MICHAEL J. LACIVITA Recalling the treasures in the trash

During my daily neighborhood walks, recycling and trash collection days are especially memorable. The rows of orange recycling boxes filled with modern day aluminum cans, glass, etc. would have been real treasures for those of us who were Depression kid junk collectors.
At 13 years of age in 1937, I worked the entire summer vacation on the East Side city dump. It was the days before aluminum pop and beer cans. Those beverages came in returnable glass bottles. I recall very few plastic items, because that was an emerging industry. The terms Bakelite and celluloid were the plastics of our era.
There are still a few individual junk collectors around, carrying their plastic bags laden with aluminum cans. The large plastic trash and garage bags are truly a marvel of this modern day, because they doomed the wormlike maggot. I doubt if our younger generation have ever heard of this word, let alone seen these squirming worms.
Maggot country
I remember them well, because my job was to dump out the garbage daily into our metal garbage can behind our house. We didn't subscribe to a newspaper and didn't have plastic bags, so we dumped the garbage into the can as is. The garbage can turned into maggot country.
I admired the Depression day garbage man, because he carried a huge metal garbage container on his leather covered shoulder. He would empty several garbage cans into his large container and then dump it into his truck. He walked through back yards and alleys in all types of weather. He banged our metal garbage can against his container, and it set off a cacophony of barking dogs, loud enough to wake up the dead.
Today trash and garbage collection has been reduced to a science, and I still respect our hard-working modern day waste collectors. They handle tons of garbage each day in all types of weather. Getting in and out of their trucks many times a day is exercise in and of itself.
XMichael J. Lacivita is a Youngstown retiree who spends much of his time making photographs and writing his recollections of the Depression and World War II eras. He has collected many of his columns in a book, "Rag Man, Rag Man," and will be at a book signing from 2 to 4 p.m. today at Pig Iron Press on North Phelps Street downtown.