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After fire, a new start Photo by Steve Johnson Greg Hostetter, right, is starting over after the Sept. 6 Boise Cascade mill fire took away his job. That new beginning includes a garage sale. Like it or not, Boise workers move on after jobs go up in flames By Mark Freeman Strangers pick through 20 years of Greg Hostetter's things, all of which are priced to go. A 75-cent electric frying pan. A $1 toaster. Bargain hunters dicker, looking to squeeze one more quarter off the garage-sale prices. A woman offers 50 cents for the pan. He shrugs, then accepts. An older man eyes the garage sale's top draw: Hostetter's '57 Buick Special with 100 pounds of chrome, a hood big enough to land a plane on and a For Sale sign on the dashboard. "It's a good cruising car," Hostetter says. "And that hood ornament is like a sight to aim it -- you just point it where you're going." Hostetter could use that extra sense of direction as his life cruises down a whole new road. A Sept. 6 fire at Boise Cascade Corp.'s Medford plant severed the umbilical cord to the place where Hostetter's work and life were centered the past 20 years. Boise money bought the toaster and frying pan. Boise money bought the Buick. But the Boise money is gone, and for Hostetter, it won't come back. So the 41-year-old is selling it all to head toward a new future at a different Boise -- this one is a electrical lineman's school in Boise, Idaho. "I've been thinking about getting out of the mill for a long time, so the fire, to me, is kind of a blessing," Hostetter says. ``It's gotten me to actually do something. "I'm trying to make a good thing out of this," he says. It's been hard for many longtime Boise workers to find the good in the blaze that destroyed the mill and idled its workers. The fire ignited in the plywood mill's dryer room and raced across ceilings and through walls before spreading through the one-third-of-a-mile-long main building, part of which dates back to the '40s. Within the ashes sits millions of dollars worth of damage and the jobs of 460 workers. Of those, 50 have been hired temporarily for salvage work, cleanup and other post-fire jobs, says Bob Smith, Boise's employee-relations manager. The remaining 410 have enrolled in retraining programs, found new work or are just waiting for Boise to decide in mid-December whether to rebuild the plant completely, partially or not at all, Smith says. Many of the jobless are moving on to new lives after Boise. Some, like Terri and Dave Campfield of Medford, are cutting the Boise ties entirely, with both regret about what's lost and excitement about what lies ahead. "We'll make it," says Terri Campfield, who with her husband will start a truck-driver training program at Rogue Community College this month. "Even if it's by our chin hairs, we'll make it. But when I think of the other families, I get teared up. ...They're hurting." Those hurting include Manuel Rios, a 26-year-old father of three who always counted on the mills to provide for his family. Manuel's wife, Tina, who was a stay-at-home mom, has since gone back to work; Manuel is taking welding classes to prepare him for an $8-per-hour job he can barely afford to accept. "We're just barely making it," he says. "We can't get food stamps. We just bought a house last year. "I want to get back to the mill," Rios says. "I'm still pretty young. I can still go pull greenchain." The displaced Boise workers are going through emotional upheaval akin to surviving a devastating tornado, Smith says. "There's a period you go through where you feel anger, helplessness and frustration triggered by the unexpectedness of the occurrence," Smith says. Or, as Hostetter says, it's just so weird to be without Boise. "It was always there," Hostetter says. "Nobody ever thought it would burn down." Boise has been there for Hostetter since he was 19. After a year at the mill, he quit to try other work but returned a year later. Since then, he has worked as a spreader on one of the many stages of plywood milling. An 11 p.m. telephone call from his son Sept. 6 changed all that. "He said, `Dad, your mill's burning up,' " Hostetter recalls. Like many millworkers, he drove down to the plant and watched his old life disappear among the flames. It was there that Hostetter's new life began. Having talked about getting out of the mill life since his divorce two years ago, he has seized the blaze as a steppingstone to a new job and new life. But not knowing what that new life should be, he has leaned on the Job Council for assistance. The council is paying for his tuition at the Idaho school, where he starts Jan. 4 on a five-month course. "Maybe I'll like it, maybe I won't," he says. "I don't know. But it's something." That new something means shedding most of his Boise past. He has held onto a few important possessions, but the rest are disappearing through garage sales and trips to the dump. The '57 Buick, which he bought four years ago and restored, will go for $6,500. He's putting his east Medford house up for rent, is moving in with a fellow Boise burn-out victim and battling his own nerves. "Everything's scary," Hostetter says. "Your stomach's scared all the time. You're nervous, especially when you're feeling down." Good days are those where Hostetter is convinced he'll make it as a lineman; bad days are those spent fighting to get off the sofa. "When you're up, the sky's the limit," Hostetter says. "But when you're down, you're scared. "You know what you want to do," he says. "You just don't know if you can do it." But Hostetter is upbeat more days than he's down, more optimistic than not that he will find a fine new life after Boise. "As long as you're doing something and trying to improve yourself," Hostetter says, "you can be happy. "That's one good thing about me," he says. "I want to start over." Editor's note : Today's story on three families coping with losing their jobs in the Boise Cascade Corp. fire is the first in a series chronicling the high points, and low points, of the families' new lives. The stories will run occasionally in the Mail Tribune as the workers look for new jobs, tackle new training and cope with day-to-day struggles. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA