I REMEMBER (continued)
Dumps. I remember dumps! Every house had a household dump pile on its grounds somewhere. In the summer months when suffering from extreme boredom, we would tour our section of town and see what valuable things that we could find in other people's dump pile. A great find would be a certain baby carriage that had removable wheels. I would take these treasures home and make a coaster car which would keep me occupied for several days.

There was a fellow named Merritt Dean, from Harrington Park, who had a pretty good size truck. With this truck he would take the job of cleaning out people's houses as they were getting ready to sell them, or clean out a store that was to close. Merritt would then dump the whole thing in the back yard of Mr. Hashagen to try and fill up the swamp that was there. This was better than Christmas! We'd be in that dump pile for days until we had examined each and every box, bag or dresser drawer that found its way there.

During the war there were "scrap drives" where men from town who may have had a truck would volunteer themselves and their truck to travel around the town and pick up any metal that people would donate to the "war effort". All this metal was heaped into a big pile behind the firehouse. That was our exclusive territory, at least so we figured. The pile sat there for a couple of weeks so we had plenty of time to be sure that there was nothing donated to that pile that would have been badly needed. I remember taking many things home that I figured would have a better future with me. I used some of that valuable stuff for trading material for several years after that. We won the war anyway...

About the same time I remember that if we took an aluminum pot or anything aluminum to the Pascack Movie Theater on Saturday afternoon all we had to do was toss the aluminum article into a big pile in the lobby and we got in to the movie for free. That was easy. All we would have to do is go to one of our favorite dumps and pick up a pot and we had free passage into the double feature (plus cartoons and a newsreel), saved us 11 cents!

I remember crawling through the drainage pile that came from the Pascack Pool to get into the place at a greatly reduced rate. Saved 25 cents there, too!