Calais job conference focuses on women

CALAIS – Two Eastport teenagers who built a bridge out of Popsicle sticks that withstood 220 pounds of pressure took first place Friday in the morning session of the Totally Trades Conference bridge-building workshop.

And their competition wasn’t even close.

Test pressure on some of the other student-built bridges found them collapsing under 80 pounds of pressure.

Jordan Baskerville, 13, and Alex Sexton, who turns 14 today, first listened to a discussion on bridge design by Lib Jamieson, executive director of Women Unlimited. “They have about 4 ounces of materials [in the Popsicle sticks],” she said.

After Jamieson’s brief explanation, the students working with Popsicle sticks and a glue gun designed and built their model bridges.

Jamieson, who watched over the construction projects, said she understood what it meant to be a woman in a man’s field. She said that when she was younger she enrolled in a drafting program at a vocational center in Maine. She said the entire time she was in the program, her instructor never addressed her or the only black student in the class.

That was in 1978. “I had to go down the hill to go to the bathroom with the secretary and nurses because they didn’t want me to go in the one-hole bathroom off of the classroom because that was man land,” she said.

The hands-on conference was held at the Washington County Community College. It was for women ranging from eighth grade to adulthood. Other workshops included a Customs and Border Patrol officer, a marine electrician and a mechanic, as well as sessions on understanding a map and compass, digital animal, creatures and their habitat, blacksmithing, firefighting, crane and forklift operation, and rock climbing.

Also Thursday, the conference honored Margaret Tinker, 93, of Calais with the Rosie the Riveter Pioneer Award for her service as a welder from 1942 to 1944 in the Hingham Shipyard in Massachusetts.

Tinker appeared overwhelmed by all of the attention, including a standing ovation from the more than 250 young women and adults who attended the conference. Tinker also raised nine children and continues to work in her son’s restaurant in Calais today.

“We worked on the battleship for the war,” she said after the presentation. She then showed a picture of the women she worked with. She said she was given a two-week training session. “They paid us good. They paid us to learn too,” she said.

And there were adult women at the conference looking for new careers. Jessica Look, 30, of Whiting – who described herself as a full-time mom who also does lobster bait for fishermen – was looking for a new career. “I wanted information about other possible trades that might lead to a more permanent full-time 40-hour week job,” she said. She said she had signed up for the electrical and EMS workshops.

Ella Acheson, 69, a retired nurse from St. Stephen, New Brunswick, said that when she began her career more than 40 years ago there were few choices.

“We never thought about going into anything else, nursing or teaching was about it,” she said. She trained at the hospital in St. Stephen. She said she would have liked to have been a carpenter. “I think it’s fantastic when people take a board and make something out of it,” she said.

The conference was coordinated by the Washington County Coalition for Women in Trades and Tech and sponsored by the state Departments of Labor, Transportation and Education.

Jane Gilbert, deputy labor commissioner, said her agency was one of the sponsors “so that young women can get the exposure to jobs where they can earn a living wage when they grow up,” she said. “We think that young women don’t think of these as occupations, and we want them to think of them as opportunities for them in the future.”