Framed or unframed, desk size to sofa size, printed by us in Arizona and Alabama since 2007. Explore now.
Shorpy is funded by you. Patreon contributors get an ad-free experience.
Learn more.
November 1933. Kingsport, Tennessee. "Ola Brooks of Mount Carmel. This girl is placing index tabs, applied with tweezers. A moderate degree of skill is required to get tabs in the right place and in the right position. This girl came to the Kingsport Press directly from a farm and has been working only two months." Another of Lewis Hine's photos for the Tennessee Valley Authority. View full size.
Mt. Carmel was once recognized as the only town in the United States to be totally on one side of the road. Since then, the city has secured property on the other side of the road and has annexed the cemetery over there. Story from CBS.
Finger tabs! WOW, I'd almost forgotten about them altogether. They are certainly on the list of animals to soon disappear. Replaced of course by GOOGLE.
Through the marvels of the Internet, we can find the history of the Kingsport Press, which appears to be a continuing business - manufacturing books.
I agree with those who note this must have been mind-numbing work, but in 1933, survival was the priority, not job satisfaction.
I know nothing of Marcel waves (except I've heard of them) but my Grandma used to make her hair look exactly like that at home by putting these giant, curved-to-fit-the-head clips in her hair in the morning. By the time she was ready to go out, she had achieved these long "waves." And she only went to the beauty parlor for a trim.
Kingsport, Bristol and Johnson city. I've spent a good bit of time in that area in the last ten years. To this day good jobs are hard to come by in the mountains and you don't have to far from Kingsport to to find that many people still live a very hardscrabble life there. That job would have been a much better way of making a living than toiling in the fields all day. She's a very lucky girl indeed.
She has a job during the depths of the Depression. Chances are she sent money home to help her family.
I thought I knew about the most boring jobs in the world.
Apparently my musings have been trumped.
Eight hours of that, five days a week and your brain turns to oatmeal.
After they've had a marcel wave?
On Shorpy:
Today’s Top 5