The buffet table in my dining room was taken from a curb in West Hartford, Conn.
The church pew in my guest room was someone’s garbage in South Windsor.
And the ice-cream parlor bench in my barn (until I find the right spot for it) came from a roadside in Coventry.
I mention these finds as full disclosure that I came to Ted Botha’s “Mongo: Adventures in Trash” as a true believer in the old saying and premise behind his book: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Even before the book, Botha’s second, he was no stranger to mongo, which is street slang for anything discarded by one person and picked up by another. When he moved to New York City, he picked up pieces of furniture off the sidewalk to furnish his apartment. And when he realized that other people were doing the same thing, he couldn’t believe that their stories hadn’t been told. So he set out to do it.
Not an easy task, which he explains early in the book:
“The street collector you see today could well be a bum or a lunatic, that’s true enough, but just as easily a millionaire, a schoolteacher, an accountant, a doctor, a homemaker. Much of the story about what they collect, and how and why, is passed along orally, like some secret religion. And perhaps because their pastime is still so easily misunderstood – “Ugh, you collect garbage?” is the refrain that usually greets them – it’s seldom that they willingly declare themselves.”
But Botha is a persistent guy, as witnessed in his first chapter, “The Pack Rats,” in which he writes about Sarah, a woman whose story he chased for a year. Sarah had come from a slightly eccentric antiques-collecting family and had taken items off the street for more than 30 years in New York, Philadelphia and Tennessee, although she and everyone else he interviewed agreed: New York is the best mongo hunting ground.
She found a crib in Manhattan dating back to the Civil War period that she later sold for $500. But most of her finds are more mundane, and over the years they have piled up, prompting her to debate herself:
“Should I take it? No, rather not. Maybe I could find some use for it. But where?”
In addition to Sarah, Botha introduces readers to a treasure hunter who digs through landfills and has found cannonballs, diamond rings and a Revolutionary War-era tricorn hat worth $9,000. We meet “archaeologists” who dig up old privies and the beautiful and sometimes valuable bottles stored in them. There are the anarchists – dumpster-diving kids who pull all kinds of food, from chocolate-covered strawberries to tofu – out of the garbage because they oppose societal waste. And the rare book dealer whose entire collection, including first editions of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake,” comes from trash bags.
Although from the start it is clear that while many make a living from collecting mongo, the act is about much more: the hunt, the pursuit and always the possibility of a find.
“Anyone you see out there who is standing on top of a dump or in a dumpster, tearing at a garbage bag, slicing open a box, riffling through a tied-up stack of magazines, shouldering a legless table, or inspecting old mattresses is often just as committed to his or her pursuit as any philatelist or numismatist. And if you bother to ask what they have found, you will understand why.”
Botha did, and what he uncovered was not just a book about stuff, but a collection of interesting, funny – and sometimes heartbreaking – tales of people who not only collect mongo, but represent the spirit behind it.
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