PAPER MILL SUMMER

Synopsis

They chained the gate on a Friday in June, which Dennis Kovar had known was coming for eleven months and had told nobody, because telling people would have emptied the town before the last shift ran. He is president of the local. That used to mean grievances and a Christmas fund. Now it means eleven hundred people with twelve weeks of severance, one grocery store, one bank, and no other employer inside forty miles. The mill can be sold. Somebody has to find the buyer, and hold the town still long enough to be worth buying, and keep enough young families from packing that the school does not consolidate in the fall. Dennis has until Labor Day.

Who this is about

Dennis Kovar is president of a paper local with eleven hundred members, and as of the first Monday in June he is president of eleven hundred people with nowhere to be.

What goes wrong

The company chains the gate on a Friday and files the notice on Monday. Severance runs twelve weeks. The town has one grocery, one bank, and no second employer.

What's at stake

Twelve weeks of money and a summer to prove the town is worth buying. If nobody buys the mill, the school consolidates, and once the school goes the town does not come back.

Why it keeps going

Each episode is one week of the summer: a buyer to court, a family to talk out of leaving, and a union president discovering how much of the job is now charity.

Takeaway

A town dies the year its school closes, and the school closes the year the young families give up.

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Story, in the creator's words

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