Tribute to a Trash Man

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep the streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’ve lived in a lot of east coast cities, and somehow I keep coming back home to New Orleans. The whole atmosphere here is different. It’s the food, the music, the clothes, the rhythm of daily life here is like nowhere else, right down to the trash pickup. The loss of Cornelius Washington is a sad day for the metro area, even though very few people knew who he was. This Times-Picayune tribute is well-deserved. Cornelius Washington is part of what made our city special, and he will be missed.

Cornelius Washington, wizard of trash cans, dies –

Washington’s street choreography of playful twirling and tossing often prompted applause. With a full trash can in each arm, he would “pop” both cans upside-down into the truck’s metal jaws, then set them back on the curb without losing his stride. From seemingly impossible distances, he would toss dozens of bags and boxes rapid-fire, landing them all in the back of the truck without dropping a scrap of paper.

“Cornelius was amazing. He could do things that I didn’t think that people could do with garbage,” said Dorothy Taylor, who has driven New Orleans garbage trucks for 18 years.

… When interviewed last year, Washington said hoppers in other cities seemed lackluster. “It’s too textbook,” he said. “They stop the truck. They step off the truck. They pick up the can. They dump it. Then they put the can back down in that one spot.”

No comparison with New Orleans, where hoppers like him had nearly perfected the art of trash pickup, he said.

“If they was to put a garbage man in the Guinness World Book of Records, I would be in there,” he said.

His boasting wasn’t based on showmanship alone. Washington knew where each handicapped and elderly neighbor lived and taught younger hoppers to return cans right to their doors. He also told them to work together with other hoppers on big stacks of refuse and to warn the truck driver about street closings, children, drunks and careless bicyclists.

“Every driver wanted Cornelius on his truck,” Taylor said. “There will never be another like him.”