Days Work: Street Crews Set to Sweep Up 1986 Calendars

Isaac (Sparky) Sparks is not one to occupy himself with the doodlings of others, except occasionally on New Year’s Eve.

That’s when Sparks and 11 other workers for Los Angeles’ Bureau of Street Maintenance stay late to clean up all the calendar pages that downtown office workers toss out their windows to evict the old year, a tradition dating back as far as anyone can remember.

“You hurry along picking up the stuff, but you can’t help but notice some of the pages,” Sparks, a 14-veteran with the city, said Tuesday. “Last year, I remember seeing some little drawings of nude men. I guess they were drawn by secretaries.”

Whatever the chronological curiosities lying in the gutters, Sparks can think of better ways to spend this day.

“I’d rather be home with my family,” he said.

Los Angeles is not unique in this custom. Calendar clutter also occurs in such big cities as New York, Washington, D.C., (where shredders proliferate) and San Francisco.

And the situation is worse in some foreign countries. In Italy, for instance, residents traditionally hurl unwanted objects, such as plates and old furniture, out the windows.

Still, the Dec. 31 defenestrations in Los Angeles require 48 hours of overtime human and mechanical labor to haul off the second biggest mess of the year downtown (next to the remains of the Street Scene celebration).

So for the last few years, the Department of Public Works has sent out notices to businesses in problem areas (including The Times), asking supervisors to appeal to employees to aim their calendar pages for trash cans rather than windows.

The warnings seem to be having some effect.

“It hasn’t been quite as much of a problem the last few years,” said Dave Reed, director of the Bureau of Street Maintenance.

A modern-day innovation also deserves credit for the decline: Windows that don’t open. “I love those skyscrapers,” Sparks said. “I wish they’d build all the windows that way.”

Not that people necessarily need windows.

“I remember seeing a woman on Hollywood Boulevard run out of a one-story building and throw her calendar into the street,” said Ed Longley, who recently retired as director of street maintenance.

Richard Rodriguez, a street maintenance supervisor, said he will be the point man today, searching out the first blizzards (forecast for about 11 a.m.) in order to pinpoint the trouble spots. Then comes the deployment of his force, which includes backpack blowers, who will propel the days of ’86 into the sewer; a flusher vehicle that will wet them down there, and three sweepers that will finally scoop them up.

Rodriguez has noticed that the calendar parts that come fluttering down are usually of a certain genre.

“It’s mostly desk calendars, not girlie types, like this one,” he said, pointing to an attractive blonde heralding in December, 1986.