Recycling isn’t a 21st-Century phenomenon: my mother recycled stuff more than 80 years ago.
The garage serv
ed as a garage for dad’s car, and two bins of coal: one for soft coal for the kitchen stove and one for hard coal for the base burner that heated the rest of the house. Upstairs in the barn was the overflow from the attic, and my brother had his clubhouse up there too. That's where we kept our "recycling."
I’m not sure how often—maybe every week or every couple of weeks (I can’t be sure)—an old man with a horse and wagon came through the alley behind the barn. He had a tin horn he blew to let everyone know he was coming, and mom would say "Oh, the Sheeny!” and we would run out to the barn to see what she had ferreted away there. When he would see my mom, he would sing out, “Any rags, any bones, any bottles today?”
Being a family of ten, we always bought potatoes and apples and sometimes corn or whatever produce was in season by the bushel at the farmers’ market, and they would put the produce in a burlap bag. Mom would save the bags and get two cents apiece for them from the Sheeny. Also any rags (clothes that had been patched or mended too many times that couldn’t be patched again and so went into the rag bag), and any large cow bones were worth a penny or two and bottles were too. The Sheeny would pick them over and take what he wanted.
