Maxine Rose Schur: The Garbage Men

Maxine Rose Schur reminisces about the sanitation workers in her neighborhood when she was growing up.

Monday was garbage day. So as not to miss the fun, when I was little, I’d be up at the living room window at the first clang of a can. I loved watching the garbage men.

In the 1950s, in the Sunset District of San Francisco, the garbage men were Italian agile fellows, and their company was called “The Sunset Scavengers.” With their boisterous ways and long leather chaps, they were to me cowboys who lassoed your garbage with spirit and song.

Back then, garbage cans were metal. When the lids were dropped on the sidewalk, it sounded like church bells echoing through the cold streets. Each man had his own 70-gallon aluminum can, called a “barrel.” A man would grab a garbage can and dump the refuse into his own barrel then dump it into the truck. With fifty houses on each street, they had to work fast yet they yelled and joked with each other like brothers, piercing the foggy mornings with jest.

But the best thing was their singing. They’d belt out scraps of opera.
Bang! Clang! Bang! “La donna mobile…”

Back then, the garbage was not put in large plastic bags. We lined our cans with newspaper and threw the trash in. And in the trucks the garbage wasn’t enclosed either. That was the beauty of it. The large blue wooden trucks boasted an intriguing hill of neighborly garbage for all to contemplate.

Those days are gone. Today, the garbage men wear fluorescent yellow vests and are called sanitation engineers. A steel robotic arm lifts our plastic bins and dumps the refuse inside the truck. The garbage is a secret.

I know this is good — it’s more sanitary and safer.

Yet today, garbage men don’t joke across the street to each other nor chide each other with insults. They don’t wear chaps. They don’t clang cans to make them ring like church bells. They don’t sing opera either. Today, the garbage men take your garbage and give you nothing in return.

For Perspectives, I’m Maxine Rose Schur.

Maxine Rose Schur is an award-winning children’s book author and travel essayist. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.