IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

King Mill and canal, Augusta, Ga. 1970s

Marty worked briefly at the King cotton mill after we were married but I didn’t take pics of the mill until after he’d worked there. Across the canal from it was the bulk of the cotton mill neighborhood, the worst part of which, the tenements lining the street, I think were already being torn down. But I remember going past them when I was younger and the humanity sitting out on the stoops was sad. As for the tenements, I remember a distinguishing feature being a lack of paint, such as in the cotton mill area we briefly lived in later outside of Atlanta.

The color of and outside the King Mill was all Georgia red clay but inside, in the mill, it was blue, indigo fibers floating so thick in the sweltering air that it was difficult to breathe and Marty came home covered in blue. You couldn’t get rid of the blue, as if it was millions of worms working into the skin. And after a few short days he was coming home coughing blue. If that was happening after a few days, one could imagine what it meant to work there a lifetime, and how many people lived in the tenements who no longer had their health because of their work. Marty only worked there a brief while but it was long enough. I yelled at him each day that he had to get out of there now. Not later. Now. He was just coming out of a long illness during which he’d been unable to work and had been unable to find work afterward.

Marty’s job was carrying these 12 foot long, three foot diameter rolls of denim as they came off the machines that rolled them. Carried them from one end of the building to the other from where they’d be shipped out. The indigo dye vats were directly below where he was working, thus the blue. He has no idea why King Mill didn’t have carts for carrying these huge rolls of cloth.

It was a non-union mill.

As you can see in the above photo, the windows of the mill are all bricked up. It was perpetual night in the mill in that sweltering blue cloud of fibers. I don’t know why they bricked over the windows. This link goes to an old postcard of the John P. King and Sibley Cotton Mills of Augsta, Ga. The postcard is from about 1900 to 1910 and the windows seem to have yet been bricked over.

The description reads:

Early-twentieth century postcard image of the John P. King and Sibley cotton mills on the Savannah River in Augusta, Georgia. John P. King Cotton Mill appears in the foreground of the image and Sibley Cotton Mill appears in the background. The expansion of the Augusta Canal between 1872 and 1875 served to further spur the growth of the cotton manufacturing industry in Augusta. In 1880 the Sibley Cotton Mill was built on the former site of the Confederate Powder Mill. The mill was outfitted with automatic sprinklers in addition to electric lighting and provided tenement housing for its employees. At the turn of the twentieth century Sibley Cotton Mill employed approximately eight hundred Augustans. Construction began on the John P. King Cotton Mill in 1882 and the mill produced its first bobbin in October of 1883. The four story mill was headed by Charles Estes and employed approximately six hundred people at the turn of the twentieth century.

If you care to take a look at the Summerville house of King Mill’s Landon Thomas there are five impressive images here. “On the hill”, or Summerville, was an older area in Augusta with some fine, large houses. It was cooler on the hill and being on the hill meant, in the old days, you wouldn’t be flooded. We lived in several different apartments there before and after living in downtown Augusta (when no one lived downtown).

The website with the postcards and links to Thomas Landon’s residence is “The East Central Georgial Regional Library”. Their page “Introduction to Historic Picture Postcards of Augusta” talks about “King Cotton” and the mills and the wealth that flowed from them, and then gives a brief paragraph on the labor situtation.

On the other hand, Augusta’s history of labor strikes demonstrated the unrest that sometimes flowed from wealth disparities and other problematic aspects of industrial practices.

Here is a pretty green picture taken of King Mill in 2001 when it was abruptly closed, supposedly unable to match overseas competition.

The film “Norma Rae” is based on the unionization of the J. P. Stevens mill. In the film Ron Leibman as Reuben Warshowsky delivers the following speech to the mill workers.

On October 4, 1970, my grandfather, Isaac Abraham Warshowsky, aged eighty-seven, died in his sleep in New York City. On the following Friday morning, his funeral was held. My mother and father attended, my two uncles from Brooklyn attended, my Aunt Minnie came up from Florida. Also present were eight hundred and sixty-two members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and Cloth, Hat and Cap Makers’ Union. Also members of his family. In death as in life, they stood at his side. They had fought battles with him, bound the wounds of battle with him, had earned bread together and had broken it together. When they spoke, they spoke in one voice, and they were heard. They were black, they were white, they were Irish, they were Polish, they were Catholic, they were Jews, they were one. That’s what a union is: one… Ladies and gentlemen, the textile industry, in which you are spending your lives and your substance, and in which your children and their children will spend their lives and their substance, is the only industry in the whole length and breadth of the United States of America that is not unionized. Therefore, they are free to exploit you, to cheat you, to lie to you, and to take away what is rightfully yours - your health, a decent wage, a fit place to work. I would urge you to stop them by coming down to room 207 at the Golden Cherry Motel, to pick up a union card and to sign it…It comes from the Bible - according to the tribes of your fathers, ye shall inherit. It comes from Reuben Warshowsky - not unless you make it happen. .

The film was made in 1979, which is after my husband was working at King Mill in Augusta.

This is the Golden Cherry Motel in Opelika. Filming for “Norma Rae” was done there. We were on the road doing the Holiday Inn circuit in the SE not long after “Norma Rae” was released and found ourselves put up at the Golden Cherry any time we were at the Holiday Inn in Opelika. Yes, they’d do that, not put you up at the Holiday Inn where you were playing, but put you in a cheaper motel. We called the Golden Cherry the Cherry Pit as the room was as cramped as I’ve ever been in, and was dirty and depressing. In order to film at the Golden Cherry, they’d knocked a wall down between two of the rooms. I never saw that particular room.

Staying there, our only consolation was the Golden Cherry’s vague notoriety.

Sally Field and crew may have filmed at the “Golden Cherry” but they stayed at the Holiday Inn. Apparently the people who ran the Golden Cherry were a couple called Aunt Loudell and Uncle Cell. If this is so, I don’t recollect anything about them. I had thought that the Holiday Inn and the Golden Cherry were owned by the same guy. I ask my husband about it and he says that they were. So at least that was the situation by the time we stayed there, which was early 80s. I never met the owner. I only remember the manager.

It has became fashionable and artsy to live in the mill area here in Atlanta. Small mill houses go for sizeable rents. Like most of these things, it started out as a cheap place for artists and musicians to live, then the upscaling happens and prices jump out of sight. After living in several different mill houses when we were first married, I can’t stand them and we have always steered clear of the mill area here though some find it yesteryear romantic. I don’t. I don’t like the smell of mill houses. Don’t like the quality of the air in them. Don’t like the feel of everything held together by a few rusty nails. I don’t like remembering how bitterly cold they are during the winter months and, because of lack of insulation, expensive to heat.

I feel just incredibly sad looking at a cafeteria token for King Mill. Maybe because a cafeteria token seems so perfectly symbolic of taking your sustenance from the place that steals your health and life, but finances fine homes and gardens in Summerville. It seems perfectly symbolic of a system that created generations of dependency poverty, people who worked for just enough money to have the tenement roof but never enough money to hope of getting away while still healthy and then unable to get way when disabled and their family members all working for the mill. This token at the above link was worth 10 cents and is now an item for trade and I wonder who wants to collect items from the textile mills.

Out of nowhere, H.o.p. said, “There are no small roles, only small actors, right?”

I don’t know what he had been thinking about that led up to this question/announcement this afternnon. But he was checking with me to make sure this philosophy was right, which one could tell from his voice he was certain was right but he was wanting to hear what I’d to say anyway.

It’s like wading through mud around here these days. Has been for a while. Speaking only for myself.

This is a kind of disgruntled posting.

One thing I’ve been doing is slowly adding to Gallery 4 in the art section of Idyllopuspress. That Gallery (now here at Flicker) is exclusively some old black and white and hand-tinted (some digital now) photos I did back in the late 70s of some of the older sections of Augusta, such as the Bon Air hotel which had been a resort and then was a retirement home in a state of ill repair. I have only a few photos that I took hanging about. And I’ve put them up on the web because I’ve looked around and I don’t think there’s any photography of the Bon Air and some of these places from that time period. Have yet a few more pics of some of the old Broad St. junk shops to add and a few of the houses and Old Medical College. If digital didn’t exist there’d be no saving most of them as they were stored in cardboard boxes and time didn’t work so well with these unprotected hand-colored photos. A lot of dust collected in them. Colors changed. Cleaning fluids that were used on them turned them yellow in the ensuing years. So I’ve had to do a bit of restoration work on each one of them.

And am slowly adding to Gallery 5 some of the very very few inks and acrylics I saved over the years, and most that I didn’t save, that I only have photos of. A lot of art is spread around god knows where, I don’t recollect, that I don’t have images of, and a lot of it too met the roadside, either because I was going through one of my purges, was moving and didn’t have room, or was damaged by the elements in places we’d lived in where there was a lot of mildew, or maybe a tree falling through the roof after a storm, things like that. It’s not a big loss because most of it was not very good art, everything I did in my teens and up to my late twenties was on its way to nowhere, but there are a few canvases that I regret having purged. Have some from later periods that I did keep and are down at the studio but I don’t have pics of and then a couple of the larger ones are in storage and don’t have pics of them either.

I realize that I somehow have deleted a post up last week in which I mentioned Operation Photo Rescue, which has a considerable, worldwide number of volunteers upon which they draw to restore photos damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The success of the project is really quite something with the organizing of the volunteers and the trips made to scan and catalogue photos for restoration work.

Since last week I’ve worked on two wedding photos from the same family, two studio photos that were perhaps for high school yearbooks, a photo of a person standing beside a chopper in probably Vietnam, and most recently an older studio photo of a woman. I think that’s it so far.

Photo restoration can be frustrating, especially with such heavily damaged photos. You don’t want to make up something which isn’t there and in a sense there is no “right” way to restore a photo, in that even when one is trying to be true as possible there’s a lot of personal aesthetics still at play that determine what you’re going to get as far as tones and contrasts and preservation of grain or artificial restoration of grain etc. Hand someone a screw and there’s a right way to screw it in and you know when it’s right. Photo restoration, there’s no “right” way. Plenty of wrong ways but no absolutely right way.

And of course when there’s heavy heavy damage, as with flood, there’s only so much one can do and then you simply have to let it go.

A lot of people choose to work clean and use filters to clear away grain but I tend to work “dirty” and don’t use filters, don’t blur, selectively go through and get rid of dust and scratches with tool tips trying to preserve and duplicate grain etc.

The one of the chopper in Vietnam, I looked all over for a photo of a similar chopper to help with the restoration since the part where the body of the chopper met the prop was almost entirely gone and I wanted to make sure I was getting it right. I wrote a couple of veteran’s websites, which might know about such things, asking where I might find a photo of a similar chopper but got no response…

Which is how it is.

Makes me crankier with the historical projects I work on when I contact libraries that I know have critical materials, and get no response even after several inquiries. One that particularly irked was when I contacted a library that had made available on the internet a treasure trove of photos and I informed them they had incorrect IDs, had misspelled the Indian Agency (not a matter of there being many ways to spell it, they had simply reversed syllables and spelled it quite wrong), and they never responded or altered the ID. Namely the Tryiptych digital initiative of the Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swathmore College Libraries. They even have a pic right there, in their collection, that states “Great Nemaha Indian Agency”. Seriously, it is the Great Nemaha. It is not Nehama. But they have catalogued all the images as Nehama. And I wrote them several times over the past six months–wrote several different people concerning this. And I never received a response. And they never changed it. And they never responded to me on my inquiry on their collection of Nemaha photos.

Which is how it is.

Though I was quite amiable.

You’d hope a library/academic institution would care a bit more. Especially about getting something right. I’m supposing if I was writing them with an academic title from an academic institution then I might get some response.

And now I need to go dig up a few emails that were sent me several weeks ago when my computer was down and write them back.