Paris, Pocatello, London and me

You can't see the Bannock Hotel

because this is a picture that is looking

South from the Hotel taken many years ago.

If you go back in my blogs a ways you will see a picutre of the 1st ward chapel. It was across the street to the North and West from this hotel. I learned a lot as a young man growing up in this hotel. I learned that you could skip out of church and to sit at the counter in the coffee shop and have a soda pop. I learned that you could get to the top floor, 12th maybe, and no one would catch you. Maybe as much as any one thing this Hotel helped me to understand why even though we were in Southeastern Idaho that we were "city kids". It may not hold a candle to big cities but it was not a farm.

Pocatello Idaho seemed like a city when I grew up. Today it seems far from what I have known as cities. I remembered this hotel again in later years when I read a book by George Orwell. It was called "Down and Out in Paris and London. The plot was to a large degree set in a hotel. First I was interested because it was about people who workedin foodservice. Orwell found the Hotel a perfect tool to show the "cast system" that people found themselves in while working in these big hotels. It really showed the down and out and how poverty was a trap and work didn't help that much if you were stuck in the cast system.

Underpass

I guess the fact that Pocatello had a big Hotel, a culture that existed by the tracks, and an underpass, makes it sound like a city. This underpass just reminded me of Pocatello. I spent time by the tracks, under underpasses catching pigeons and of course in and out of a Hotel. All times that perhaps I was less supervised than I should have been.

I learned about the "cast system" of Hotels described in the book

but I may have learned it first hand in earlier years at the Hotel Bannock. Years past. I grew up some. I went on to college. I remember a boy I knew in grade school and junior high. I remember going to his house by the tracks. We were good freinds in school. His first job was at the Bannock Hotel. Mine was in a delivery truck working for a wholesale food company while going to college. We often sent deliveries to the hotel. On day I was pushing a hand truck in the back door and my old friend from years before was hauling a trash can of slop out the same door. We met and hardly said a word to each other. He was wearing a grey uniform and I had just put a delivery apron on over my school cloths from earlier that day. To me it seemed as though it was my friend who didn't want to speak. I don't know what he thought. I saw that scene in George Orwells book played in a variety of ways. The book called it a "cast sytem". I just remember my friend who seemed to have been lost to our earlier years. I guess even in a little town in Southeastern Idaho people get trapped in a job for probably the wrong reasons.

I have been to Paris, and London and Pocatello. I would enjoy going back to all of them.