LEWISTON – Aime Foisy can still feel the weavers staring at him as he hurried to fix their looms.

“Hey curly, hurry up,” they’d say, “I got money to make.”

Weavers at the Bates Mill got paid according to the number of times per day the stitching shuttle shot across the loom. When the loom was down, the clock stopped. As one of the mill’s trained loom-fixers, Foisy’s had to get it going again.

Foisy, now 85 and retired, loved the pressure.

“It was great,” he said, his eyes wide as he moved his hands side to side to show the motion of the shuttle. “All you had to do was keep on your toes.”

Most days, Foisy arrived at the mill at 7 a.m. He often didn’t leave until 12 hours later. At the end of a shift, his hands were dirty and tired, and he could hardly hear.

He refers to those 38 years as the best time of his life.

On Sunday, more than two decades after Foisy walked out of the Bates Mill for the last time with his tool chest and loom-fixing manual, he will return to the large room where day after day he rushed from one distressed weaver to another.

This time, he and his wife, a fellow retired millworker, will be greeted by a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a long gown. Waiters and waitresses will approach them with trays of fancy hors d’oeuvres with a French-Canadian flair.

And they will be joined by about 500 other people with similar memories of loud machines, long days and that feeling of accomplishment.

Time for mingling

The first-ever Millworkers’ Reunion is being held in Weave Room No. 2 of the Bates Mill. Those who planned the event, mostly all retired millworkers, considered having it in a refinished part of the mill.

But they decided the room with large stains on the floor where the looms once sat was more appropriate.

They also decided to keep the formal speeches to a minimum.

The reunion, which is open to anyone who worked in one of Lewiston-Auburn’s eight textile mills, will go from 1:30 to 4 p.m. Speeches by local lawmakers and the event’s organizers will take up only 45 minutes of that time.

The rest will be for mingling – for reminiscing and catching up.

“I can’t wait to see some of the guys I used to have fun with,” Foisy said. “I haven’t seen most of them since I retired.”

It was time’

Rachel Desgrosseilliers, the director of Museum L-A, which is in the Bates Mill, came up with the idea last May when the mill opened to the public for the governor’s conference on creative economy.

Several former millworkers showed up to take a look around, and Desgrosseilliers overheard a group of them asking about the whereabouts of other former co-workers.

She decided it was time for a reunion.

Like Foisy, many former millworkers rushed to sign up as soon as they heard. The room holds 500 people, and the only remaining tickets are the 75 that Desgrosseilliers wanted to keep open for the actual day.

She is worried she’ll have to turn people away.

“I’ve been amazed by the response,” she said. “Being recognized for contributing a lot to the community means so much to them.”

Pride

The guests, mostly 75 or older, include everyone from a former vice president of Bates Mill to the guy who unloaded the cotton from the train. But they seem to all have one thing in common.

“They talk about their time in the mills with such pride,” Desgrosseilliers said.

For Foisy, who started his first job at the Hill Mill on the day after he returned from World War II, the hardest part was leaving it all behind.

“With loom-fixing, there was always something mysterious,” he said. “They had to be just so, just like an automobile.”

Now a grandfather who spends his time collecting stamps and relaxing with his wife, Foisy usually wears a tie only once a year.

“And this Sunday is it,” he said.

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