Vociferous Odors

[W. Gray]

This Good Old Days post was triggered by Lookatmeknow's comment concerning diapers.

When I was a kid in Independence, Mo, maybe seven or eight years old, there were two things I hated to see come into the neighborhood, especially on a hot summer day. At this point in time, we were just a few years from having left Elk County.

One of those unwanted intrusions was the city wide garbage truck. Back then, everyone on our residential street and probably most of the residents in the town had a septic tank. No one had a garbage disposal and everyone put their leftovers and other biodegradable stuff in a large covered galvanized garbage can sitting outside somewhere. Ours was just outside the kitchen. This garbage can would have been similar to what my granddad called a slop bucket that he would carry out to the hogs each evening. It was my job to take the garbage out after each meal.

The garbage man picking up the contents of the galvanized pail was always a black man (I did not learn the significance of that until several years later) and he would carry a stinking tub of some kind back to our galvanized garbage can. He would empty the galvanized can into his tub, hoist it up on his shoulder, take it to the truck, and throw it in with everything else that had been picked up that day.

Everything stunk to high heaven and no one had to tell anyone else that the truck was in the area. The smell permeated the entire neighborhood. Although, it did not seem to help with the odor, the truck storage area was covered and had a small door to throw in the stuff. It seems to me the contents of the truck were taken somewhere to an industrial facility, cooked, and then fed to pigs.

I recall one time looking in our garbage can and seeing maggots everywhere. At some point, sewers were installed in the neighborhood and then it seemed everyone got a disposal and eventually the city wide garbage service was stopped.

This was progress: the garbage service went the way of coal deliveries for heating.



The other unwanted intrusion was when the diaper man came into the area. Our next door neighbor had diaper service in which the diaper man would call at certain intervals, pickup the dirty diapers, take them to a cleaning service, and then return clean diapers.

This truck was entirely enclosed but still stunk terribly when the doors were opened and the dirty diapers thrown in with the dirty diapers of every other baby in the area, whose mother had the service. There is one thing about smelling the odor of a single baby, but it is entirely another thing to smell the odor of 100, or more, babies at the same time, especially when those diapers have been sitting around for awhile. I have always wondered how those diapers were processed when the truck rolled into the cleaning facility at the end of the day.

Even in this day's use of disposable diapers, I understand there are still companies out there who specialize in washing cloth diapers.