A NEW FIRM FOR THE OLD MILL

Missota Paper Co. is a newly formed company incorporated specifically to buy Potlatch's Brainerd mill.

Address: 46 Sanctuary Road, East Tawas, Mich.

Owners/principals: Dan Alexander, Charlie Wemyss, Jim Withers, who will be the active senior managers of the company.

* Alexander, 55, Missota Paper Co. president, chief executive officer and principal spokesman, will be involved in sales, marketing and financial functions of the company. He will be located at the sales and marketing office in Chicago.

Alexander was a member of the initial management team in the creation of Madison Paper in Madison, Maine, in 1977, becoming vice president of marketing in 1980. In 1984, he founded St. Marys Paper by acquiring its sales and marketing company, D.C. Northam, located in the Chicago area. St. Marys Paper was sold in 1994. Since 1994, Alexander owned and operated Silver Creek Paper as a paper sales and market consulting company. He was a founding member and twice chairman of the SC Council, which was made up of four North American and eight European paper companies. He was a member of the Premier's Council of Ontario from 1988 to 1993, an economic advisory body to the Province of Ontario premier.

Alexander has a bachelor's degree in economic geography from Eastern Illinois University.

* Wemyss, 46, vice president of sales, also will be located in the Chicago office. During the past 20 years, he gained extensive management experience in sales and marketing printed papers, including establishing a U.S. sales company for the Swedish paper company, Modo Paper AB, which was sold to the Finnish company, Metsa Serla in July 2000. He managed International Data Group's paper supply company. IDG is a major publisher of computer technology related publications in 75 countries.

Wemyss' father and grandfather owned paper mills in upstate New York and northern New Hampshire and he grew up in the paper business. Wemyss has a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of New Hampshire.

* Withers, 59, executive vice president and chief operating officer, will be located at the Brainerd mill. He has 35 years of paper industry experience with background in manufacturing and the technical aspects of the business. He started as a process engineer and progressed to production manager with the Kimberly Clark's Schweitzer division, a specialty freesheet manufacturer.

More recently, Withers was vice president of operations at St. Marys Paper from 1986 to 1994. Since 1994, he operated Paper Technical Services, providing consulting and technical services to European paper companies, which manufacture coated and uncoated groundwood and freesheet papers.

Withers has a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and a master's degree in pulp and paper technology from the University of Maine, and a Master's in Business Administration from the University of Massachusetts and completed an advanced management program at Harvard Business School.

Source: Missota Paper Co.