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Photo by Andy Atkinson Former Boise Cascade worker Greg Hostetter stands in a friend's basement where he has stored all of his belongings before heading off to Idaho for training as an electrical lineman. OUT OF THE ASHES Moving to a new career Displaced by fire, Greg Hostetter is moving to Idaho for re-training By MARK FREEMAN About this series Greg Hostetter is among the people who lost jobs in the Labor Day fire that destroyed Medford's Boise Cascade Corp. mill. The Mail Tribune is following three such families, chronicling their efforts to rebuild their lives. Stories will run occasionally during the next several months as workers look for new jobs, seek training and cope with daily struggles. Greg Hostetter is packing away the remnants of his old life this week, making room to start his new one. A store room in an east Medford basement holds the few tools, trinkets and furniture that remain from Hostetter's past 41 years living in the Rogue Valley, including 21 years as a Boise Cascade Corp. millworker. Saturday morning he will leave them all behind when he points his Chevy Corsica north en route to Boise, Idaho, to a new life as an electrical lineman-in-training. "I've never been away from Medford," Hostetter says. "Maybe going away will be bad. I don't know. "It's kind of weird," he says. "But I guess I'm ready." He has been ready since before the Boise mill burned to the ground Sept. 6, taking with it many of the jobs of Hostetter and 459 other millworkers. Divorced, with his kids all moved away, the 41-year-old Hostetter is ready for a new challenge and life without the mill. So he's happy to head to the lineman school next week, where his tuition and some living expenses are being paid with federal retraining dollars. "I guess you can say," he says, "that it's kind of like an adventure." He's not really nervous, not really excited. And he's not really packed, either. "It really hasn't soaked in," Hostetter says. "It's like everything I do -- I don't really get nervous until I actually do something." Lineman school has been that something since the fire helped Hostetter get off his duff and look for the new career away from the mill that he's pined for. Hostetter had been taking classes at Rogue Community College and had talked of getting out of the mill, he says. But it was always hard to leave the Boise money in the rear-view mirror, he says, so a change in careers had been little more than talk. But the charred mill turned the talking into planning. Since signing up for the school last fall, he's worked part-time in construction and lived off unemployment compensation. In October, Hostetter sold off most of his possessions, including a 1957 Buick Special, during a garage sale. He has left his east Medford home in the hands of renters, taking up residence at the home of a fellow displaced Boise millworker. What's left is packed in the basement of his home. At the lineman school, he will spend the next five months learning the intricacies of installing and maintaining electrical lines -- a trade that will likely land him a job in Washington or the Midwest. "I gotta try hard at school and get this new thing going," Hostetter says. "I think it will work out. Something's got to come out of this." After he leaves, Hostetter does not know when he will be back. He doesn't know if he'll be back. "Heck, I don't know what I figure," he says. "If things blow up on me, I might have to come back and maybe work at Boise a while," he says. "Who knows?" Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA