Photo of the Week

Traveling to a ghost town that was once the busy town of Cocoli on the Pacific Side of the Canal. Cocoli was once an important town on the West Bank of the Canal near Miraflores Locks. The town, like Gatun and Margarita were constructed to support the then Third Locks projects in the later 1930's and early 1940s. Work stopped when WWII started. See my article on this website by (clicking here). This photo of the gym brings back memories from a student assistant job I had back 1969. There were three of us that were hired by the Schools Division for the summer. The Schools Division had just acquired hundreds of elementary school student desks to replace the aging ones on hand. Our job was to unpack the desks and assemble them. What a very boring job!! We started out in a warehouse in Balboa and when we were done, the took us over to Cocoli, and in the bottom of the gym above, there were hundreds of more desks to assemble. We worked out in Cocoli for a few weeks in that gym basement. I remember on July 20 we listened to the moon landing on a little transistor radio we had. Between the warehouse in Balboa and the basement of the gym, we became very batty that summer, just like the bats that lived there.

Long live the memories of our Canal Zone home.