Get off my lawn!

The recent bit of trash talk is something I can get behind; I am not without experience in the matter.  Way back when, in the summers of '66 and '67, I was a janitor (Chicago Flat Janitors Local #1!) at a high rise apartment building on Lake Shore Drive at Addison.  It was one of those glass box twin-tower types, 28 stories with about 7 hundred units in total.  As the guy at the bottom of the totem pole one of my main duties was to empty and burn the trash, this being before EPA restrictions on garbage incineration.

Just as Uncle Ken noted, each tower had a garbage chute, and at the bottom was a big steel container, like a lidless Dumpster (TM).  These were the days before the ubiquitous plastic bags; garbage was wrapped in newspaper or in a paper bag.  Not a tidy system and it could get messy especially when the chute got backed up.  You would swing the bin out of the way and a bin's worth of garbage could be piled up on the floor.  That's why God made shovels, I think.  Before you put an empty bin under the chute you had to hit a switch that ran hot water from the top of the chute above the 28th floor.  When the water ran clear you shoveled up any crap, squeegeed the floor and you were good to go...to the other tower's garbage chute.

The fun part came next when you pushed the bin over to the gas-fired incinerator and burned all that stuff up.  Exploding aerosol cans were always fun, had one whistle past my ear one time.  When everything was burned up the incinerator had to be cleaned and emptied; easy enough but coat hangers would get hung up in the grates so you had to crawl halfway into the thing to get them out.  All of the ashes were shoveled into a different dumpster, this one with a lid.  Incinerators are marvelously efficient at reducing the bulk of trash but not so good for air quality, but that's enough trash talk for today.

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I think I mentioned that my sister and her hubby have moved into a new house.  They are still getting organized and unpacking and I inherited another family treasure (to me), the kind of thing that if you buy it in a store it's an antique but if it's been in the family for years it's just more old crap.  I didn't know it existed but here I am, officially an old fart with my great-grandfather's rocking chair.

There are no markings or names on it, so it could have been made by anyone, most likely some local guy but whoever made it knew what they were doing.  This is a very comfortable chair, perfect for watching the TV; too bad I don't have a porch to sit on and yell at kids.  Get off my lawn!