Gasoline Alley by Jim Scancarelli for October 12, 2022

Walt goes low to get high. I rode on a frame attached to the back of a flat bed truck to put the cones down when they striped roads at Travis. I sometimes got temp duty in the paint shop when masonry shop work was slack. The striper was a machine that you rode on and pulled a trigger that shot paint and dropped the 3M glass beads which give the stripes an iridescent look when shown on by headlights. One man on the striper and his partner driving the truck with the cones. I loved going over there.

I worked on a garbage truck , to the dump, to the dump to the dump, dump, dump! (To the tune of the Lone Ranger Theme Song)!

When Walt was a kid, trash was hauled away in wagons pulled by mules.

Could you stand the smell?

oh this one stinks

Or, a milk truck, at 4 AM. With glass bottles.

It would be nice if Gertie could make it happen, even if he went only one block.

In the 1970s, the president of a small college in Pennsylvania worked blue collar jobs in the Summer. One of the jobs was collecting garbage.

I’m happy to say I’ve already done that in my childhood. I used to live in a favela (slum, if you want the English word) in Rio de Janeiro and when the garbage truck went there to get the trash, the workers let us childs do that. Of course they also told us to wash our hands right after. Ah, great times!

My high school history teacher’s boyhood ambition was to be a garbageman so he could drive a horse wagon.

me too

Back in early 1970’s, we all wanted to ride our bikes in the wake of the “mosquito man” truck, spraying clouds of mosquito killing vapor. I wonder how many of us are still alive!!!

The previous 3 were high aspirations especially walking on th moon.

Can this walking corpse even lift his leg high enough to clamber onto the back of a garbage truck, or will he need to be carried up there like an infant?

A garbage truck from 1915, when Walt was 17. https://www.waste360.com/sites/waste360.com/files/Mack-1908-Manhattan_0.jpg