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Nice Cans

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I found some nice trash cans today that reminded me of throwing garbage out in the old days. Sometimes I worry that doing all this is bordering on some weird unhealthy fetish for public amenities — but perhaps it’s not different than watching Antiques Road Show, which is kind of fun. If CBC of PBS or BBC did Garbage Can roadshow, I’d watch for a while.

This old can must be 30 years old. It was outside my friend’s house on Ouellette Avenue, Windsor’s main street (some two kilometers south of the Rohypnol District I mentioned on Saturday). They’re all over town too.

The ads in Windsor on cans and bus benches are mostly small-time stuff — real estate agents complete with pictures of the agent — none of the big campaigns like in Toronto. The local-ness of it is sort of neat though. Kind of like Toronto’s Brad Lamb, but none of these people attach their heads to sheep-bodies.

Does anybody remember Ricky Receptacle? I have a vague feeling there was some kind of cute campaign when these cans came out, with an anthropomorphized can asking kids to throw stuff out instead of littering. Am I imagining this, or was there such a thing? It is interesting to think that the state could be so cute.

Across the street from my old house, in the park I grew up in, was this old red can. These cans are everywhere, complete with with stenciled on town name. Tecumseh is sort of the Mississauga of Windsor. Well, maybe the Port Credit of Windsor is better, as the scale is about right. Not fancy, but the cans do the job and we’ll never forget where we are.

They’ve also got this huge stencil they’ve placed all over the place that shows Chief Tecumseh. We didn’t know much about Tecumseh the man growing up in his town, just that he helped us win the War of 1812 somewhere along the Thames up towards London. His face was around though, like on the Big Chief gas station sign in town, a full service place that employed tough-looking kids.

When the Harris government almagamated some of Windsor’s eastern suburbs (all former towns/villages/hamlets) there was some debate as to what to call the new municipality, but happily Tecumseh won out. The adjacent mega-pality got the unfortunate generic “Lakeshore” moniker. I don’t think I want to go see their cans, because even if they say Lakeshore, I won’t know where I am.

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7 comments

  2. We had Ricky Receptacle where I grew up in the Maritimes, but I don’t remember any advertising. Maybe it was before my time (70s). But I remember the cans well and I can actually still recall the weight of the flap when you’d push garbage through. I had forgotten all about them.

    Is it just me who thinks it’s totally hilarious that London has a Thames? When I was reading that paragraph about Tecumseth I was wondering, “big deal he was in England during the war of 1812.”

  3. I remember the Ricky Receptacles in Windsor while growing up. Don’t remember making a big deal out of them, just another place to throw out trash.

    Essex County was lucky in one way during the Harris renaming-amalgamated-towns madness – other than Lakeshore, everybody else kept the names of their main towns (except Harrow, which was thrown into Essex). None of this Central Middlesex/Town of Blue Mountains/Greater Napanee craziness.

    Just don’t ask me to ever accept Essex Road 20 over Hwy 18.

  4. Thanks for that PDF Sandy. From it:

    “In response to a need for litter education, the Ricky Receptacle character visited schools educating children on recycling and litter abatement. Unfortunately, this campaign was short-lived due to financial limitations.”

    I think it timed it to the 90s…I thought it was before that. That document also mentioned the Pitch-In campaign. I remember a pointy, stylized human figure throwing trash into a wire-mess container. I think that was the central image from that campaign.

    Jamie> All those highway numbers were important. “42” meant big things.

  5. Shawn, what park is that in the picture?

    I was in Windsor a couple weekends ago and was astonished and disgusted by the recent spurt of big box development out by Walker Rd/401. There are so many parking lots and devastatingly huge stores out there. I know downtown/pedestrian shopping culture is long dead in Windsor, but even mall culture is better than these stores and huge parking lots. I wanted to climb the lampposts in the lots and tear down each of the tinny speakers playing ads: this unavoidable sound pollution/clutter was the worst part of the experience.

  6. For what’s it’s worth, I wrote about the big box part of Windsor in a Broken Pencil Magazine article that can be found here: http://www.brokenpencil.com/features/feature.php?featureid=73

    I got out of the car in a Tecumseh Shoppers Drug Mart the other day, and there were speakers attached to the light poles playing music throughout the big lot. Public Space in Windsor doesn’t play by the same rules as Toronto — everything is so attached to the car here. I’ve driven so much in the last 5 days, without even trying, that I feel like i’m back in my old life.

    I’m working from my old house today, but I want a real coffee right now (from a real espresso machine) so I have to go for a 10 minute drive. To a stripmall, where the Second Cup is. There is a Tim Hortons up on the highway, maybe a 10 minute walk, but I think we’re allowed to burn all the gas we want to avoid TH coffee.