Tracks of the StoneBear
Tracks of the StoneBear Copyright MCMLXIII Uncle Hargus ALL Rights reserved
ROF= Ring of fire Odyssey MEF-H = Marine Expeditionary Force- Hargus
AL = ALAbama journey
The Jungle circa 1967/8
The stuff that doesn't kill you,... makes you stronger.
ROF Tracks of the StoneBear Odyssey Ring of Fire
Circa late 60's
Welcome to The Jungle
Lumberjack Meats
The stuff that doesn't kill you,... makes you stronger.
High school football season is over so there's afternoon hours to get a part time job. Always working to hustle up some bucks is nothing new, been doing this since age 10 with a clorox jug of gas and a lawnmower. Since 15 have worked the Summers doing road construction, ironworkers construction, shipyard boilermaker work... fairly good money in the summers and would save up a thousand bucks to go to school the next year. An after school job was some more $$ to make it to the next summer of a good paying job.
Started working at a local meat packing plant.... my introduction into the surreal world of " The Jungle"... Lumberjack Meats, a pork packing house plant. This was an eye opening experience for a teenager.
Hired as part time utility worker Pat from Samford.
***
Pat Pat was who actually hired me. Pat was about 24, working on his business degree at Samford University in Birmingham. He was the only normal person there.(maybe a couple more) Pat liked that my plan was to go to college and major in business also. He was encouraging, always had a smile and nice disposition. Pats instructions were always instructive, not demeaning, a positive attitude... he was a good guy. The other workers liked him too. He had a brown beatle haircut... it was the late 60's. He was professional ... always in a light blue gant shirt / , sometimes and izod type,... khaki pants, topsider shoes. I thin he was a frat boy at Samford. I was always glad to work on his tasks.
Pat described my job as a part time "utilty" worker that would be doing a lot of odd jobs around the plant. A lot of clean up work. A lot of straightening out the left behind messes that had been neglected. I would be doing things that were outside the production work - packing lines/ meat processing lines of the regular workers. This turned out to be really good as I got to see and work in ALL the different places/ lines in the plant, opposed to staying in one room like the production workers on an assembly line doing the same thing all day. I saw it all.
Football season was over so I had afternoons to work part time. Pat told me to work to about 6pm, or until I got to a stopping point on a task. As a football player I had PE at 7th period... so often I skipped out early most days at 2;10... clocked in at 2;15 and had about 3 - 3.5 to 4 hours work a day. Saturday work was another 8 to 10 hours... so part time was 28 to 30 hours at $2 /hr... $50 bucks a week spending money was ok in the late 60's.
Walking into plant for 1st time. Pat walked me through the plant for the 1st time and introduced me into the dept heads I would assist/ work for... it was like walking back into the middle ages. It was scary. Ugly , dreary, smell, ugly people/ country people. When I say ugly... think of appalachia,... of blue collar, uneducated, factory workers. This is in the Appalachian foothills. The back woods of Jefferson and Shelby county hinterlands. ... back over the mountain of hwy 25 into Shelby county. In the Carolinas it was textile factory workers.... this was meat packing plant. Very similar atmosphere... The looks I got walking through the different meat packing / processing lines/ rooms was like.... like what I envision walking into prison. The workers were all busy on an assembly line of slabs of meat.... about 1/2 black... 1 half white. They'd look up from their brow,... no smiles,... Scowls on their face... and go right back to cutting / prosessing the assembly line. Very noisy. The black workers were hard to guage at 1st... the white workers were country folk... backwoods country folk, they seemed mistrustful and withdrawn, very suspicious, isolated except for their small circle. Later on heard white guys talking about cousins, uncles, ect... working there. I saw a couple of guys that had dropped out of high school. I was in the 10th grade and I think I raised the IQ level being there. Not being snooty here but this was a very dismal enviornment. This was not the beautiful suntanned people on a California beach. Several of the white guys wanted "Hee Haw" to be on TV every night of the week.
It was cold. Cold air. All the workers wore layerd clothes and a white processing plant full length coat on top... all with various blood stains from red to turning brownish. Rubber boots as there was always water on the floors. White hard hats for the packing industry. All wore hats -- no hair exposed. And the smell... that 1st walk through was ungodly. A stinch that everyone working seemed to think was normal. Walking by the smoking ovens... 12' by 30' firebrick lined ovens smelled good; like barbeque. a rich smoked meat smell.
The 1st days task was to sort out a stack of pallets by the supply warehouse so the suppliers could take them back to ship again. This had not been done in years. about 1/4 thrown in dumpster as they were rotten beyond use. Maybe 300 pallets total. The next day was shovelling gravel into the potholes in the dirt parking lot. Next day was to shovel the ashes out of the smoker pits... and I was off to the races.
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Segregation: Bath houses / locker rooms. I cleaned a lot of stuff. The bath houses were segregated. The Civil rights Act had been passed in '64 but this was still the Jim Crow South. The white guys would not go into the black locker room section, & vice versa. But I could go through and hold a wastebasket and ask if they had anything to go out. I spoke to the black guys genuine,... had a smile,... gave them their respect... and they treated me somewhat indifferent; white boy. The white locker room had radio music of the most god awful country music. Not Bluegrass or Opry; that's actually good. This was horrible hokey country twang for basic country thinking. Hard working... but realy back country. The black guys radio listened to Tall Paul on WENN, the most popular black radio station in Birmingham... and they rocked. These were concrete block buildings and it had been years since any cheap whitewash was painted on the walls... peeling paint in places. The civil rights acts had been passed several years before; change was slow coming to the South, especially here. There were gas heaters for the winter, no AC. I remember a pot bellie stove of red hot coals... coal burning, i think in the black side. I shoveled the cold ashes and dumped them out back past the live hog pens.
In the processing / cutting lines black and white workers were side by side, but there was polarization. Seniority & union rules seemed to sort out definitions and the framework that maintained order in job movement... lateral or vertical.
Clean up bath houses and black guys appreciated. These bathhouses and lockers were dismal. Raw concrete floors that were horribly gungy brown and black from years of neglect. It was squalid in a way. The only previous cleaning was sweeping out, or moping with dirty lysol water that had built up over layers. The 2nd month, one Saturday I worked there, I got a fan to blow the fumes out... and mopped muriatic acid all through the black bathhouse.... and sprayed a steam hose through out and hit the showers too. toilets too. It was clean concrete floor and walls. Monday afternoon ALL the black guys thanked me and said it had never been cleaned like this. They treated me ok from then on... and spoke to me often with smiles and kidding.
Working road construction with Dad I had learned to do a job good, do the job good; for the sake of the job. This translated into a trust of the black workers that they appreciated. The management had obviously not had a prior attitude that they deserved clean facilities. I gave then some respect and they looked after me after that.
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Jobs in different depts Drafted. The foremen knew I was a good worker and when someone didn't show up-- short-handed- I would be pulled into production work ... which I was not supposed to be doing... but it was a job, and interesting. It didn't take 2 weeks to be drafted into inpromptu production work.
Kill room Noah The kill room was where they would bring in live hogs, chain their back leg and hoist them up onto an iron pulley track. Squeeling, hoisted upside down on the track,... a black guy with a gold front toooth would stick a 10" knife into the hog through the neck and collarbone. Red blood would pour over into a corner as the hogs bled out and moved aroung the iron pulley system. When they bled out,... the overhead pulley system would lower them down on the cut line for the butchers to begin their initial cuts. Slit the gut... a USDA white coated inspector would pull the guts out and inspect for worms, look at their kidneys and squeeze to see a white looking worm... ect... stamp them w/ a blue ink processing USDA stamp-- and pass them on down the line. He could red tag an un-healthy hog. Few were tagged. About 250 hogs were slautered on a day. The corner where the blood dropped got to about a foot high of coagulated blood. really gross. Like a mound of red/ brown jello. and it would be washed / steamed down the drain in the cleaning ... which I assisted Noah many days. It was a white tiled room and after the hogs had gone down the overhead rail line... Noah and I would spray the room with a soaping wand and steam clean for the next days production. A horrible experience to see this. Pigs / hogs squeeling. This plant was very noisy.
Cut room: After the cut room, the hogs were hung on the overhead rail line in a cooling room overnight for the next days preparation. You cool meat down to 45*... then you can cut it. cold meat is how you cut it. All the black guys on the cut line started discecting each hog / pig with knives and sent them down the line. Hams... the hind legs. Pork bellies= Bacon. Loins,... shoulders= picnic hams... I never could understand why they called them picnics. Not as big as hind leg hams ... like you think of a thanksgiving ham. Side meat... and fatback... it's all for sale. and the periferies; pigs feet, ham hocks,... Pork Snouts... Who in the fuck buys pork snouts.... but they do. There is a market for them and this is where they come from. kidneys separated.... and the entrails were sent back to a room and steamed /cooked... it smelled horrible back there... a black guy shoveled goo into a press, steam cooked and made 4" by 24" patty molds... pressed and stacked into boxcars for dog food. It was horrible. Oh yeah,... don't forget... Chitlins. Pig intestines packaged for sale. This is the South; Chitlins ! Chitlins w/ cracklins.... the South!
Hams ... Pickle pump. Hams... there was this big 500 gallon vat. and they'd mix bags- like a bag of white cement- of salt and alkaline enzyme preservatives... stirred around. Then through hoses to a nozzle-- like an air hose with a trigger to a large needle-- only this was liquid "pickle" ... and the black guys would get a big 12 pound ham in front of them, find the right artery/ vein,... insert the neeedle.... squeeze the trigger and pump about 3 pounds / 2 quarts of preservative into the hams. The hams would litterally "grow" in front of your eyes... 'til the pickle would start spraying out of the many end capillaries; that's how they knew the hams were "Full" of pickle. .. and send them down the line to be hung on racks and smoked.
Bacon = Pork bellies. The pork bellie line was all black guys trimming the gristle off into an aluminum barrel.... that waste would be sent in those barrels to the Birmingham plant to make hot dogs and lunch meat. You don't want to eat hot dogs!
Smoking ovens; Hams, shoulders called "picnic" hams... smaller hams with a lot more bone in, would be tucked into mesh bags, hung on racks and rolled into the smoking ovens. Bacon slabs would be hooked with a metal hook and hung on racks and rolled into the smoking ovens. The smell was wonderful.. like barbequed meat. The pickle would cook out and drip all over the firebrick lined ovens... and I would steam clean them later.
Lighting; It was lit strange. Light bulbs in industrial globes and metal grids. It was cold and the globes would fog at times. Kinda dingy.... there was enough light to see.... mayby it was the dreariness of the atmosphere that made it seem like dismal.
Assorted cuts kidneys,... pork snouts . totally disgusting. a 3' X 5' vat of pork snouts,... a pork face looking up at you. undescribable. One of the workers held up a snout on his face and it looked hilarious... a surreal expeience. Ham hocks = pig ankles. Pigs feet... pickled pigs feet; no place like the south. There was NO waste; all was procesed.
Frozen Bacon and Hams Freezer rooms. To balance production, they- the company -- would buy a boxcar load of frozen hams, bacon, ect... and we'd have to load them into these huge freezer rooms like a fire bucket brigade tossing hams. One of the guys got hit in the head by a thrown frozen 12 lb ham and knocked him cold; out like a light for 10 minutes. The whole plant was cold, except near the ovens... but the big room they were in was cold
Bacon packaging line. women. The bacon packaging line was ALL women. Country women.... the long haired... don't cut your hair church women of the holy roller kind. They had their hair tucked up in a hair net uner a hat... but these were some country women. Think appalachia. Final trim, adding a strip after the slicing machine to bring the weight correct, packaging, then boxing like 24 pkgs. Onto a pallet for shiping
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Wildcat Srike A Wildcat Stike is an UN-authorized stike by the union. It IS a mutiny by rednecks. Trust me... you never want to be in a mob of mad, pissed off rednecks with a grievance. It was something about one of the black guys had not clear seniority about a line job... and white guys were arguing between themselves ... then it escalated by the time I got there. I can understand what a lynch mob is like after seeing this. They will turn in a second on a victim. It is a dangerous place/ event to be in. I was on the perifery... watching the ringleaders with redneck menatality demanding justice for a grievance over seniority / job on a line. Now,... after seeing this... I know how black people were hung in the south. Mob rule / law by mad rednecks is dangerous! This lasted about an hour... and as an observer to the side... don't get caught up in mob rule!
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Maintenence Helper Henry One of my jobs, especially on weekends was to help the main maintenence man Henry. A real country guy, but he knew this plant. I'd worked construction machinery and knew greasing and oiling... and he appreciated. I greased and oiled all the machines in the plant; everything! I went all over and knew every nook and cranny... in every dept / room machine. This was a real learning experience. It was a horrendous place to work for 6 months... but I learned a lot! I learned alot about industry, about people,... about life. and I walked away... which a lot of those workers couldn't do. They had to work there. I knew I had to go to college. Saturdays were usually helping Henry on machines. There were endless pumps, pully wheels, drive / fan belts to be replaced. Sometimes there was Sunday work. Part time but some weeks would work 35+ hours. & I'm in high school.
*****
Management
Pat Pat was who actually hired me. Pat was about 24, working on his business degree at Samford University in Birmingham. He was the only normal person there. Pat liked that my plan was to go to college and major in business also. He was encouraging, always had a smile and nice disposition. Pats instructions were always instructive, not demeaning, a positive attitude... he was a good guy. The other workers liked him too. He had a brown beatle haircut... it was the late 60's. He was professional ... always in a light blue gant shirt / , sometimes and izod type,... khaki pants, topsider shoes. I thin he was a frat boy at Samford. I was always glad to work on his tasks.
Graham Mr Graham was not the sharpest shovel in the shed. About 6'2, brown hair slicked with vitalis / hair "oil", overweight ~240+, black rim glasses... Graham was not capable of making a decision on his own.... he always had to go / leave, and would come back with the other foreman, or had talked w/ him... then he could tell you what task to do. He was spineless to Neville. He was the plant foreman standing around with a clipboard always overlooking the production line workers to make sure they didn't slack up... work fast and don't slow production. A real nerd.
Neville This was the big boss / plant manager. First name Harold? In all my years of working with other people... this was the worst person I met by far. He was a little man, litterally. Mr. Neville was about 5' 3... a Napolean complex for sure. overweight pudgy, balding,... black hair halo / male pattern baldness with a black comb over. Neville was the most loud mouthed, mean spirited, beligerent, pushy, offensive, abusive, obnoxious, racist, bigot (I usually don't use profanity in these posts) asshole... and I mean he was a real asshole... a real pompas asshole; that is the best, most favorable description I can give. It's really worse than that. He was a despicable human. At times I'd have a task of doing something up in the office and was privy to hear office conversations with the plant foremen getting orders.... and sometimes Neville's telephone conversations of his schemeing, back stabbing, bragging about firing one of the black workers... and he used the N- word about every other sentence. He was an absolute jerk face coward; a bully for sure.
Lumberjack was a private owned company. There were 2 wealthy owners in Birmingham that we never saw. I saw a black Lincoln or Chrysler Imperial in forn ot the plant a couple of times. Neville was their henchman to run their plants and their hands were clean. He was their overseer on a plant "ation" work farm / plant . factory. This was not unique. This is how old South / old Birmingham money worked. The owners washed their hands of any responsibility of the uglyness of the horrid conditons at the plants. I guess that was beneath them.... that was Nevilles job. The South may have lost the Civil War and had to give up slavery, but the old money figured out ways to wean off of cheap labor. Growing up in birmingham in the 50's and 60's I saw the last vestigages of the Jim Crow South... 100 years later Lumberjack Meats was a clear view of this horrible penchant/ atmosphere/ system/ mindset/ attitude, and precisely the reason there should be unions to bargain for better working conditions.
*** this is from Wikipedia about peonage... and you say it's comparing apples to oranges... the point here is Old South money has a very scurioulus history of exploitation of the poor for cheap labor without concious. I was just observing an evolutionary step up from slavery, to Jim Crow peonage, to now.
Peonage is the system in which a debtor must work out what he owes in compulsory service to his creditor. In the South, this was the condition of the sharecropper, who went deeper and deeper into debt to the planter on whose farm he worked. Since the planter furnished the goods the cropper needed and kept the account books himself, it was virtually impossible for the black cropper to free himself from debt and thus escape the system.
The selection that follows was obtained fram an intervu~w with a black peon. It is of particular interest because it describes not only peonage but also the convict-lease system, whereby black people were arrested for minor offenses then leased to white farmers by the state for a fee. Needless to say, the number of arrests made ruse with the need for labor on farms. ***
Jefferson and Shelby counties were the worse for this type of oppresive corruption for cheap labor. Birmingham companies were good at getting cheap labor, and the company owners slept well knowing the oppression they wrought. Google Docena, AL miners graves and see what you find. Docena= slang for 12... the 12 convict miners buried in the slag heap outside the Docena coal mines. These owners knew exactly what they were doing.
***
Bear with me here. Trying to describe the mentality of working in the poor South... this link will put the "management" / Labor relationship into perspective much better.
http://www.leftinalabama.com/diary/11147/part-2-history-of-prison-privatization-making-crime-pay
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You think I don't like Neville... not so; he's one of my favorite characters through this life journey. Never have I seen so much frustrated rage in a person in life. I know he was tormented at everything and was not happy. I'm glad he was miserable. It was my 1st view of poetic justice. Money, power, title, priviledge,... and Neville was the most miserable person ever. Since they switched me over to production work at times,... the union made them - lumberjack - pay me back pay for production. Neville chewed me out and said I was not in the union so I wasn't entitled to the production work pay. So I signed the Meatcutters and Butchers union #442 card... right there on his desk... dues were $4.60 a month... and the union steward informed him otherwise. I thought Neville was going to explode he was so much in a rage that he had to pay a few hundred extra bucks. It was actually funny to watch this unfold. I worked there a couple more weeks to mid May. The workers liked that I didn't let Neville push me around like he did to so many workers. I only saw Neville a couple of times and he gave me the evil eye... uuuuhhhh. What a loser. So when Graham came one afternoon and had some rediculous clean up task; an impossible task ... one that I knew he was not capable of thinking up himself.... obviously they wanted to make work hard for me. So I gave Graham my 15 second notice,... Graham said I couldn't quit until I finished. So I walked straight over, clocked out, left them their dirty task, swore I would never go into a packing plant again.... and would go to college. As I drove out of the gate, I swore I could here Neville yelling / cursing throwing stuff around in the office. I'm glad I got to see "The Jungle".
Jotting these notes down today in 2012, I look at these modern manufacturing plants like the GM / Ford / Intel facilities that have state of the art facilities. Well lit and measured for the eyes. Epoxy paint of wall that are cleaned regularly. Floors so clean you could eat off them. Ventalated, air conditioned, pneumatic lifts so backs aren't strained, protective eyewear and earplugs.... really pleasing atmospheres to work in. I look back and Lumberjack seemed like it was in medieval times. The dark ages mentality was stifeling and was another notch in my pshyche that I didn't know quite how.... but I would go to college and graduate. In business school at UofA while studying modern management styles / structures / philosiphies to increase production = and profits... reading Lester thurow from MIT, and Tom Peters In search of Excellence, I thought back about the time at lumberjack meats and thought... I think my crib was switched; I was supposed to be someplace else with progressive innovative thinking instead of the stifling fields of Leeds, AL.
A couple weeks later in late May '69 schools out and I was ready to go back to work for the summer with Dad where ever he was at the time. Time to get out of here. This Summer would be working in a shipyard. ADDSCO; Allabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Co on Pinto Island in Mobile Alabama.
Late Sunday night after a weekend of saying my goodbyes made my way to The American Legion Post 107, Leeds, ALa; that's where Dad and I would meet up to head to the Mobile, ALa shipyards. Sometime after 11pm.
after too many beers at the American Legion, I led Dad to the '59 Ford in the parking lot... poured him into the backseat to sleep it off... got in the drivers seat and left Leeds, Alabama at 11pm on a warm Summer night... heading south to the gulf driving all night to start work next morning in the shipyards of Mobile. Well, that was somewhat of the plan. Remember this was Dad; anything was possible. Between here and there could be any number of events on the way. ... stopping at a roadhouse Honkey-Tonk for another beer, winning $80 in a card game, engaging in some varying degrees of involvement with some bar floozies giving them a ride or whatever...
We drove straight to the shipyard in Mobile, Pinto Island. Big parking lot dimly lit. Large brick office building. Dad was awake by then directing me where to turn. It was after 4am and slept in the car in the parking lot for an hour or so, awoke at daybreak. About 6am when the doors opened there were 400 to 500 guys there in the big man room to apply for a job. There were old guys, middle age, plenty of young guys like me, all hollering their skills to catch they ear/ eye of the several hiring supervisors. They guys yelled "Painters, Welders, chippers" ect to get an application chit/ slip to get hired.
I don't know how Dad knew how to maneuver around this chaotic hiring auditorium with yelling and hollering like what i envisioned a slave auction would be like. Dad and i went into this mess and within 10 minutes Dad had both of us hired on as ADDSCO - Alabama Dry Dock Shipbuilding Co - Boilermaker/ Ironworkers for like $3.25/ hr- very good pay. Dad was a wheeler-dealer from way back!
We went straight to whatever bay/ pier#, reported in, Peir foreman gave us a days work card; it was an IBM data card/ punchcard, and told us where to report to and what work gang. We worked all day. I saw Dad a couple of times during the morning as I carried tools and equipment into the drydock under the ship jacked up for repairs. At lunchtime we met up and sat and talked. We had not brought a lunch so it was a 30 minute rest. We knocked off when the shipyard whistle blew I guess about 3;30. came to the dock entrance, a line of 12+ men, handed the dock supervisor the IBM punchcard, Supervisor wrote in our badge#, 8 hours work, signed it, and we dropped into the paycard box. That was my 1st day in the shipyard.
2nd shift was coming in to work. Dad drove now, out of the Pinto Island gate, turned left, mile or so went over a huge bridge over the Mobile River entrance of the Mobile Bay. It was industrial and stunk like crazy. There was the smell of Gulf States paper co to the right/ north of the road. I could see the plant and steam plumes. At the bottom of the bridge Dad turned right onto Hwy 43 for couple hundred yards and stopped under big trees beside this huge old 2 story southern house with wrap around covered porch. It was brown from the paint being worn off 50 years ago. It was Miss Bells boarding house; 110 Telegraph road, Prichard, ALa. Dad had rented a "room" for $7.50 a week. The borough was Plateau, ALa. This was home for the next 3 months. After a shower and cleaned up we went and got something to eat. I had not slept in a couple of days. I just remember closing my eyes, and it seemed like 2 minutes and I was being shook to wake up. 2 weeks later 1st paycheck was for~ $210.00, $105 week after $25/ week, $50 taken out for taxes. That was quite an awakening for taxes for a teenager.
These early working treks with Dad evidently formed my curiosity for heading out into the unknown, somewhat desperate to be with Dad, somewhat adventurous going on a skeleton of a plan then making it work out... a plan formed on the thinnest of possibilities, maybe even some reckless lack of preparation; pretty sure this is where my journey of odyssey began... where the RT- Road Trip mentality began. The search for what's out there. The pursuit, the hunt for what makes a different place tick... ?What was it about? good and bad. After a lifetime of assorted odyssey I understand Homer much better.
Sons need to work with their Dads some. It teaches how to be the man they will become. You learn the good things that will build into your character; who you will be, what you stand for. You can pick up some bad habits too.
This next journey is introduction to Cajun life. I worked with and got to know the Cajuns working in the shipyard. I got along with them, and they liked me cause I was a hard worker; they respected that. The Honkey-Tonks in Prichard ALabama were "private" clubs that could sell alcohol on Sundays. Prichard was a rough place. I saw many barroom fights, some severe beatings, a couple of stabbings and shootings. "Cottrells" club, "The Rocket Club" i remember. There were a dozen more I knew in another year, soon, it would be the Marines while Viet Nam was still on. When I got to The Marines, it was like... I've lived in Prichard, ALabama; i can handle this.
I was gone from home for the next 25 years... Marines, college, Latin America,.... Florida, raising a family. ... journeys to the 4 corners of the world. During that time Lumberjack Meats ceased to exist; bankrupt ... evidently ceased to exist and the pix are of what's left of the buildings. The bath houses/ locker rooms between the white building and red brick building is gone. This is all that's left. ... and I'm still kickin' around. There's a saying in Latin America; the stuff that doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger. Also -- It is better to become, than to be born being.
You never drink twice from the same stream.
Copyright MMXV ALL StoneBearTracks blog posts and photographs ALL Rights reserved
*****
Lumberjack update May 2018
Sometimes you live long enough to see things come full circle. You see things that run their
course and you get to see the end result of the things you went through And were part of.
A person that wanted revenge would say that's Poetic Justice, that the other party got their
just Rewards,what they deserved. This is not about revenge. this was a part of an early life that
I endured that was sure not fun or pretty. I learned an awful lot as a young teenager working
in the jungle of the Meatpacking industry at Lumberjack Meats in Leeds Alabama in 1967.
These last few pictures taken in May 2018 are of the raizing, demolition of the old Lumberjack Meats Factory, packing industry plant in Leeds. I don't pass by this and have any Joy or are giddy.
I just look at this pile of rubble and in an instant of a nanosecond think back of the darkness
of that time and place. The buildings have been empty ? 25 years, ? 30 years? I don't know.
All I do know is that Lumberjack Meats ran its course and sat empty, useless closed down for a long
time whether it was from mismanagement or a changing Market. I don't see how the market changed
because people still eat 3 meals a day breakfast being one of the main ones, bacon, pork, and Ham
are in the food chain.
Lumberjack meats is gone... probably forgotten by all except for this singular blog post of a past
worker. Lumberjack Meats is gone and I'm still kicking around in 2023.
You never drink twice from the same stream.
Just because you wander doesn't mean you're lost.
Uncle Hargus: Last of the Independents
Have Bear,
Will Travel
StoneBearTracks Copyright Uncle Hargus MCMLXIII ALL blog posts/photographs/video ALL Rights reserved
ALL Blog posts/photographs/video Copyright MCMLXIII ALL Rights Reserved
