In 1946, that’s 78 years ago, just after WWII, Jack Tarmy started driving a lumber truck making deliveries of lumber he had milled in his Brattleboro mill to the Boston area. By 1958 he had developed his own wholesale timber business selling fine New England boards further and further afield. In 1976 his son Mark joined the company who, by 1989, had shifted the company’s focus to custom-milled, wide-plank flooring, a product that is today being carried on and developed by Mark and his son George. The two run the company together.
Stacey Euber, who has been working for the Tarmys since 1989, and is the subject of this profile, was born in Middlebury, Vermont in 1967 where his parents farmed and his father also logged. In 1982 his parents and family of six moved to Brattleboro. By 1985, Stacey’s dad took a job on The Retreat Farm and two years later he took a job as a lumber handler stacking sawn boards at Cersosimo Lumber south of town. In 1989, his son Stacey, then 22, took a similar job at Jack Tarmy Lumber and is still there after 35 years. As Stacey said, “The Tarmys are good people. I feel respected, looked after.”
Stacey, father of two boys, has lived in Bellows Falls all those years. He’s up at 5:00AM and at Tarmy’s Wide Plank Mill near the north end of Putney Road (where it has been since the beginning) by 6:00, “but sometimes I come in on a Saturday if some rough lumber needs to be stacked or moved around. That’s my job.” In fact, it’s a whole lot more than just moving boards.
Stacey’s job is and always has been about shipping, receiving and organizing the work in this entire mill with the help of his forklift. As George Tarmy told me, “Stacy is a maestro with a forklift. But far more than that, his depth of knowledge is essential to our business. We sell a custom product with a wide range of possible specifications and each plank for every order has to meet that spec precisely. Stacey’s are the first set of eyes on the raw timber we bring in before processing the planks. He’s responsible for staging the rough stock for each custom order in our queue. And as the planks move further down our production line, Stacey has a hand in just about every step in the milling process.”
He is on his forklift all day servicing the 14-20 or so professionals who do the milling. Inside the roughly 150’ wide, 360’ long milling shed with a perhaps 36’ ceiling, he is moving milled-to-order flooring made of ash, birch, cherry, walnut, Eastern white and heart pine, hickory, maple, red and white oak.
All this is carried out in an absolutely dustless environment where dust-handlers built into much of the milling equipment as well as exhaust fans keep the air absolutely clean. Stacey told me that none of them wear facemasks. But the milling equipment – that is NOT quiet. “We all wear ear protection.”
In the first room, the blanks are produced out of rough-sawn lumber. Stacy gathers the rough lumber in the correct dimensions and amount and delivers the needed boards. The ripping and plaining gets done by guys operating the state-of-the-art Cameron Automation Rip Saw which was installed just two months ago. It has a 16’ table and 20’ overall width. Stacy told me, “It’s arrival with its state-of-the-art precision and ease of setting up made us all very happy.”
The second room is The Mill Room. The Leadermac Molder allows the men to establish board widths, thickness, tongue and groove and other specifications. The millers pass the blanks from Room 1 through the Molder. The milled boards then pass out of the milling machine onto another conveyor and are then stacked for Stacey.
He then might deliver some boards from the Mill Room to any one of several specialty rooms, all outlined for him on the work orders he refers to throughout the day.
Once the equally crucial 15-20 guys working in this precise milling facility have completed an order, the milled flooring bundles are stacked, labelled and wrapped for delivery. Stacey carefully organizes and stacks the bundled floorboards in the sheds sometimes 24’ high to await trucks. And those bundles go across the country, from Shaftesbury, Vermont to LaJolla, California.
There is a balance between the other individual craftsmen, each with his own specialty in the crafting of this fine flooring, but it’s Stacy who keeps the whole place organized, the work flowing. And what comes out of the process is beautiful and flawless. He knows what everyone in the facility needs and when they need it. He gets it for them. He keeps up the momentum, the organization, the orderliness. Everyone does their part, but in a way, Stacy is the glue that holds it all together. And he pulls this all off in a quiet, understated way that everyone relies on but never talks about.
When I initially drove into the parking area to interview Stacey, the first person I saw was a guy on a forklift. Little did I know…..
Before thanking Stacey for his time, I asked him about what he does in his free time. He mentioned something about fishing and hunting and racing cars, but he wasn’t really into it. His mind is on his work.
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.