Retirement Party : Trash Man Hauls Away Street’s Love

In an age when few people know their neighborhood grocer, service station manager or mailman by name, Arthur Green is an exception.

Green, a longtime garbage man in North Hollywood, won affection and respect from his customers through three decades of hauling away oversized loads, fetching trash cans from the back yards of elderly residents and nursing wounded birds found by neighborhood children.

“He wasn’t just the trash man,” said Betty Harris, 40, who has lived in North Hollywood her whole life. “When we were kids, we’d all run over to say hello and he’d stop and play ball with us.”

“It got so we’d look forward to Friday when he picked up the garbage,” said Sheila Reutter, a North Hollywood resident for 25 years. “We miss him already.”

On Saturday, about 20 residents of the Bakman Avenue area of North Hollywood threw a surprise party for Green, who retired earlier this month. Green, a portly 60-year-old man with white hair and a gold-capped front tooth, had tears in his eyes as he opened a gift-wrapped home video camera residents gave him.

“All my neighborhoods were friendly, but this street was special, real special,” Green said.

Five days a week, Green got up at 5 a.m. to collect trash for the Los Angeles Department of Sanitation, he said. Once a week, his job took him to Bakman Avenue, a quiet neighborhood of modest houses and well-tended yards just south of the Ventura Freeway and east of Tujunga Avenue.

Harris remembers the time almost 30 years ago she and other neighborhood children brought Green a baby bird that had fallen from its nest. Green put the bird in a box and told the children to pray for the return of its health, she said.

“Then he drove away and every time we saw him he said that baby bird was doing fine, and we believed him,” Harris said.

Anna Terzian, 59, a retired bank manager, said Green used to pick up garbage cans from her mother’s back yard because the elderly woman was too feeble to bring them out to the street. Such favors were “a kindness that never stopped,” Terzian said.

Tampered With Clock

Green was so devoted to his job that his children once tampered with his alarm clock to get him to stay home and nurse a cold, said Odile Green-Street, 22, one of his daughters.

But when his 27-year-old daughter Deborah Evans died earlier this year during surgery, Green decided it was time to turn in his khaki uniform and spend some time with his family, said Christine Green, his wife. The couple plan to drive to New Orleans this summer to stay with relatives, she said.

Hauling trash seems to be second nature for Green, though. Green-Street, who lives in Fort Ord, said her father woke up early during a recent visit to help the garbage man there.