Now & Then | Recycling as it used to be

PEA RIDGE — On Wednesday afternoon I made a quick trip to the Pea Ridge recycling bins.

Although I was skeptical about changing over from our monthly recycling gathering to this arrangement of bins on trailers, the system seems to be working well, and the area around the trailers is reasonably clean. I’m glad to see that the recycling of goods is catching on.

It is good also to see that markets are opening up for many materials that otherwise would clutter our highway ditches and overwhelm our landfills. I’ll be glad if a market can be created for Styrofoam.

I was just thinking about recycling in the old days.

No, we didn’t recycle newspapers back then, unless it was to use old newspapers as packing material, or for covering a crate of potatoes, or to line a storage box or drawer or to wallpaper a closet. In our old house, Dad’s work closet was wallpapered with old newspapers.

One section had a picture and an article about the champion boxing match between Joe Lewis and Max Baer. We didn’t think to preserve that old “clipping” for historical purposes. Steel cans also usually were thrown on trash piles to rust away, at least those that were not used to hold nails or screws, or to hold miscellaneous items in the shop, or as patches tocover holes that mice had gnawed or to seal around pipes coming through the floor. In the earlier days we usually didn’t use the word, “recycling,” but it was part of a way of life that developed in the days of the 1930s Great Depression.

Usually our recycling in the 1940s was motivated by the maxim, “waste not, want not,” more than by a commitment to the virtues of recycling to protect the earth. We didn’t throw things away, because they were expensive to replace and nobody had money to buy things.

Today we have this strange situation which has us often reasoning that “to buy a new one is cheaper than fixing an old one!” That seems especially to apply to our electronic gadgets, our computers, printers, modems and so on;

but it also applies to televisions, mixers, hair dryers and other small appliances.

I learned that if you take a computer printer to an office supply store to have it repaired, likely they will look at you like you are an immigrant from Jupiter. All that is so different from “the old days.” In theold days we were likely to think of having something repaired until it was just “plumb wore out” and not worth fixing any more.

Then it would be thrown onto the junk pile where it would either rust away or be made into something different from what it had been before.

That raises one point to be noted about old-time recycling, that things were often recycled by being made into something else. Pieces of metal from an old machine or tool might become material for repairing another machine. Farm people were often inventive about making useful tools out of things that used to be something else. Pea Ridge’s own Johnny Clanton was inventive in that way, using metal from other old things to make plowshares like new, or building a garden tractor out of parts of old cars and so on. I’m remembering that we used to have a steel bar about six feet long for jabbing post holes, and tamping rocks and dirt around fence posts. That bar long ago had a life as a machine shaft. Interestingly I recently found that bar among my dad’s tools. I hadn’t seen it since 1957.

Here in the 21st century, we are making progress as recyclers, but some practices today are ghastly to the eye trained in the 1940s. There was a time when houses were taken apart board by board, tosalvage the useable lumber.

The lumber might be good enough to build another house, or to build an out building, a hen house, a barn or farm shed. Today, houses and other buildings are smashed by giant machines. Some of the destructors have jaws like T-Rex, and the pieces of house are chewed into toothpicks and jagged waste. I hate seeing things crunched to smithereens when they might have been salvaged for a good use.

Some lumber in old houses is better lumber than we can buy at the lumber yards today.

People of the 40s used to take an old rusted out Model-A Ford, strip the body off the frame and make themselves a run-about. Today we go buy an ATV.

On the farm, recycling was all around us. The hogs got the potato peels and other scraps, the cats got the milk spoiled by bitterweed. Everywhere decaying plant materials, leaves, grasses, weeds, flowers, fallen trees, were returning to the soil, enriching it. A farm is one big recycling center.

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Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is 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.