January/February 1998
By Si Wakesberg
Si Wakesberg is New York bureau chief for Scrap.
I once had an ambition to write a novel about the scrap industry. And on March 12, 1963, I drafted some rough notes for this novel and published them in Metals Report, a newsletter of the National Association of Recycling Industries, an ReMA predecessor.
Surprisingly, these notes awoke the newsletter’s slumbering readers. Suddenly, readers who had never written a letter to the editor in their lives took to their typewriters--this was long before the age of e-mail--and sent appreciative words to the publication. My notes evidently struck a familiar and personal nerve.
Today, these notes, which I penned before the age of recycling--in fact, before "recycling" became a buzzword in the 1970s--have the aura of pre-environmental and pre-regulation days. Yet they continue to occupy an affectionate place in my memory, perhaps because they’re the true material of fiction--reality seen at a distance.
With that said, here are my rough notes for a scrap novel, dedicated to the pioneers of the industry.
* * *
Did you ever think of writing a novel about the scrap industry, Joe? You know, about real people who pioneered their way into the hinterlands of America. I’m talking about a realistic novel, the kind that gets to the origins, to the heart of the people it deals with, to the human element behind the growth of this little-known industry.
The way I see it, this novel would begin with an itinerant scrap peddler who has wandered around the East but then set his sights elsewhere, feeling the need to move into a new territory. He arrives in a small midwestern town with little money yet tremendous energy to carve out a place for himself and his family. Since he likes what he sees in this new place, he decides to stay.
The work is hard and the rewards are meager. This fellow, Joe, gets up before dawn on cold winter mornings and doesn’t get home until late when his kids are asleep. He travels across an uninviting countryside, picking up whatever scrap he can find and selling it to another dealer who has a place to store it. Little by little, he learns to distinguish between copper, brass, lead, and zinc. While he mostly deals in mixed materials, he begins a sort of rudimentary segregation of the metals he collects.
It’s a tough life, but he perseveres. By dint of backbreaking work, ingenuity, boundless energy, and thrift, he accumulates enough money to buy a small piece of property--his own scrap yard. This, Joe, is the first step up the economic ladder, but it doesn’t come easy. He now works harder than before to make enough to pay for the simple machinery and equipment he needs to speed the processing of his scrap metals. He also has to pay his few laborers who help sort the material and truck it to his consumers.
Here’s the human touch, Joe. I see this fellow, his hair turning slightly gray, returning home late, too tired for anything but a cup of coffee and the evening newspaper, his mind troubled with the perennial problems of the scrap industry: Will he be able to get sufficient supplies to meet his commitments to his customers? Will the price go up before he buys the material? Will the price go down before he sells it? Will the material he shipped today be accepted?
He can’t rest. As a scrap dealer, he finds himself at the mercy of a wild and fluctuating market that he must master--or else. In order to master it, he must learn more and more about the metals he handles, about the market in which they are traded, and about the events that shape this market. This man, Joe, has never gone to school, or if he has, he hasn’t received a diploma. But he knows he must learn, so he slowly begins the process of self-education, which eventually makes him an expert in his field, a kind of Ph.D. without portfolio when it comes to scrap.
One day this man discovers that he isn’t alone in the scrap business, that it’s an industry in which thousands participate in various phases. He meets a few of them. At first he’s a little suspicious. After all, they’re his competitors. But soon he realizes that by talking he learns something from them and they learn something from him. Not a bad idea. He joins the industry’s trade association because by this time he begins to feel that he’s part of something big and that he and others have to make sense out of this industry. They sit down and write standards and specifications.
His kids, meanwhile, are growing up. There are good times and bad times. The going isn’t always smooth, but the country is growing and his company is growing with it. He now has a larger plant and he’s built a small warehouse to store some of his nonferrous metals. One of his sons is old enough to come in on Saturdays and help out. But mind you, Joe, this kid has to go to college. Pop makes sure that his kids get the education that he never got.
See what I mean? The old man doesn’t relax one bit. He’s up at the crack of dawn opening the gate to his facility, watching the trucks deliver scrap, looking over everything, hollering over the phone, chewing out his employees now and then. Still, all in all, he’s a likable guy with a soft heart who can’t bring himself to fire one of his older laborers just because the fellow can’t keep up with the job.
His family begins to nag him: Slow down, Pop. Take it easy. You can afford to relax. But not this man. He’s built of pioneer stock, the same kind of stock that crossed this country to build the West. Work is in his blood. He’s got to work to keep building.
But he has a little time now to devote to his community and the community, in turn, has stopped looking down at him because he deals in scrap. Yes, the perspectives have changed, he now sits on the board of the local bank and he leads the local philanthropic campaign. People come to him for advice and help, and he doesn’t turn them away, remembering his own early days.
The way I see this, Joe, is that one day he gets up early and looks out the window. He starts thinking about what he’s been doing all the mornings, afternoons, and evenings, and it suddenly hits him that the stuff he’s been working with--this "junk," this "scrap"--isn’t just a commodity but a vital raw material, necessary to the economic lifeblood of his country. He realizes that without scrap, the United States would be a poorer country, that it would have to depend on imports from other nations. Though he’s never been ashamed of his business, he suddenly feels proud of it. It’s a good business, something a father would be proud to turn over to his children.
Sure there will be rough days ahead for his kids, just as he faced recessions and depressions. But in the end, the country will continue to grow and scrap will be needed for that growth. This pioneer is a man of faith, he has to be, otherwise how could he have accomplished what he did in his lifetime? He has faith in his country’s growth and in the industry to which he has devoted his life, and he has faith in his kids and other children who will run this industry in the future. We catch him in this moment of recognition on a quiet Sunday morning, all alone at the window, smiling to himself.
Well, what do you say, Joe? Don’t you think you have the elements of a stirring and dramatic American novel? And the best part about it is that it’s true.•
I once had an ambition to write a novel about the scrap industry. And on March 12, 1963, I drafted some rough notes for this novel and published them in Metals Report, a newsletter of the National Association of Recycling Industries, an ReMA predecessor.