Evening star., 1936-11-29
By Sfewarf Jackson.

there Is a spot in downtown
Washington where 100 men
are fed three times a day on
Q stack Of old newspapers?
Fantastic. you say, absurd; men
can't eat newspapers.
But If you will go down to 526 First
street northwest you will find that this
statement isn't half the truth; here
you will find that these 100 men are
not only being fed three times a day.
but are given employment. paid small
salaries, clothed and housed in a
modern mems residential hotel with
warm beds, showers, reading and
recreation rooms. And all on q stack
Of old newspapers.
Down there, little known to most
Washingtonians, the industrial branch
of the mems social service department
Of the Salvation Army has built up
from q shoestring thriving business
with an annual income between $75,-
600 and $4,000, a business housed in
q new s85,000 three-story building
with garages and shops extending half
q block around it, a supporting
institution which guarantees the live
Iihood of 100 deserving middle-aged
men whom mechanical industry, the
depression and advancing age have
left in the rear of the economic pa
rade.
Beginning in 1894 with little place
In the 100 block on Pennsylvania ave-
o@~Sh M ndafinO f1Up
out of work men and with one horse
and wagon Gathering about the Dis
trict, collecting few hundred pounds
Of old newspapers and some old clothes,
this business of cashing in on waste
rehabilitating waste materials in order
TO rehabilitate waste humanity-has
pyramided into thriving industry
employing 100 men, operating II big
trucks and wagons and bringing in
daily more than 10000 pounds of old
newspapers and magazines and great
quantities of old clothing. old auto
tires, broken furniture, scrap paste
board and the like.
Ten tons of old newspapers day
80 tons a week-200 tons a month
2,400 tons a year. A stack Of old
newspapers that high taxes the imagi-
nation to the firing point, but that's
what they collect.
HOUSEWIVES Of Washington and
- its suburbs in Maryland and Vir-
ginia for years have been familiar with
the big red trucks which circulate
through the residential districts pick
ing up this waste material, but few Of
them ever imagined that such a busi-
ness could be worth $4,000 a year.
And their husbands probably never
gave 1t q thought; if they did it was to
opine that somebody ought to be
making q lot of money out of this.
Somebody Is, it develops, and the
beneficiary Of this unique but little
known industry of waste material
is-waste humanity. This branch Of
the Salvation Army was begun early
in the nineties by the heads Of the
organization in an effort to rehabili-
tate unsocialized men, worthy middle
aged men without a home, without
friend, without a dime.
There have always been thousands
Of such men; today there are many
times more. Individual craftsmen,
painstaking experts in their lines,
have been pushed out of employment
by the machine age; men over As are
not being hired in any event-insur-
ance companies advise against 1t as
Q had risk. Came the panic and the
depression and thousands Of big fac
tories and little shops shut down; mill
lions Of Americans ceased buying
things that men made by hand. But
the years rolled ON relentlessly for
these men and they found themselves
down and out, no Jobs to be had,
stripped of their savings by invest
nnent losses, bereft of their families
by deaths. Men in their late forties,
mites and early sixties, too proud to
beg on the streets, ineligible by one
reason or another for home relief in
the city where they found themselves
stranded when the bad breaks came;
ashamed to haunt missions or soup
lines-deserving craftsmen begging
for q chance to work for q living, to
work out their own lives.
This is the type of men at the Sal
vation Army's industrial home at 526
First street. AL Of them have jobs
the chaufieurs and teamsters to drive
the trucks and wagons, the helpers
to gather the waste material from the
homes, the sorters and paper balers to
work in the warehouse. the tailors and
shoemakers to mend the old clothes
and shoes, the carpenters, painters.
decorators and upholsterers to patch
up the broken furniture, the clerks
In the seven stores operated in the
District to sell the rehabilitated ar
ticles for quarter or two to people
too poor to buy the bare necessities OF
life elsewhere. Every craftsman in
the building is q man over IS years
old. One skillful upholsterer Is 81
years old. another 81.
THAT Is their job and that is their
- home. The waste material that
comes In provides their work. It's sale
provides their wages and their keep.
! There they are dependant upon no
charity: there they are self-respecting,