Mill Stories: Dana Fellows

By June 4, 2001, about 2 weeks after the mill closed, Dana Fellows was sitting in classes at Rockford Business College.

He had been a designer draftsman in the engineering department at Northwestern Steel and Wire for 4 years.

“I was very fortunate to get in the department I was,” Fellows said. “It was a straight day job, where other jobs were around the clock, weekends, nights, and it was very hard on a person to work in those departments.”

He was on vacation the week the announcement was made.

“A former employee from the mill who had moved to Florida a few years ago had called and told me,” Fellows said.

He wasn’t surprised, though.

“The mill had been on such shaky ground,” he said. “They had filed bankruptcy prior to this, so for me and a majority of employees, it wasn’t a total shock.”

He earned an associate’s degree in mechanical engineering before he started working at the mill in 1987. After the mill closed, he steadily worked his way to another associate’s degree, this time in computer networking, finishing in 2003.

He then earned a bachelor’s degree in information management in 2005, and finally a master’s degree in instructional technology in 2009.

He wasn’t the only one to pick this path.

He said a lot of people went to college right away, but the unemployment benefits that allowed them to go to school for free stopped. The government had decided the mill’s closing was not caused by imports.

“A lot of people gave up with the schooling, and they just went looking for jobs, whatever they could find,” Fellows said.

Others lobbied Congress to get that decision changed, but Fellows said the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent anthrax scare made it a lot more difficult to get in contact with lawmakers.

The change was eventually made, though.

He now works at the Whiteside Area Career Center as a computer technology instructor and is an adjunct faculty member at Sauk Valley Community College. He plans on starting work on another master’s degree in education leadership this fall.

“I learned the more doors you have open, the better,” he said. “I learned that 10 years ago.”

Dana Fellows

Dana Fellows, 46, worked as a designer draftsman at the mill. He started at Northwestern Steel and Wire in 1987 as a laborer. He is now a computer networking teacher at Whiteside Area Career Center. Originally from Tampico, he lives near Grand Detour with his wife, Jodie, 43, and three children, Caitlyn, 18; Bryce, 16; and Rachel, 12.