sheeny man, [[1950's junk dealer with horse-drawn wagon)

[Jimaz]

Do "trash" and "garbage" mean something different in Michigan? I've always understood them to mean the same thing. What's the difference?

Good question. "Garbage" was biodegradable. "Trash" was not.

"Yard Waste" might be the more modern designation for biodegradable. Today's garbage grinds down through the sink's garbage disposal into the sewage. Disposing of yard waste with the trash is discouraged so that it can instead be routed toward composting. Landfills are overflowing. Composting alleviates that problem.

Then we have the whole [[relatively) new "recyclable" category, plus the "bulk trash" category including mattresses, furniture, etc.

What a complicated mess we humans make. Perhaps it has some profoundly mystical purpose in the universe, but I doubt it. Although one never knows.

[Jimaz]

Okay, now I'm pondering planting a GPS device in the trash to track down exactly where our trash lands. Why don't we know this beforehand? Future archaeologists need to know. Peristalsis comes to mind.

Please, stop me before I ponder again.

[old guy]

I've been wondering the same thing. The town I live in had a recycling system where you separated certain items. A new company came in, I'm assuming at a lower bid and now you just dump all of it together. I am going to attempt to track it.

Sorry to somewhat threadjack. This is the best thread I've seen for a few hours or so.

[kathy2trips]

This is a great thread, by the way. I'm going to copy it and send it to my older relatives that aren't too Internet savvy. I know they'll love it.

Gistok, I remember Mr. Lappacola, too! Haven't thought of him in years! Even though we lived within walking distance of the Food Fair on Harper, and the Wrigley's and Kroger's at 7-Mack, Nonna still bought produce from him, if he carried what she needed. She said he told her it was "fresh from the farm" and it sure tasted like it! She'd speak to him in Italian and try to get some of it at a discount, playing the piasano card, as it were. In return, she'd give him some biscotti or whatever she was baking to munch on his rounds.

Mr. Springer lived 2 doors down and he sharpened lawn movers and such as a side business, so we always went to him for our sharpening needs. He hung a sign on the back of his garage that faced the service drive of I-94, so he got a lot of business. I remember Uncle George, too, though I can't remember if he was an independent or Good Humor. Thanks for the memory jog!

[Dan Wesson]

Do "trash" and "garbage" mean something different in Michigan? I've always understood them to mean the same thing. What's the difference?

Garbage attracts Rats. Trash did not.

[the rock]

We had a sheeny man in Grosse Pointe too, but he was British and wore a tuxedo.

Seriously, I remember the guy that game around with a push cart and sharpened knives.

Did he visit the Blue Star Home?

[Hermod]

Detroit must have been pretty vanguard in garbage removal according to your description.
I don't think we had anything like that in Montreal, never heard of this fine grained approach for the time period you are mentioning. Recycling and compost and just straight garbage as different entities are rather recent here, maybe 30 years old. I don't know about Vancouver's evolution but here garbage and trash are the same as kiraly says.

I think the garbage went to the incinerator and the trash to the land fill. The only recycling was that you saved your newspapers for the school, church, or Boy Scout newspaper drives. Until the bottom fell out of the old newspaper and magazine resales business in the 1970s, those newspaper drives were quite profitable for the charitable organizations.

[wilderness]

In the late 50's my Grandfather had a side-business with another gent as a fruit vendor and a market [[at least until the partner got his hands in the till). My Uncle and I rode the truck and worked the market. Nearly all the produce was purchased at both Eastern Market and the Western Produce Terminal [[Fort & Green) despite claims of FRESH . For years Grandfather still had some of those old wooden Banana crates that he'd paid deposit on stored in his garage.

[Dumpling]

Clover Hill Park Cemetery has a note on their webpage that Beth Olam Cemetery
is to be open this September 20th from 10 am until 1 pm.
Also, when I was young, in the sixties or seventies, there used to be a "Raimi's Curtains"
store at Oakland Mall. While casually researching the Raimi family [[I don't personally
know any of them) I came across a story that readers of this particular thread may
enjoy:

http://www.math.rochester.edu/people...rm/zalman.html

[kathy2trips]

In the late 50's my Grandfather had a side-business with another gent as a fruit vendor and a market.....

Just wondering where your grandfather's territory was. East side, west side, all around the town?

[wilderness]

Just wondering where your grandfather's territory was. East side, west side, all around the town?

We were all over the place, however mostly west side and suburbs. I recall one day through Herman Gardens. The store didn't last long and was a rented building at Ecorse and Inkster [[today a truck stop). I was 7-8 years old and to see the Eastern Market in the wee hours of the morning was memorable. Lots of farmers in those days sold their own produce.

[EL Jimbo]

My grandmother told me there was a Jew who came from the same small village in Poland as she did who traveled through her neighborhood collecting rags and who sold household notions such as needles and thread and romance novels in Polish and she could play the numbers through. She was invited to have tea at his house a few times and said they seemed to do very well.

I may have heard of them called the ragman, but I've never heard anyone use the term sheenyman. I've only read it in this forum.

You may be talking about my great-grandfather. My dad's father's side of the family were Jews that emigrated from Poland just before he was born. The only things I know about his dad [[my great-grandfather) is that he only spoke Yiddish, his occupation on the 1920 census was listed as "peddler", and my Dad once told me he was a sheenyman.

now that might not be him, but then again...

[Brock7]

I don't know if my grandmother could understand Yiddish. She wasn't Jewish, but she did work in Germany for some time as girl, so I suppose she knew some German. The village she came from was Jastkowice. She said the nearest large town was Nisko.

[Smirnoff]

Great photo, CassTechGrad!!!! Yeah, that's how I remember him. We called him the sheeny man also, but I can't remember if he was black or white. There was nothing disrespectful meant about the term; it was just common neighborhood usage [[Grand River - Sorrento area). I don't recall any negative thinking about Jews in our family at all...just neighbors with a different religion than ours, no big deal at all.

I also remember a guy who came down the street with a large stone grinder on wheels, ringing a hand bell, and shouting "knives sharpened!".

God, what a different world it was back in the forties. Sigh.

The same guys were in the Grand River & Schaefer area in the 50's & even early 60's.

[EASTSIDE CAT 67-83]

Ray1936
We had the knife sharping guy with his grindstone hand cart as late as the early 70's in my Jefferson/Chalmers neighborhood as well as "Charlies Produce" truck, you could hear him on his trucks loud speaker calling out...Apples, Oranges, Waaaaaaaaaatamellon. Great memories of a
by gone era.

[dtowncitylover]

I also remember a guy who came down the street with a large stone grinder on wheels, ringing a hand bell, and shouting "knives sharpened!".

There was a guy in Royal Oak during the 90s who did that. My mom would always watch for him. I think he passed away some years ago.

[CassTechGrad]

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.

[Parkguy]

I moved into Rosedale Park in 1978, and I was surprised to see a knife sharpener pushing a small cart with a grinding wheel down the street ringing a bell. I saw him maybe three times over the first couple of years I lived here, but not since then. I remember as a kid in the suburbs in the '50s, we had "the bread man," a vegetable truck, and several milk different trucks make the rounds. I remember the coffee cakes from the bread truck, and I remember that we got our milk from the Borden truck. Other dairy trucks I remember were Twin Pines and Sealtest.

[Király]

I found these artworks and remembered this thread.

[lpg]

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.

As a kid I was always next to my mom when it was time to burn the trash in the wire basket. I bugged her to let me poke the fire to make sure everything burned. One day she said OK. I carefully did what I was supposed to until I touched her arm with the red hot poker to see if it was really that hot. That was the end of my trash burning career. It also earned me a first class ass whoopin'.

[GPCharles]

We had a gas incinerator in the basement to burn the trash. Cleaning out the ashes was one of my jobs.

[gnome]

My dad built a type of outdoor fireplace out of cinder block because those cheap burner barrels would disintegrate.

Instead of mortaring the blocks together he used rebar to hold the blocks in place. In theory it's a good idea because the heat from the fire woul destroy the mortar.

Theory only works so good.

Being young and adventurous and wearing a Have Gun Will Travel outfit. I decided to lasso one of the blocks that protruded like the crenellations of 15th Century castle. I put my foot on the side of the contraption so as to climb up side and yanked.

Walking in the side door with my hand holding together the side of my head brought a look on my poor sainted mother's face I will never forget.

The scream was pretty unforgettable too.

It wasn't my first trip to the hospital, which progressively became so frequent the hospital gave her a separate parking spot near the door, did I say my mother is a saint?

[CassTechGrad]

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.

[expatriate]

Yes, we had an elderly black man with a horse and wagon that traversed the alley on Alter rd [[and I assume other east side streets) in the 1950s. He would let the kids give his horse carrots and sugar.

[Dan in Ashland Oregon]

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.