Yesterday's Garbage

"Under today's gentle blanket of beautiful snow lie hidden the special decorations which embellished the streets of Jersey City for the holiday season. Tomorrow the sun will shine and everything will sparkle, even last week's garbage."

The Jersey Journal, editorializing thus last week, was wrong in one respect. Not just last week's garbage, but a month's accumulation of rubbish, ashes and slops littered the sidewalks and gutters of certain sections of Jersey City.

For this stinking state of affairs, Jersey Citizens had, as usual, to thank their perennial mayor, Frank ("I am the Law") Hague. Boss Hague did not have to hold his nose; vacationing in Florida, his only problem was to get to Hialeah in time for the first race. Boss Hague left the worrying to a trusted lieutenant, one Michael A. Scatuorchio, who has grown fat and rich collecting Jersey City's garbage for the last 24 years.

For all that time, no one except "Mike Scat" could get the garbage-collecting contract. The law provides that a bidder for the contract must own a garbage dump; an incinerator would not do. Mike owns several dumps along New Jersey's Hackensack River, whence he sells his swill by the cubic yard to pig farmers.

Boss of the Fifth Ward. Mike Scat is one of the more fragrant characters in U.S. municipal politics. Son of an Italian junk dealer, he went to high school and Georgetown University. Before he finished college, Frank Hague called him home to boss the Fifth Ward, where most of Jersey City's 70,000 Italians live.

As reward, Mike Scat got the garbage contract--a circumstance which provided money for him, jobs for his constituents. Mike knew how to take care of his people. Among other things he organized the Dante Alighieri Society, which provided social evenings and entertainment. For a few years before Pearl Harbor, Mike Scat's favorite entertainment was a show in which one of the actors did a takeoff of Haile Selassie.

Since Mike Scat could always be sure of the garbage contract (this year worth $522,000), he never bothered to modernize his equipment. He still uses horse-drawn wagons, a slow method which, even in normal times, permitted him to make no more than two collections a week. It also called for more manpower, therefore more jobs for his loyal Fifth Warders. But last month the manpower shortage finally caught up with Mike Scat.

Mike made a typical Hague compromise: he would collect the garbage in the Journal Square district (where Frank Hague lives) and in the West Side park section (where most other politicians live). The rest of Jersey City's garbage could lie rotting. Complained Mike Scat: "The work is hard and unattractive. . . ."

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