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Change: Same Corner of Atlanta, 1972 v. 2010
In 1972, my dad Dr. Thomas W. Smoot purchased West Chemical and Engineering Company. It was a small concern, begun by Harold West around 1964. It occupied a couple of derelict former houses on Huff Rod., off of Marietta (a.k.a. Atlanta) Street just west of Howell Mill Road.
I spent weekends and summers there, mixing vats of chemical products, reconditioning 55 gallon drums, labeling containers, and testing water samples in the lab. If I was good, I got to play with the copy machine, which took about one minute to make one copy; and the mechanical calculator, which weighed easily fifty pounds, and shook the entire table as it multiplied nearly twenty digits!
A few years later, Dad renamed the company "Kor-Chem" ("from the center of chemical technology") and moved it down the hill on Ellsworth Industrial, less than a block away.
Here's that street corner in July, 2010. A waitress at the outdoor cafe there, seeing my camera, said she was so tired of all the tourists!
