Conspicuous consumption

While I was on vacation last week, The Bee ran an L.A. Times story by Larry Gordon about the astonishing amount of stuff college students leave behind when they depart their dorms at the end of the school year. It brought back a memory from the mid '70s.

In those days, shortly after I graduated from college and before I was ready to grow up, I had a series of odd (and I mean odd) jobs up and down the state. One was a brief gig with the Housing Office at UC Berkeley, and one of my chores was to clean out the garbage chutes at the campus's high-rise dorms, called "The Units."

Each of these complexes contained four buildings of eight stories, housing about 200 students each. They had garbage chutes on each floor that emptied into a basement. My job was to clean them out after the students had departed for the summer.

Gordon's story describes piles of appliances and electronics; there wasn't much of that back then. But the rest of it sounded familiar: clothing, linens, sundries, books, papers. In each dorm the end-of-year glut jammed the chutes, so I had to go to every floor and use a heavy broom handle to try to dislodge the garbage.

Two things struck me. I salvaged enough thrown-away baseball gloves to outfit a softball league -- which I did with some friends -- and found enough pornography to fill the Library of Congress. There were also hundreds of bottles of liquor and copious amounts of other recreational substances -- all of which I threw away, of course.

Gordon's story is a reminder that the specific nature of our garbage may change over the years, but not our propensity for creating it in massive quantities.