Ladies: ‘Litter is our middle name’
Every Tuesday, trio scours their neighborhood
When it comes to community service they are Vallejo’s Three Musketeers. Only there are no muskets. And they wear COVID-19 protocol face coverings, though they’re not above donning a funny hat.
Every Tuesday morning from 8:30 to 10:30, Terry Butterworth, Colleen Heskett and Annette Saroyan hit the streets with an extra-large Hefty bag, grocery cart, and trusty “PikStiks.”
Rain this week? No big deal. Trash doesn’t take a day off for the Vallejo Litter Ladies. Yes, it’s one for all, all for one under the motto, “Litter is Our Middle Name.”
Heskett started this trash terminating trio in November, soon adding Saroyan and, two months ago, Butterworth.
“It’s really grown,” Heskett said chuckling.
Slightly more seriously, she emphasized it’s strictly a threesome of friends “wanting to make a difference” and not an official nonprofit with any board meetings or fundraising.
“We’re totally volunteer,” she said. “We just do our time here.”
It all started with Heskett walking her dog near her home at Milita and Nebraska streets.
“One day, I noticed that people don’t seem to be picking up the garbage and thought, ‘I guess I’m doing it,'” Heskett said, rating the city’s litter problem as “moderate.”
“It depends on the day,” Heskett said, “especially annoyed” by broken glass “because of my dog’s paws.”
When Saroyan and then Butterworth threw their latex gloves into the ring, “it was a lot more fun. It’s a party,” grinned Heskett. “I look forward to it.”
While all agreed the camaraderie is important, there is that environmental concern.
“I just feel like it’s an opportunity to show how we need to treat people and protect Mother Earth for our kids and grand-kids,” Saroyan said. “It’s an active way of doing something instead of just sitting back and hoping someone else does something and they’re not.”
Saroyan recalled her school days and the “Do Not Litter” campaign “and you don’t throw things out of your car. I don’t know how people can do that. I don’t understand it.”
On this day, the gal pals cleaned up the neighborhood around Heskett’s home. On another Tuesday, they’ll hit around Saroyan and Butterworth’s Tuolumne Street neighborhood.
When the two-hour shift is over, “you feel good. You feel you made a difference,” Saroyan said.
Most of the litter is the standard fare: Fast food eatery wrappers, cigarette butts, “so many” plastic straws “and lots” of discarded pandemic masks.
“We do get seasonal stuff, like at Christmas there’s tinsel,” said Saroyan.
Lest the three forget that best-forgotten slab of meat.
“There was a steak last week. A huge, cooked steak with one bite out of it,” Butterworth said. “I should have left it. It was nasty.”
Butterworth said she’s learned “that there are some really wonderful people who live here. We get a lot of ‘thank-you’s.’ But there are a lot of people who just don’t care and they throw their garbage out” of car windows.
Butterworth has witnessed the random tossing from vehicles “quite frequently” and confronts the offender when appropriate.
“It depends on how (threatening) they look,” she said, agreeing that the camaraderie helps makes it fun as they “mostly talk politics and talk the world and talk whatever.”
If Butterworth has a complaint, it’s that the city needs more public trash cans.
“There are not enough of them and the ones they have are always jampacked,” Butterworth said.
Formerly of Houston via Chicago, Butterworth said she may not eagerly await Tuesday morning, “but when you get out here, it’s ‘Hey, this is good’ and we do think we’ll do something that makes a difference.”
Pick up trash more than a day a week? Uh, no.
“We’re busy,” Butterworth said. “We garden a lot and I have 12 chickens. One day a week is enough.”
Heskett said there’s no worrying that the three won’t have litter to dispose of on any given Tuesday.
“This is job security,” she said. “There will always be litter.”
Not that there has to be, Heskett said.
“Besides just not throwing litter out, if everyone takes care of just their own front yard, we would not be in business,” she said.
Then again, there is that little adrenaline kick when there’s litter ahead.
“Oddly enough, whenever we come across an area with a lot of trash, it’s so exciting,” Heskett said. “It’s like, ‘We have something to do!”