"Piggy" Smith

W. A. "Piggy" Smith lived in an old farmhouse by the highway. Behind the house were forty acres covered with junked cars and trucks, gutted combines and parted-out tractors, dead batteries and grimy engine blocks, and rusting piles of scrap iron and corrugated sheet metal. There were also the doors, windows, stripped-out wiring and salvaged plumbing fixtures from a hundred demolished houses and buildings, and the lumber from a score of dismantled barns and wooden grain cribs, pulled down for their thick planking and heavy timbers. And in the very center of Piggy's property stood a huge pile of old tires that had become an unsightly local landmark, only partially concealed by a fence made from automobile wheels welded together and painted a riot of clashing colors. Piggy Smith, enormous in his bib overalls, presided genially over this salvage-yard empire. He liked to say that he had gotten out of pig farming and into recycling when it was still called the junk business.

Only one thing bothered Piggy and regularly cost him a night's sleep: what to do with his collection of 60,000 old tires, a monument to thirty years of never saying "no" to anything free. He was certain there had to be a market for old tires if only he could discover it.

In an inspired moment, Piggy calculated that 60,000 tires, laid side-by-side, would stretch for 25½ miles and their combined weight could hold down all the sheet metal, particle board and waterproof tarps covering all the leaky-roofed mobile homes in Idaho. This was based on an informal "windshield" survey of mobile homes in Palouse County conducted by Piggy himself one Sunday afternoon. It depressed him to think that he could saturate such a promising market and barely make a dent in his stock of old tires.

Still, he would have gone on collecting them, at the rate of several hundred a year, in hopes that modern science would one day discover a paying use for the blinking things and he could cash in big-time on the discovery, thereby benefiting the environment and mankind in the process.

However, his scheme for environmental improvement did not meet with universal approval. A number of Piggy's neighbors began to complain about his collection of old tires. They were less concerned about the environment than about their property values, which did not benefit from Piggy's unsightly monument to recycling. Palouse County officials took pains to remind Piggy that his long-established salvage yard was, nonetheless, a nonconforming use and in violation of several county ordinances. The term "public nuisance" was used to describe what Piggy boasted of as being a "gold mine." The libertarian voice on the county council went so far as to declare a limit to the inviolate and inalienable property rights of even the most rugged, die-hard, Idaho individualist and local character, a category Piggy proudly occupied. The ownership, possession and back-yard storage of 60,000 old tires—in full view of motorists passing by on U.S. 95—was, she declared, pushing the limits for rugged, die-hard individualism and local-characterism even for Idaho.

Piggy was shocked and dismayed at the outcry against him. He felt hounded and set upon by the forces of something he stoutly resisted—change, progress, and all narrow-minded souls who failed to share his vision of a world benefited and improved by recycling technology—in particular, the technology of recycling old tires—in particular, his own enormous cache of old tires.

Piggy's son, George, was big and strapping like his father and George won a football scholarship to Northern Idaho University. Anxious to escape the stigma of being a junk man's son, George hit the books as hard as he hit opposing quarterbacks. As a result, he graduated with his class.

George was the first member of Piggy's family to go to college and his proud parents attended his graduation. While visiting NIU on that auspicious occasion, Piggy buttonholed an errant engineering professor and questioned him about the feasibility of using shredded rubber tires as a mileage-stretching gasoline additive or perhaps a radiation shield.

"Sort of like putting a box of baking soda in your refrigerator to absorb odors. Only instead of absorbing odors, it would absorb radon gas" was how Piggy described his radiation-shield idea. Both ideas he had picked up from talking to customers, who trooped through his salvage yard in search of dollar-stretching bargains and overlooked treasures.

The professor smiled. He would later, in talking to a colleague, describe Piggy as an "amusing character."

Shortly thereafter, the mountain of old tires at the center of the controversy surrounding Piggy Smith's salvage yard mysteriously caught fire and burned for a month, despite repeated attempts by the Borah Rural Fire Company to extinguish the smoldering heap of rubber. When it finally stopped emitting plumes of oily, acrid smoke, Piggy salvaged the chard steel belts and bulldozed what was left, adding another layer of grime to his miniature Super Fund site.

The county slapped him with $1,800 in fines and penalties for various zoning violations and other infractions and ordered him to clean up his property or face condemnation proceedings. Arson investigators from the Borah Fire Department and the Palouse County Sheriff's Office came nosing around.

Piggy swore off collecting old tires after that unless they were attached to a salvaged vehicle.