Hope Harrison was one that I should have talked about in the section on “characters”, because Hope was a character if there ever was one, and he was tighter than the bark on a swamp cypress. Hope was raised in an area, down near Creswell, that was called The Mill Pond. I have no idea how it got that name because, as far as I know, there was no mill pond anywhere around there. It was apparently not a very productive agricultural region, because I have heard Dan Marrow say that a crow would have to carry a lunch if it were to try to fly across it.

When I first became acquainted with Hope he was firing the bark burning boiler at the Pulp Mill. As time went on and operations expanded, he was promoted to Boiler Room Foreman on the same shift that I was on. Hope had served a considerable amount of time in the Merchant Service as a fireman on sea going freighters, so he knew his way around steam boilers.

We had built our little home a couple of miles east of Plymouth and the mill was a couple of miles to the west so I had to drive through the town to get to work. This made it convenient for me to pick up three or four of the other men who worked the same shift that I did, and Hope was one of them.

On one occasion we had stopped to pick up Hope, he being the last one on the list, and saw that they had bought a new, used, Chevrolet sedan. Hope’s wife, Bea, rushed out of the house just as we were about to leave and wanted Hope to leave her the keys to the car so she could do some shopping. Hope said, “Bea, you’ve got keys to the old car, they’ll work, go ahead Bart”. He just didn’t want her to use that new car.