Bookmark Project - New Orleans Domino Sugar Factory (cityscapes) / Slaughterhouse Advantages

I bought my first digital camera Thanksgiving 2002.  Shortly after Christmas of that year Andrew and I took a trip to New Orleans, marking the first trip captured with the new technology, a Fujifilm 3800.  By then I was hooked, excited at the potential and the fact that we could come back home and see our pictures without the hassle of taking film to Walmart or some such place.  And the literally-instant gratification stoked my creativity to a whole new level.  Almost every frame brought a surprise that could be creatively explored as the days passed.

This particular bookmark is from a pic taken while on a boat tour of the Mississippi River.  It's the Domino Sugar factory - full of history, nostalgia and earth tones...I knew right away it was a "keeper" (though I hadn't yet adopted the term).

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[continued from yesterday's post; series started on 10/20]

There were many advantages to working in the slaughterhouse.  One was that it was good, honest hard labor.  Very hard labor - for every ten hired about eight washed out within two weeks.  After each summer there I was a lot healthier physically, and noticeably stronger - my brother Bob used to make me show off my muscles whenever we got together.  The hard work was one of the greatest aspects of the job.  And in later summers when I moved beyond the fat table and took other jobs on the line, the repetition didn't bother me that much.

Another advantage was that it was almost 100% blue collar.  There were a handful of the white-collar manager types, but virtually every soul under the roof of that plant was the hard-working, down-to-earth, hand-to-mouth, non-pretentious individual with (mostly) good values.  Indeed there were a few jerks, as is the case everywhere, but I felt very comfortable and learned a lot about life in their midst.  However it's true that, being a college student, I had a brighter outlook for the future, thus knew - and was glad - that I was merely a visitor to that world looking in, if not even a little down, from the outside.

While on the subject of the people on the floor, there was an incredible variety.  Many were immigrants from Mexico, legal and otherwise.  For some reason there was a good percentage from Laos...in fact the first ethnic grocery store I ever saw was a Laotian one that I passed every day on the way to work, on the famous Route 66.  And, most interesting, there was a smattering of Navajo Indians.  True to the stereotype, they were known for showing up drunk, and not many stayed very long.