Blog: Early Recycling

Before the term “recycling” became groovy, people just re-used stuff. Here are a few examples from the farm.

In 1964, the summer after I began working at the Pitman farm, road construction for the widening of Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road in front of the farm began. On the opposite side of the road, just up from Miljevich Drive, there was a long guardrail that needed to be taken down. The guardrail was made of two inch steel pipe painted white and was typical of the style of railing that was installed in the 1920s and 30s beside the creeks and over the small bridges in many places in the area. Some of it still survives on Quito Road at Old Adobe Road, and I’m sure in some other places too.

In those days before plastic PVC pipe, Mr. Pitman saw an opportunity for irrigation pipe and obtained permission from the road-work foreman to salvage the pipe. One day he took me out with him to harvest that crop. With traffic whizzing by on the highway, we used a hand pipe cutter to cut the horizontal lengths of pipe that were between the vertical posts. The lengths we were able to get were about seven feet long, and we got a good stack of them. At the time, I was only twelve or thirteen, and was not much help cutting the pipe, although I remember putting my hand to the task. So he cut the pipe and I loaded the truck, and by the end of the day we had a full load of pipe, which we drove down to the dry-shed. 

Since I did not have sufficient strength, it fell to Dave, a co-worker of mine, to put threads on the ends of all those pieces of pipe. In Mr. Pitman’s words, threading pipe was, “The kind of work that made an old man out of a young boy.” I’ll never forget coming into the dry-shed from my job of watering the trees and seeing Dave set up at the work bench by the big shed door sweating as much as a man can sweat as he threaded the pipe by hand. He threaded the entire stack.

Two gunnysacks of pipe couplings and plenty of additional sweat later and the back acreage had water.

The fencing for the pasture had been procured in similar fashion. In 1936, the Golden Gate Bridge had been completed, and in the following year, the Oakland Bay Bridge. These were huge accomplishments and to commemorate them, San Francisco was chosen as the site for the 1939 World’s Fair. The Fair was held on Treasure Island, which is the island at the half way point on the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco. The island was originally just a rock outcropping similar to Alcatraz Island, but was expanded greatly by dredgings and fill from the bridge projects. The new, flat land provided the fairgrounds.

After the Fair, the island was converted into a military base and almost all of the Fair-related infrastructure had to go. Much of it was available to anyone who would cart it off, and that’s where Mr. Pitman came in. So, the pasture got first-rate fencing and Mr. Pitman himself got several green denim uniforms that had been worn by the Coca Cola Company employees during the Fair. I’m told that he wore green for years.

These days, if some local enterprise did those things, there would likely be a full page article in the paper telling everyone how wonderful it was that the company was “going green.”

This article was condensed from the new local history book, The Last of the Prune Pickers: A Pre-Silicon Valley Story, by Tim Stanley.