My dad's writing...
There seems to be a good deal of uneasiness and uncertainty everywhere. New cars aren’t selling and people only buy used cars if theirs have quit beyond repair and then they replace it with one only a year or two newer.
Store parking lots have many fewer cars than usual for this time of year and customers are bringing out fewer packages. Some just look around, but don’t buy anything. Grocery carts don’t look as full as they used to when they get to the checkout stands.
The big Oxford Paper mill is running below capacity, with some departments doing little, and workers in others only working two or three days a week. The mill pulp yards have much less pulpwood than previously. Wood cutting operations are also very slow. Some operators have shut down for a while.
Two relatively small wood product factories have gone out of business. Others have slowed down and laid off workers for a while or possibly permanently. If any strikes take place in them, these will also close for good.
A neighbor who works at another woodworking mill says some of the crews are laid off and the salesmen who get orders for the mill’s products aren’t getting any new orders. That mill produces the material for furniture factories who in turn can’t move furniture already manufactured. The furniture stores can’t sell their stock on hand. A furniture store in Norway, Maine is holding a going out of business sale but people don’t seem to be buying. Big Sales are going on in the cities of Portland and Lewiston. They have been at it long enough that there shouldn’t be anything left to sell if it were selling normally. Much noise about fabulous bargains, but not many vehicles on the road that seem to be delivering or taking home many items. Second hand things seem to be moving more than anything else but even these, not very briskly.
The cities of Portland, Lewiston, and Bangor all have lost quite a lot of population, about 1000 apiece per year but it is slowing down in village, rural, and semi-wilderness areas. A few thousand former Maine people have returned from other states but also are in non-urban places.
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