Is it always Opposite Day?
History is full of bizarre paradoxes, as one era’s complex mixture of values leads to another’s in unpredictable ways. Some changes come so fast that one mortal human might remember whole different contrary eras.
Much of the emphasis of public policy in the last 50 years has been concerned with pollution, waste, energy usage. But were we much better custodians of our planet when we weren’t trying so hard to be?
That weird thought emerged with a summer idyll, provoked by a walk around my neighborhood, and the smell of cut grass. Like a lot of boys of my generation, I grew up spending much of the summer mowing grass, not just for my own family, but for several others around the neighborhood. By the time I was 10, I had seven or eight clients, and cut several acres of suburban grass every week. All but one of them were yards I just walked my mower to. It was a standard Toro lawnmower. It wasn’t a “power mower,” because those were mowers that propelled themselves. I don’t call it a “push mower,” though, because that was something else, a mower with no motor at all, its whirling blades powered entirely by the rotation of the wheels as you pushed it. I had tried a push mower just enough to be grateful for having a mower with a motor that turned the blade. I believed push mowers were mainly for grown men in good shape, football players, perhaps. We little kids needed some help. So I had a small mower with an engine that burned about a quart of gas per hour.
I wasn’t unusual. A lot of my friends did the same. I was an independent contractor. But I knew one kid, even younger than me, who hired several other boys to take care of his lawn contracts. I think most of the lawns in my neighborhood were cut by neighborhood kids who hoped to get two or three dollars for the job.
The job had fringe benefits. I often found box turtles in the grass. It was part of our unspoken contract that I could keep any box turtle I found. There were some summers I accumulated a whole colony of them, different sizes, red eyes and yellow eyes, in a sort of homemade compound in our backyard. They tended to escape about as often as I replaced them. It’s remarkable how easily a sizeable slow-moving, ungraceful thing can just vanish.
When was the last time you saw a kid pushing a lawnmower? I don’t doubt it still happens in some families. But I’m not sure I’ve witnessed it in this century. Only occasionally do I see dads mowing lawns. This summer, in all the neighborhoods I drive through, including the one I grew up in, those who mow are now very serious professionals, young men with reflective aviator sunglasses, as serious as snipers, commanding big, wide mowers across small lawns, and driving them so fast no box turtle would stand a chance. Those mowers are like small cars, and may burn as much gas as one. Moreover, they all arrive from some distant point of origin, presumably miles away, on still another gas-powered vehicle, a big trailer pulled by a big pickup or sometimes even a small semi-type truck. Just to do the same thing I used to do with my little mower and a pair of Keds, 50 years ago.
When did that happen, and why? These maximum-force mowers are faster than I was, I’m sure. Maybe that’s an advantage. I doubt they’re cheaper.
Knoxville News-Sentinel ad, August 1, 1969.
But our old low-impact mowing habits developed before the first Energy Crisis, and before “climate change” was a phrase we ever heard. All this high-performance lawn-care approach happened after our first inklings that we might need to use less petroleum, and that emissions may be making the planet warmer, and strong advice from experts to use less gasoline.
Back then, nobody was telling us to save gas. For some reason we did it anyway. I always walked to elementary school. In sixth grade, I was a Safety Patrol crossing guard, because nearly every kid walked to school, too. Later, when high school was farther away, I rode a bus, with all the other kids. We also rode a bus to summer day camp. Most boys played sports, especially baseball. Most neighborhoods had a baseball field of some sort, and we’d take turns using it. Most of the team sports I remember playing before high school were on fields within walking or bicycle-riding distance of home.
But as I learned as a parent, with some dismay, there are now suburban soccer complexes 10 or 15 or 20 miles away from most neighborhoods. Today, when we’re more consciously trying to control emissions, most kids arrive at school and at soccer games singly, typically in an SUV that’s on a 20 or 30-mile round trip just to deliver a 60-pound kid to a field. Some of them look like space shuttles, big enough to carry a team.
Then there were carpools. When was the last time you heard that word?
No parent wanted to drive their kid to sporting events, or church-choir practice, or swimming lessons—and then drive back and then drive to pick them up again. Of course they didn’t. Parents had their own lives, and other things to do. So they carpooled. A carpool for four kids means about a quarter as much driving for each grownup, and a fourth as much gasoline bought and burned. And even then, carpools often involved a trip to the grocery. Kids on the way back from swimming would wait while somebody else’s mom would do a little shopping.
Grownups carpooled, too. My dad would often leave the breakfast table to get in a car with some other guys in suits and ties. He was an engineer, he owned a car, a little two-door Opel, but carpooling just made sense. For one thing, it offered a family of four the freedom to own and pay for insurance and maintenance for only one car.
And by the time I was 13 or so, I often rode a city bus downtown on Saturdays to look for the latest Hardy Boys book at Miller’s, or look at the amazing airplane models at the Hobby Shop. Nobody had to take me. I had a quarter for the fare, and I took myself.
Environmentalist was a new word, and I don’t think I’d ever met one. We weren’t trying to prevent pollution, or preserve the world’s finite petroleum supply. We just did.
***
This message-contrary phenomenon connects to all sorts of things we claim to care about.
When I was a kid, I’d never heard of enormous floating garbage patches of plastic in the ocean, or of the threat of plastic to wildlife. I’d certainly never heard there might be measurable plastic in our bloodstreams.
We didn’t know plastic was bad for the planet. But for some reason we almost never threw plastic away.
Consumer plastic existed, as it has since the 1920s or so. My dad worked for a plastic factory, one that specialized in Plexiglas. Plastic was our friend. Some of my favorite things were made of plastic, like green army men, and model B-17s, and water pistols. I liked plastic fine. We liked it so much we always kept it handy.
Kids often drank out of heavy-duty plastic cups that bounced when they hit the floor. And then Mom would wash them and use them again.
Things that got thrown away in the 1960s were almost all made of paper. Groceries always came in brown paper bags.
That brings up another weird revelation of how much things have changed popped up unexpectedly early this summer, at a Kroger checkout line. I was there to pick up one item, and the prospect of a bag didn’t come up. But I overheard a young couple asking for a paper bag for their groceries. The bag boy—and I shouldn’t call him that, because he was an adult, if barely, and bigger than me—said, “You must be from New York!” The young man asked, “why?” The clerk responded, “Only New Yorkers want those paper bags!” I had the impression that maybe this staffer didn’t approve of his customers’ choice, but he complied.
I was tempted to speak up. But for someone my age, it was just too weird to engage. The paper bags requested by the young couple—who were not from New York—were exactly the same kind of paper bags all Knoxville groceries provided, even Cas Walker’s stores, to everybody, including our parents, and grandparents, and great-grandparents, until sometime around 1986. In fact, some News-Sentinel articles from 1986 note that the Knoxville market was slower to embrace plastic bags than the nation or the wider region was. Some Knoxville groceries, in response to customer demand, were sticking to paper.
But here we are. Now plastic is so much the Knoxville status quo that you have to stop your grocery clerks from giving them to you—I bet Knoxville uses and discards a quarter million plastic bags every day—and the paper option has become some arrogant fancy-boy impertinence from New York.
As I recall, just for convenience, we used paper bags a second time (never to say “recycle”) as garbage bags, to put out the trash in the steel garbage cans. They were sometimes messy. But in those days it was generally understood that garbage is messy. Now we like our garbage to be neat and clean, tied up with a plastic cinch that will keep it secure for centuries, for future generations to enjoy.
Styrofoam was part of my youth, too, but I knew it mainly as it existed in squeaky floats at the swimming pool. I was a teenager before I ever saw a disposable Styrofoam cup. The first time I was ever served a Coke in one, I took it home and saved it. It seemed just as good as new, and I figured I might need to use it again.
We did have disposable cups, but they were always made of wax paper. At the store, no beverages came in plastic containers. They were all in glass bottles or aluminum cans or waxed cardboard cartons. Plastic single-use water bottles would have seemed too bizarre to contemplate.
We stayed hydrated—though we never said “hydrated”—mainly thanks to water fountains and water coolers, that were usually handy. Sometimes supplied with conical paper cups, so flimsy they seemed to be already returning to nature by the time they hurtled toward the garbage. At baseball practice, at our field at least, there was a spigot out past left field. Most of us slurped right out of it, but the fancy kids had telescoping metal cups they carried even in their baseball britches. But we all seemed to get enough to play another inning or two.
It wouldn’t have seemed necessary to quench our thirst with a plastic bottle that might last longer than our civilization.
Of course, all through that era, I never heard the word “recycle.” I double-checked myself on this. Although the term existed in industry, recycling didn’t become a common household term until the 1970s.
But here’s the weird thing. We didn’t know what to call it, but we recycled anyway. Much more than we do now, it seems to me.
I may be the last generation to remember the milkman. Milk arrived at our front door in glass bottles, with cardboard lids. When we finished our milk, we’d leave the empties on the front step, and the milkman would take them away, wash them, and refill them, probably for somebody else. Later, the milkman seemed to retire in the mid-‘60s, but there were still businesses like Weigel’s that specialized in milk, and even after they shifted to plastic gallon bottles, they maintained the returnable tradition for another two or three decades. That was recycling, more direct and provable than any kind of recycling we do, or pretend to do, today.
Soft drinks had a similar deal. Coca-Cola came in glass bottles, and as you drank them you’d fill up a carton with empties and take them back to the store, for a small discount on another six-pack. If you found one, you could even sell it back for a penny or two. They were called “returnable.”
If I remember correctly, both Coke and milk bottles were still being exchanged in Knoxville up until about 1990 or so. It seemed to work then—corporations don’t do things that are unnecessarily costly—but doesn’t work now. Why? Is anything returnable today?
Before we were told to do these things, we did them anyway, and didn’t congratulate ourselves for it.
Knoxville News-Sentinel ad, June 10, 1963. The Roddy Manufacturing Co. was the first to bottle Coco-Cola in Knoxville in the early 1900s.
But now we’re told to use less plastic, less energy. So we use more plastic, and more energy. We’re told to throw away less, so we throw away more. Is that human nature?
The cowboy-philosopher Will Rogers might not have been surprised.
I ran across this last week, when we were preparing the Smokies Park centennial events. When he was in town in 1926, entertaining a crowd at the Lyric Theatre on Gay Street, Will Rogers wasn’t talking about recycling, but about America’s sudden orgy of enjoying alcoholic drinks. He was impressed with what national prohibition, as decreed in an official Constitutional amendment, had done for the liquor industry, and consumer habits. It appeared that banning liquor by federal law made it more popular than ever.
“Just tell an American he can’t do anything,” Rogers said, “and he’ll be sure to do it.”
That century-old observation rings truer than I wish it did. It may apply to a lot of things that we argue about on a national level.
And here we’ve been operating on the principle that if we get enough scientists and politicians to educate the public, people will be impressed with the figures about waste plastic and wasted energy and fall in line. But no. We’re Americans. And as Rogers observed, we do the opposite.
If he’s right, his observation has profound implications for public policy.
I don’t know the answer. It’s just one of those thoughts that came in on the summer breeze of freshly mown grass.
By Jack Neely
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