Starlight In The Alley
November 9, 1956

Of all the jobs in this town, the most thankless belongs to those who comb the alleys for bottles and boxes. They pull rickety wooden carts through the streets to gain a dollar or two a day, a small reward in a prosperous era.

For most of these men, pasteboard box collecting is a vocation, a means of livelihood. Like most enterprises, it is competitive. Those who search for boxes in the little-traveled corners of the city know what time Sterchi's discards its pasteboard the way secretaries know what time the boss gives dictation.

Eleven-year-old Charles Simpson and his brother Lira, 8, are not professionals, however. They are new at the game. They started just two months ago.

"We generally do it after school," Charles explained. "We get 60 cents per hundred pounds for the boxes down at the mill. We get five cents for drink jugs when they have tops on 'em and three cents when they don't. We sell them to the juice place."

Charles and his brother built their own cart with cast-off lumber and Soap Box Derby wheels.

"Some days," he says, "we don't hardly make nothing. Some days we make maybe a dollar. We take it home to Mama.

"We save some of it, too. I want to grow up and cut hair and Lira don't know what he wants to do yet, but something like that. Mama says I got my eye on a star, but I'll do it."

The two boys have worked hard at the job, but they have the problems amateurs are bound to have.

"We don't know when the cartons are thrown out," Charles says. "That's the biggest trouble. If we knew, we'd be there, but we haven't learned about it yet. We just have to be lucky and do the best we can."

Charles and Lira Simpson's best will someday be good enough, likely. Every man who starts out collecting boxes for 60 cents a hundred pounds doesn't end up cutting hair, it is true.

But then every man who walks in the alleys doesn't have his eye on a star.

Charles Kuralt's People (Kenilworth Media, copyright 2002)
ISBN 0-9679096-1-9 | Hard cover | 384 pages with photos | $25.95

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