We think and talk more about recycling these days than we did in years gone by, but it would be wrong to assume that recycling is just a contemporary movement. People recycled in the old days, too, although often with different approaches than we see today. Today, recycling often happens when bins are provided somewhere in the community, either on set collection days, or by having bins in place for "stop by when you can" collections. When we moved back to Pea Ridge in 2002, we recyclers were being invited to gather on certain Saturdays of the month to fill the trucks and trailers with recyclables. For several years now, we have had bins parked near the Emergency Services Building to collect everything from steel cans and newspaper print to plastic milk jugs and glass jars to cardboard and cereal boxes.
In years gone by, I'm pretty sure that we had less to get rid of, fewer things to throw away. We were not so much of a "throw-away-minded society." In my early lifetime, we were beginning to use things like paper plates or paper cups, as for a picnic meal, but more commonly even picnic utensils were of durable materials; you didn't throw them away. For picnics, we tended to use metal cups and metal plates, and regular, metal knifes and forks and spoons. There were no plastics until the 1950s. Somehow I still feel that plastics have been detriments to civilized life, especially those plastic eating utensils.
One form of our earlier recycling was in finding new uses for things, once their initial uses had been completed. One example was the syrup bucket. Karo Syrup came in thin metal buckets with wire bails, in gallon and half gallon sizes, and were capable of all kinds of alternative uses. They were good for picking blackberries or gooseberries, gathering things out of the garden, carrying water for the flowers, or serving as containers for nails or brackets or brads or rivets or anything that needed to be in a container on a shelf.
We also recycled glass milk jugs and glass soda pop bottles by sending them back to the company to be washed and reused. Often at the grocery store there was a deposit on pop bottles, which were always of heavy glass, and you could get your deposit back if you brought your empty bottles back to the store. Likewise, glass milk jugs were brought back to the store to be picked up by the milk deliveryman and returned to the milk plant for reuse.
Back in the earlier days, almost every farm had a junk pile, often out behind the farm shop. Usually it was a catch-all, with all kinds of discarded metal piled together. Once in a while, a piece of metal might be pulled out of the junk pile and used to repair a broken piece of equipment. That brings up the distinction between junk piles and salvage caches. The distinction between the two is not always clear. What is junk at one moment may in another moment become a salvaged treasure, or what is junk to one person is a treasure to another. We also tended in the old days to have junk yards and salvage yards. A junk yard is basically a place for abandoning old metal items that are no good for anything anymore. A salvage yard may also have a lot of old things sitting around or stacked around, but the object in a salvage yard is to preserve and rescue old pieces that may be remade or reused or used to repair other items.
I recall that from time to time, the junk man would come by, wanting to buy our junk piles. He didn't usually pay much, but he was able to make a little money by selling junk metal for recycling. This let you "clean up the place" from time to time. The only downside to selling off your junk was that over the next several weeks after that you would be wishing you still had those scrap pieces that had been on the junk pile for years, because now you have a new idea for how to use them!
Once in awhile, even today, I see an older pickup truck that may have one green door, one white door, a red hood, orange and blue fenders. The owner has made one pretty good truck out of four or five junk trucks. That is another example of old-time recycling.
I've long been impressed with how the ladies have made quilts through the years. Often quite beautiful quilts with exquisite and ingenious designs have been put together using "quilt scraps." Quilt scraps were just collections of miscellaneous pieces of cloth, which might be of all colors and shades and weaves, which when judiciously selected and arranged, became works of art, as well as serving to keep the family members warm and cozy in wintertime.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 03/19/2014