A Tale From the Ashcan of History

I’m not sure what this story means. Actually, it’s two stories, separated by a distance of 30 years. They both involve the telltale relationship between a city and its garbage. One story is happy. The other is not.

Any more, I cannot say.

The first story proceeds from our modern Los Angeles. Neighborhood by neighborhood, a new era of garbage is arriving. One day you’re loading everything into the plastic cans you bought at Thrifty Drug and dragging them to the curb. Just like always. The next day you’re part of the new age. Life has changed forever.

In the new era, garbage has become labor intensive. Coffee grounds go into one container, Plastic milk cartons in another. Lawn clippings in still another. It all gets carted down to the curb in different packages and picked up by different trucks.

If you try to sneak plastic bottles into the container intended for coffee grounds, woe be to you. Your containers will be spurned, left at the curb so your neighbors can witness your shame.

As I say, it’s happening neighborhood by neighborhood. One day the man from the Sanitation Department knocks on your door with the new containers, and the old way of life is gone for good.

So how’s L.A. taking it?

L.A. loves it. People call the Sanitation Department, begging for an early conversion date. Neighborhood after neighborhood has gone happily into the future, eager to cull and separate, as if people were weary of watching once-used plastic being carted off for eternal life in a landfill.

L.A. has become a believer.

And that gets us to our second story. It is 1961 and Sam Yorty, former congressman, has decided to run for mayor of Los Angeles. In 1961, Yorty is regarded as a political has-been, a man who has lost more elections than he has won. Yorty badly needs an issue.

Out in the neighborhoods, he finds it. Only a few months earlier, the city has initiated a plan forcing residents to separate their metal cans from other garbage. Not glass, not grass clippings. Just the metal cans.

The Sanitation Department calculates that the sale of the scrap metal will return the city a profit of $600,000 a year. Not to mention the savings in landfill space. It seems simple enough.

But this is another age. Convenience is a birthright that will be defended. The idea of “progress” includes the notion that life will become a little easier every day in every way. Separating metal cans from other garbage does not fit into this concept.

Yorty discovers what he describes as a “housewives’ revolt” in progress throughout the city. He relentlessly rides Norris Poulson, the sitting mayor, on the garbage issue. No “housewife,” Yorty says, should be put through the inconvenience of metal can separation merely to serve the interests of the city.

Poulson tries to defend himself on the merits of the plan. He is supported by the Sanitation Department, the City Council, and, of course, good logic.

It does no good. This issue has power. Yorty rides the swell of the housewives’ revolt to victory over Poulson. The garbage plan dies soon after, and Yorty rules over City Hall for the next decade.

So here you have an issue powerful enough in 1961 to send a long shot to the mayor’s office. And so invisible in 1991 that it seems to be happening by remote control.

A neat duality. It’s hard to imagine, now, that earlier time. The sheer sense of space that must have surrounded Los Angeles, thereby feeding the outrage over metal can separation. The belief that the day of reckoning was so distant it need not be taken into account. The wonderful arrogance of a time when there was always another canyon to fill.

All gone. Replaced by the claustrophobia that seems to inhabit our own age. As a trade-off, you might argue, we have gained some wisdom. We don’t seem quite so silly, now, as we did in 1961.

I guess. Personally, my only real consolation is that Sam Yorty will have to cull and separate with the rest of us. You see, His Honor still lives in Studio City, and his time is coming.

I am told that the men from the Sanitation Department will begin knocking on doors in Studio City sometime in April. They will bring their special cans and special bins with them.

You have until then, Sam. After that, remember: It’s bottles in bins, garbage in the cans.