When Leonard Stefanelli was a senior at the old Polytechnic High School in San Francisco, the dean of boys, Paul Hungerford, called him into his office. Hungerford used to be a football coach, and Stefanelli was a tough, skinny kid with a bad attitude. But Hungerford liked him and thought it was time for some tough love.

“Stefanelli,” the dean told him, “I know you have some brains, but if you go outside in that world and f— around like you f— around in this school, you will end up picking up garbage.”

That is exactly what happened. He went into the garbage business.
Stefanelli started hauling garbage at 19, rose to be “a boss scavenger,” was a shareholder in Sunset Scavenger at 23, became president of the company at 31, helped overhaul the industry, became a solid waste expert, made some nasty enemies, and got fired after 20 years.

It is a wild story, and Stefanelli tells it in a new book, “Garbage,” published last fall by the University of Nevada. Sunset Scavenger, the company he headed, has turned into Recology Inc., a billion-dollar, employee-owned enterprise with 45 operating companies, and more than 800,000 customers in three states. “And this was built by a bunch of garbagemen, not by some Wall Street guy in a suit,” Stefanelli said.

Stefanelli is 83 now and mostly retired. A native San Franciscan with the old-time San Francisco accent, he has a growly voice. He is a plain talker, his words laced with salty images. He’s a man who likes to talk about his life and times, the hard work, the problems, his family, his friends, his enemies.

In his book, he is quick to point out his trade was not a refined one. “The garbage business is what most people historically assume to be the lowest rung on the social ladder of life,” he writes.

In conversation he talks easily about the hard work garbagemen used to do — how they carried heavy cans on their backs up and down steep stairs and packed every load up to the back of the open truck. They also had to sort the garbage to pick out bottles, cardboard and other usable goods, and take the rest of it to the dump.

This is not one of the fine arts. Stefanelli does not talk about “trash” or “rubbish.” It’s garbage to him, and it contains rotten fruit, maggots sometimes, old papers, junk, sour milk, all the stuff people throw away. It stinks.

But when Stefanelli talks about the world of garbage collection, it is with pride. “I enjoyed working on the truck,” he said. “It was a macho thing. I was proud to be a scavenger.”

San Francisco produces a million tons of waste a year, and somebody has to pick it up. It became the job of Italian immigrants, who came to this country with no skills. Some, like A.P. Giannini, became famous. But others did the dirty jobs.

To read the full story, visit http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nativeson/article/Garbageman-collects-respect-by-transforming-trash-12511920.php.

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