, too. He-men these, and yet the finest compliment you can pay them is to say "Pretty Catty".

ANNOUNCER'S INTRODUCTION:  Extra! The People's Paper, a radio edition for your entertainment.  The People's Paper headlining John Fisher, your favourite story teller, with true tales about you and your friends.

Tonight, John Fisher takes giant strides from Lake Nipigon to Port Arthur and has a story which will give the Sleeping Giant pleasant dreams ... he talks about men who are proud to called "Catty".

And these men are part of Canada's largest family, the pulp and newsprint family ... 325,000 wage earners in mill and bush.  This great industry has an investment of over a billion dollars in mills and power plants that cannot be moved... they cannot operate without pulpwood...Therefore conservation of the forests is of vital interest to the industry.  Every Canadian pulp and paper mill is pledged to a ten point plan of forest conservation to bring about perpetual harvests from our greatest natural asset... our forests.  Canada's pulp and newsprint leaders jointly sponsor this program.  Abitibi Power and Paper ...Great Lakes Paper...Ontario Paper...Ontario-Minnesota Pulp and Paper and Spruce Falls Power and Paper.

Well in our bushlands John Fisher has found some mighty unusual men...

Extra!!

 Pretty Catty!

JOHN FISHER: We were peering out the window. We looked straight into the silver fingertip of Lake Superior. Though the haze of winter we sought the Sleeping Giant. I had seen him from the air when the steel green waters slapped at his feet in summer. Now I wanted to see him in winter dress. But Jack Frost beat me to it. He had thrown a protective haze around this sleeping giant... this great rock promontory... resembling a slumbering giant whose bulky frame guards the gateway to the boundless plains of the West.

1965 Great Lakes Lumber Sea Plane Base
Port Arthur
Sleeping Giant in mist.

In Port Arthur, Ontario, they scarcely ever sell a postcard without this dormant guardian in the background. He is a symbol of the majesty of Lake Superior.  The silhouette of this rock is the signal to water born commerce that the world's greatest inland waterway is about to stop. Here is a part of Canada where nature went on a rampage and scattered and tossed her rocky children...here the Sleeping Giant stands as the dean of mighty Superior.

It was from a window in Thunder Bay that I tried to see the Sleeping Giant...instead these in the spotless, modern mill of the Abitibi Power and Paper I heard these ancient tales and superstitions.  We could not see him...for an hour though, I listened to these Thunder Bay papermakers rave about the beauties and legends of our Lakehead country.

Sleeping Giant from Hillcrest Park, Port Arthur
now Thunder Bay.

I had been filled with the charm and bigness of Northwest Ontario.  I kept nodding approval.."Yes, this is magnificent country alright." I commented on the sunshine again which beats down summer and winter on the Twin Cities of Fort William and Port Arthur, which both stand more than 600 feet above sea level. All of a sudden as I was talking , one of the men from the Thunder Bay Paper Mill pulled me up short.   He said:"You're a Maritimer, aren't you...well you've got nothing like this down there..."

Rough, Burly, Magnificent

Now, a Maritimer may eat a lot of herring bones and codfish and so on...but, they also feed on pride...and I was ready to defend my "homeland" when the papermaker softened the blow and sparked my curiosity. "Some pretty smart fellows come out of the Maritimes," he said..." we've got some PRETTY CATTY  guys up here." By this time I was just about ready to arouse the Sleeping Giant and for to war...imagine anybody calling a Maritimer "catty". Why that's a female term...and women hate it...if you say to a woman that she's "catty" ...that's an invitation to get out the back door and stay out, but fast. There are few words in the English language that arouseth a woman's scorn as dose the label "catty". Imagine calling a man "catty"!  I soon learned in this rough, burly, magnificent land of the lakes where men are men ... I learned that to call a man "catty" was to pay him the highest complement in the roughest toughest of all games.  It is a lumberjack's word of respect and I would only call a lumberjack a "sissy" if I were in the other end of a transcontinental telephone line.

You see, that newspaper you read every day is born out of two parts.  It was processed in a great roaring mill where the machines rumbling at breathless speed take the wood...make it into a porridgy mush...turn it into running liquid and then into dry shiny paper. They call that the Mill side of operations.  At the Thunder Bay Paper Mill in Port Arthur City Limits they have one of the most modern streamlined operations in the world. In fact their grinder room is the very newest thing in paper making...They are proud of it in Port Arthur. But, there would be no mill if it were not for wood. So the other great partner in papermaking is the Woodlands Division...the fellows who are responsible for bringing rooted trees in the bush to the mills.  In other words the fraternity of lumberjacks. Canada itself owes so much to this lumberjack group.

Like A Ballet Dancer 

That serves to introduce a former Maritimer Bob Matchett.  They say he is a Pretty Catty. He only weighs 160 pounds, but, if you could see him jumping like a ballet dancer up there at Lake Helen at the mouth of the Nipigon River you'd see why he is "catty" and strong as a little bull.  Lake Helen is a long ways from the Thunder Bay mill where I tried to see the Sleeping Giant...but it's that distance that gives colour to our story of being Pretty Catty.  The Abitibi men of Thunder Bay use the familiar boom to move their logs. A boom is a great enclosure made by chaining giant boomlogs together...just like freight cars are coupled together.

  The wood floats within this linked frame of big timber...the boom is towed by a boat...a boom is really a huge cat-walk which bobs behind the boat...just like a cat that's afraid to get wet...just like a cat...as sure footed, as agile, with miraculous control of muscle.  Bob Matchett came to this tremendous Superior country looking for work in 1937.  Today, he is foreman down at Lake Helen. Quick on their feet these men, and they do their job just as quickly and as unobtrusively as the famous Black Cat in the black room. They are partners in The People's Paper.

If you ever have occasion to fly over Lake Superior in the summer, you can look down and see these floating giant golden islands of logs or rafts towed by tubby chubby tugs. (editor note - Nevermore)

Guts and Grace

As far as Port Arthur goes this story starts in Lake Nipigon...that lovely lake beloved by moose hunters and fishermen.

 On one of its many feeding rivers .. say on a frosty November day a cutter swings his axe against a tall spruce ...bites into it with bucksaw... shouts "timber"... the tree crashes and then the great odyssey begins.

 

Nipigon Historical Museum Archive Abitibi Binder

  Teamsters and caterpillar tractors haul the logs to the Ombabika River.

   Now the log sits quiet and patient upon the ice for month after month..

.until May arrives...the sun breaks the grip of ice...Mr Log is on his way. Oh, he doesn't move fast...he's jostled and jammed with thousands of others like him..

.sometimes dynamite is used to free him from the Chinese puzzle of fellow logs.  This nature-given conveyor belt of the river has its own moods and twists and currents.  The winds help him too, blow panic upon the logs... and old man sun joins the circus...sucks up the water in summer...slows the conveyor belt and even brings in the long dry summer arms of the banks to arrest the merry sail of Mr. Log.

Man Against Nature

The lumberjack swats and sweats and swears and gives Canada a vocabulary that would put Webster and Hollywood press agents to shame.  As Mr. Log on his colourful jaunt to the jaws of the mill flirts , stops and stares at obstacles, his back is pricked and prodded with sharp pike poles. His bark is scarred from the catty dance of steel boots.   Drama, colour!  Pulp and Paper is not only our biggest business...it is our most Canadian of shows.  Here is the ballet of brawn.  Here tough, rugged men do the arabesque on a floor of rolling spruce.  Here is drama with the backdrop of white water, and props taken from nature's burly and beautiful storehouse.

Pine Portage dam c. 1950
Nipigon Historical Museum Photo Archive

The stage is mighty and magnificent.  Man against nature.

The orchestral accompaniment comes from the strange company of the outdoors ... a medley of the musical silence of the bush...the drone of the mosquito...the timpani of rolling water...the throaty vengeance of the frog...the swish of the trees...the call of the wilds...and thrown upon this scene are the dimensions of smell...the nostalgic smell of slow rot and quick growth...and the dimensions of colour...floral and faunal.  Sunset and sunrise peeking through the screen of green.

And Canada cries for expression in its personality! 

And the newsboy calls "paper" on corners rancid with friction-mad rubber burnt gasoline and chocked with crowds.  And newspapers are the carriers of democracy. True! Liberty must march with newsprint or die.  The purveyor of liberty is born not amid the thundering thousands, but deep within the kingdom of trees. Drama? Colour? Story?  Where art thou, Mr. Canadian dramatist?  Point thy pen to the pageant of paper and thou will write pungent prose.

Back to Mr. Log

Mr. Log has come down the river .  With thousands he takes rest in the storage reserves on Lake Nipigon. The tugs wait for the winds to blow him over and into the V shaped mouth of the booms which trails behind them. When the winds blow and logs follow, catty men like Bob Matchett close the mouth of the V...turn it into an "O" and the logs are caught inside.

Top of the Fence

Chapter 1 is over for Mr. Log...he's prisoner now in a raft...and he has 60 miles to go down Lake Nipigon...towed by tugs which must be "catty" too, to run the rafts through the islands and shoals...through storm and wind on this junior Great Lake.  The Abitibi tug captains pull the giant rafts as trickily as a cat runs along the top of a board fence.  Mr. Log is still a long distance from the Sleeping Giant, whose shoulders protect the harbour of Thunder Bay Mill.

One of the dams on the Nipigon River. Pine Portage.

Downriver

At the end of Lake Nipigon is Virgin Falls... a dam and the big tumbling Nipigon River with canyon...Now Mr. Log is turned free from the raft...spilled.

Pulpwood going through. Pine Portage.

..let run over the dam...down, down, down stream...over more dams...through rapids...sometimes he is tamed and controlled by booms across the face of the river...and all the way lumberjacks bully him...keep him moving until he reaches another storage pond in Helen Lake.  Again he must be nipped into a raft and caught in the tear- drop "O" shape of booms.  And here nimble-footed catty Bob Matchett dances on his back and helps ready him for the biggest ride of all...across sometimes surly Lake Superior...and up to the Thunder Bay mill where Abitibi employees look out at the Sleeping Giant. And in the office files of Port Arthur Woodlands Division are listed the tens...hundreds of thousands spent on improving his journey...money spent on dams, booms, piers, dredging, cleaning banks, dynamiting.

And in the handsome brick building of the Abitibi Thunder Bay mill in Port Arthur where I tried to see the Sleeping Giant...here in his last resting place, Mr. Log sees stenographers...pretty ones too...who would throw their inkwells at you if you called them "catty". Yet, such is the romance of paper that their very jobs depend on men ...rough, tough men hundreds of miles away who boss the rivers and float their golden boom islands past the feet of the Sleeping Giant...men who are flattered when you say to them: "Pretty Catty".