Resilience
My multimedia career started in these buildings. It was happenstance that I wandered by this scene able to catch a few frames of the bricklayer’s demise.
(Last remaining structures at the Georgia Pacific Mill in Bellingham. Look closely and you can see the wall leaning about 30 degrees as the back hoes pull heartily.)
(My dSLR was in the car, best clarity I could capture with iPhone. Would of loved to have captured the girders twisted like pretzels in more detail.)
The dust reached my face and the smell of history hit my senses. I reflected on my time inside. The year was 1994 between Christmas and New Year. It was definitely the wrong time of the year to be six months into business development and still trying to land my first client. I was frustrated and ready to hang it all up when a message came from Lonnie Wiebe at Georgia Pacific. She saw our reel. It was the only reel that she viewed containing industrial content (documentary footage I shot in an Alaskan cannery). She wanted to discuss developing a new safety program her team had been tossing around. I still remember receiving that voicemail. It was a breath of fresh air needed in the nick of time.
I worked with Lonnie and the GP team on many projects over a six-year period. The largest and last of which took a turn for the worst in the development stage. Computer Based Training was in its infancy post laser-disc era. Authorware was the prosumer multimedia editor of its day. I had a team of four developing a spec project. We secured 50+ project managers from various GP ranks, had them excited by our product. But it only took one person to shut the door. Five-months in to the pitch and the regional head informed us that corporate decided to go with a national provider. Quite different from the call I received from Lonnie four years earlier. This call felt like a ton-of-bricks falling on top of me. I got up, dusted myself off and looked ahead. The team and I continued creating content for GP for years after. But on that day I made the decision to put more energy into our own Intellectual Property.
Within a few years I was in Seattle balancing the creation of enterprise and entertainment original content. If there was a plug to pull, it would come from my own hand as much as any client's. Sadly, during the same period, GP corporate took a page from its own playbook. With little to no notice, Headquarters (Atlanta) decided to shut the door on the entire Bellingham Mill. This decision represented a loss of 800 direct and 3000 indirect jobs.
This Mill helped build Bellingham, helped build me, my resilience. And now after 75 years, it tumbles down to make way for what will build the new generation of Bellingham.
