Landmarks of Your Personal Past

Thanks, Ms Olga, enjoyed your post about Australia too. Don't you just marvel, looking back at your life, how things have changed - that you actually went through those (seemingly, now) weird things?

I saw a special on one of the History channels about the earlier years in Australia, when it was still a penal colony. Geeez, what mean people existed, then. How about all those barrels of bacterial warfare stuff buried in all those tunnels, and that's still there?

Yes, I do marvel, Pemerson. Apart from anything else, ending up in Australia was such an arbitrary thing, really . Initially my parents were thinking USA, Canada but (as the story goes) my sister had some undiagnosable skin condition, which the health authorities of those countries found unacceptable. So then it was a toss up between Australia & South America ... Australia was almost an accident.

What it meant for me, personally, was that I received a free education & the privilege of having opportunities & choices in my life which my ancestors, & indeed, even my parents wouldn't have dreamed of, if they'd been able to return to the own country.

Yes, Australia in its early days was a very, very tough place. But I don't know about what happened with the bacteria, sorry.

But, look at your life Pemerson! Having read your contributions to a previous thread here, it's a wonder that a film hasn't been made about your life! (I mean it.) You've seen & experienced so much! What a life.

After moving to Michigan in 1972, I enrolled in a community college, at age 35. Oakland Community College was housed in several buildings that resembled Army barracks (really!) - that was part of an old NIKE site. The students were all amazingly interesting, anywhere from new high school graduates to over 50, plus all the auto factory line workers were taking management courses or anything to find a new job. We had so much fun there, the teachers were so helpful, thoughtful, caring, different. My philosophy teacher, from Yugoslavia, was a former priest of 20 years - the most handsome of men, and so intriguingly interesting. We all worshipped him.

Well, now that college is enormous and very beautiful. I went on to Oakland University from there but my good memories are of O.C.C., that old NIKE site where I learned public speaking and journalism. Once after I was out working in the world I took the same route, off I-95, and couldn't find it. Gads, the freeway had changed so drastically. I felt like crying, no kidding. The Army barracks were gone - so many places are gone with the wind, they sure are, everywhere you go.

Have you tried a Google search for old photographs of the college, Pemerson? (I know what you mean about treasured places disappearing, just like that! Gone with the wind, as you say.) I mean, the place might not exist in reality any longer, but at least there are most likely images of it. If you should find any old photographs, do post them here!

Marshall Field's in Chicago was a premiere luxury retailer during it's day and I learned my craft as an art director and graphic designer there. At my 2 previous positions after art school, I was a layout artist but here at Field's, I began heading up creative teams of photographers and models and stylists and art directing photo shoots for newspaper and magazine advertising. Just down the street from Wieboldt's, I still remember preparing for my interview and portfolio presentation. Still remember the day I was told that I'd gotten the position. It was glamorous work and we worked hard too, churning out a hundred newspaper and magazine ads a week, dozens of brochures a year, but it was fun and prestigious and it's still impressive to those in my industry to this day. I will always be proud of working there.

For good reason! I'm impressed.

My landmarks are disappearing.

The church where I was baptized and confirmed has been closed.
The high school I attended in East Boston is no longer in operation.
Neither is the one I transferred to in Ipswich.
My college was taken over by Sussex county and made over into a community college.
The church where I was married has been torn down.
So has the functional hall where we had our wedding reception.

Thanks Soz.

On that same note, several houses I lived in were scraped and are now condominium buildings. Just on my recent California trip we drove by my old lab - and it and the building are no longer there, though the parking lots now hold cars for what must be hundreds of condos.

Brava, Eoe.. I love that you worked at Field's doing all that.

Silicon Valley sits on ground I often hiked through with my brothers. It was all beautiful woodland.

Thank you.

I lived in several apartments all over Chicago but this was my favorite, a 1000 sq. ft. renovated loft space in the South Loop. Within walking distance to work, downtown, Grant Park, I had a killer view of the city including the elevated trains, and watched the filming of "The Fugitive" with Harrison Ford across the way at the Chicago Congress Hotel (formerly the Pick-Congress) on Michigan Ave. You can see this building and my trio of windows on the 7th floor several times throughout the movie.

I have not been to Miles, Texas, since I was weeks old. Soemewhere around this shot is a field that once had a cotton patch with a tent in it. There, I was hatched.

Oh! Thanks for the picture and the image.

At age 16, I went to work for relatives, building shell houses for the Jim Walter Corp. They sent us all over south Texas to work and even to west Texas a few times. We were constructing models for their new office in Austin the day the shooter in the college tower was at work. We listened to it on radio as we worked. The first year of my first marriage I subcontracted the building of several of them.


Once the underpinning of Florida-based Walter Industries, home building subsidiary Jim Walter Homes is shuttering its doors after 62 years in business. Management made the announcement this morning.

Immediate fall out from the decision includes the loss of 230 jobs across 12 states, including 45 positions at the company's headquarters in Tampa, Fla. Moreover, management stated that it expects the closure to trigger a pretax charge of between $8 million and $10 million to the company's balance sheet.

As of Dec. 31, 2008, the company had roughly 150 homes under construction.

"This is 20 years in the making," said Larry Comegys of the announcement. Comegys, now a managing director for financial advisory firm Algon Group, was president of Jim Walter Homes from 2004 to 2005.

Like Levitt & Sons, which filed for bankruptcy in November 2007, Jim Walter Homes was formed in the wake of World War II as soldiers returned from the war and needed housing. According to company information, Tampa entrepreneur Jim Walter founded the company in November 1946, when he used $395 in savings to buy and sell his first home, for a profit of $300.

However, unlike Levitt, which grew to renown through its development of the first master planned communities known as Levittowns, Jim Walter's success was rooted in its corporate M.O. as an on-your-lot builder. This strategy made home buying more affordable by leveraging buyers' sweat equity; people bought a lot, the company put up the shell of a home, and the buyers finished the home out.

The business flourished under the model; in 1985, the company was the largest builder in the U.S. by unit volume, closing roughly 10,000 units that year, Comegys said.

But the evolution of the housing industry, which effectively turned home builders into community developers, challenged the business model. Home builders began making most of their money off of land and were able to pad margins through the sale of options and upgrades in design centers. With a focus on scattered lot development and shell construction in "D" locations, the company fell behind the power curve.

"Even in places in rural Mississippi, those people had no interest in finishing the bathroom off," Comegys said, noting that most of the company's volume was coming from that particular area.

The company moved to catch up, opening its first subdivision in 2002, followed by few more, mostly on land owned by Walter Industries. But by 2004, the home building operation had become a drain on the diversified company's profitability.

Further hindering a complete revamp was the home building company's tie in to its sister financing arm, which was heavily focused in the subprime mortgage market.

In 2008, as metallurgical coal prices achieved record highs and housing experienced new lows, the corporate management team took steps to unburden itself from the declining profitability of both its home building and financing businesses. In mid-February, management announced that it would close nearly half of its sales branches as a first step toward dividing its financing and home building businesses, spinning them off separately, and ultimately unloading them from the balance sheet.

The individual spin offs of the financing and home building businesses suggested that management intended to sell off the entities discretely. However, by disconnecting the relationship between home building and financing, some analysts worried that the company could be sacrificing not only value, but a sale as well.

Their fears were confirmed as no buyer materialized. Some industry experts argued that, with a meager land portfolio and an inefficient if not outdated business model, there was nothing of value to acquire.

In a release, the company stated, "Efforts to sell the business were unsuccessful in the face of the unprecedented conditions in the housing industry and tightness in the credit markets."

"Even if the markets had continued hot, they'd still be shutting the company down," Comegys said. "They just weren't getting the traction they needed. It would've been a tough company to sell even in good times."

Hmmm. I used to do designs for a major developer, and eventually left all that from disenchantment, not only with the builder but with municipalities (lawns in the semi arid desert or really arid desert? back then, anyway), plus the stress. On my own in practice I did some large condo developments but I and they went low water with or without city rules.
Ah well, I learned a lot.

The most important landmark of my personal past was when I said "don't leave money on the dresser unless it means you want to take care of me".

Wise words, chumly. What the hell do they mean?

I was watching the movie Wyatt Earp and Mattie the former prostitute said: "Only, don't leave money on my dresser, please. Unless it's 'cause you wanna take care of me. Is that how you mean it, Wyatt?" http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/w/wyatt-earp-script-transcript-costner.html

Consider that many of the most popular tunes, poetry, religious text, etc have phrases that are (to put it nicely) rather undefined. Yet people around the world quote them, sing them, place personal meaning on them, etc.

So in this case the general references are sex, money and responsibility. In the context of the thread I suggest those three tings are landmarks of most everyone's personal past.

Also I thought it just sounded funny.