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Remember those heavy wire burning baskets we had in the alley to burn paper materials
Burning the trash in the alley in that big wire basket with my father in the late 50’s and early 60’s was always something I looked forward to. You could poke the trash through the wires with a stick and make embers fly high into the air. It’s a miracle that the garage never burned down. Happy simple time gone forever.
Attachment 28054Attachment 28055
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G stood for Garbage and the R stood for Rubbish
If you remember the wire baskets then what about your trash cans having the letters G & R painted on them.
The G stood for Garbage and the R stood for Rubbish.Attachment 34779
We also had a Sheeny Man in the late 40s or early 50s
We lived just east of the Detroit Fair Grounds and 4 houses below 8 Mile on Charleston. Our sheeny man was a black guy with a horse drawn wagon that came around in the alley regularly. He took rags [[used for paper making) and metal items. Not sure about this, but I think he also took used cooking grease. My parents told me not to call him the Sheeny Man, but to call him mister.
The alley, back in the day, was not paved, but gravel. When I was last in Detroit in 2003 the alley was no longer passable. It was completely grown up with trees and weeds. I think only one house on our block had a driveway, all the other houses accessed their garages via the alley. One of the neighbors said that they had agreed to close the alley because of crime issues. So, everybody was now parking on the street.
We also had a horse drawn milk delivery van [[Twin Pines I think) every morning. The horse knew the route and the milkman would hop on and off with his deliveries and picking up the empties as the horse moved down the street 2 or 3 houses and waited. Probably around 1950 the milkman switched to a truck which didn't know the route, so he had to get in and drive it 2 or 3 houses, get out, deliver and then repeat. Probably not as efficient as the horse. And, as a 5-year old I was devastated with the loss of the horse and not knowing what would become of it.