Spent a miserable year in Vietnam early in my USMC career.

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
Ft. Polk / Sleazeville, LA in the summer.

I was at Ft Polk in the winter of 1970-1971.

Back in the mid-80's, I spent the better part of two years working on an engineering project at a large manufacturing facility in Cuautitlan, Mexico, just outside of Mexico City. If the world ever needs an enema, Cuautitlan would be the right place to insert the tube.

Nokia

Late 80's to the early 90's I worked on weekends doing physical inventories in GM dealerships for Motors Holding. They were GM's lender when a person wanted to buy a dealership, basically your business partner that you bought out over time.

We did normal yearly ones and termination ones. The termination ones were usually rough, more times than not those were not being sold, just closed up. And that was a red flag, normally the only ones that were closed up were in marginal market areas. Usually old, dirty, dark and nasty places.

Two come to mind, both in Detroit, one at Seven Mile and the John Lodge, and one at Livernois and Seven Mile.

Seven and Lodge, not too bad inside. I knew the parts manager, actually worked for him at the first dealership I started at in 1970. He ran a pretty decent ship even with the constraints he had there.
Our problem was having to walk a couple blocks to the body shop to count parts. On our way, early on a SUnday morning we came upon an older lady, obviously well versed in the neighborhood's ways. She is walking down the sidewalk with an angry scowl on her face and a Louisville Slugger in her hand. We gave her a wide berth off both sides of the sidewalk.

Second one, Livernois and Seven Mile. Actually nostalgic for me, two owners previous it was Packer Pontiac, the second dealership I worked for, 1971-1972. Packer sold the building to Porterfield Wilson, a GM Minority dealer who moved his store from Grand River near Greenfield to this larger and "newer" (1946-8) facility. It was actually being run by GM as Mr. Wilson had passed away and GM stepped in an attempt to keep this store open. What a dump inside!

As I pulled my car up, we were waved into the building to park. The neighborhood surrounding this store had gotten so bad the safest place for us was locked inside. They brought lunch into us, we were not allowed to leave to sample some of the local offerings, not that I would have wanted to. Inside, it was like I stepped back to 1972. Walls were still the same green with the same dirt I swear. Packer's "creed", painted upon one of the doors inside was still there, but crudely painted over Bill Packer's signature was Porterfield Wilson's name. I wandered around inside during breaks, brought back memories. Found a couple of things from the old days, one place on the ceiling where I put my name and date like others had done, 1971. Another was an old wooded desk chair,nothing special.But taped on the back of it was lettered in magic marker "de throne", our assistant manager's desk chair. I really wanted to snag that but didn't. A couple of people would have appreciated it, including the assistant as I knew where to find him. It was a mess, parts scattered all over, trash,half eaten food. A real rat hole.

Anyway, dark, dusty(!) hot and cold depending where you were inside there. I ended up with a full blown migraine the next day flat on my back due to all the crap floating in the air there. They tore it down soon after, another strip mall in it's place.

I was in charge of demolitioning a facility we had owned for 80 years in the Bronx. The local gangs were afraid of the Teamsters (word on the street was the Teamsters went to town with pipes and chains after somebody carjacked a Teamster driven semi), but when the Teamsters went home at 3:30 PM that neighborhood got scary. We made it a point to shutdown work in time to be locking the gate at 3:30.

In Detroit, we had a very old facility that involved driving 16 blocks through a high-crime neighborhood to get to our 1/4 mile long one way in and one way out private road entrance at the back of the neighborhood . Some of the lowlights were a local thugs dumped an executed body on our site (hands tied behind back and bullet to back of head), broke into our facility at night and used our heated garage to strip a car, and had car jacked one of our guys. We were planning a construction project so I was meeting the construction manager there, and I'm pretty sure I dodged a carjacking by maintaining a safe following distance and not letting two cars pin me in the middle of a 1 lane, 1 way block (I peeled off on a side street when I saw the car in front of me block the road). The project promptly had a scope change to include a new road across a railroad track and a new motor operated gate so nobody had to enter the facility through that neighborhood ever again.