Bill Thomas was on the street before the sun was up, bundled against the cold and sporting a ball cap that said “60 forever.” He carried a long-handled grabber in one hand, a white plastic trash bag in the other, as he began his daily circuit through town.
He knew just where to stop for his booty — beer cans, mostly, which fetch 45 cents a pound at a Tacoma recycling center.
He found a stash under Santa’s Cottage at the Village Green, another stash under a loading dock behind the IGA where a homeless man often sleeps. The Dumpster next to the Chevron station offered up a trove, as did the Dumpster behind the Red Bike.
He marveled at the abundance and shook his head at the debauchery all the cans suggested.
“They never quit drinking their beer,” he said as he emptied a can of swill onto the dark pavement. “It’s discouraging.”
“Discouraged,” though, is not a word that comes to mind after a morning spent with Bill Thomas. He reaps about $400 a month from his one-man recycling program, enough to take occasional trips to Colorado to visit his son or to Las Vegas, where he and his wife recently took a bus tour to see the Hoover Dam.
“It’s become an obsession,” he said cheerfully, striding through the Thriftway parking lot. “And if it keeps my legs limber, I don’t mind.”
Thomas, 78, began his obsession 30 years ago, on a day he remembers as clear as a summer afternoon. He had accidentally destroyed his 11-year-old daughter’s bike when he ran over it with his car. He felt horrible. A gas station attendant and grave-digger at the time, he didn’t have the money to buy her a new one.
“My brother-in-law said, ‘Why don’t you recycle? You can earn some extra money that way.’ I said, ‘Where do I start?’”
As it turned out, Thomas started with his brother-in-law, a heavy drinker with plenty of empties on hand. In 30 days, his daughter had a new bike, and Thomas was hooked. He walked into the house, put his arms around his wife and asked her what she needed for the home. A television set, she told him. “I got that new TV in 90 days.”
According to Thomas, he’s been recycling ever since. During his working years, he collected cans on the weekends. When he retired 13 years ago, he began what is now a near-daily regimen. He guesses he’s out on the streets 300 days a year.
Two weeks ago, with a reporter in tow, he began his day at 6 a.m. at Sporty’s, where he downed two cups of coffee and chatted amiably about his life. His friends — regulars who, like him, show up every morning when the diner opens — cast a friendly eye his way. “Some guys still got it,” one quipped, nodding toward his date.
Thomas then ventured out into the morning chill, a black glove on one hand, a blue one on the other, both discovered during his morning rounds. “I haven’t bought a pair of gloves in years,” he said happily.
Thomas is the son of Greek immigrants; his father, born a Pistikoudis, chose the surname Thomas when a foreman suggested his was too difficult to pronounce. He was raised in Ohio, where his father worked hard to feed his small family and where Bill Thomas developed a work ethic at a young age.
In 1946, when he was 12, he got his first job delivering newspapers, an arduous task without a vehicle. Someone suggested he buy a bike, but he didn’t have the money. So he worked out an arrangement with a local merchant: He’d buy a bike for $63, paying it off in $5 installments over the course of three months. “I paid it off in six weeks,” he said.
When he first started recycling, he gathered both bottles and aluminum cans, stacking them in cartons in a lean-to on his property off the Westside Highway. His wife took issue with his avocation on occasion, warning him to keep the empties neat and tidy.
It was particularly profitable in those early days, and Thomas knew just where to go.
Along with a couple of friends, he’d sneak into the landfill at night. His friends were after old lawnmowers and batteries; he’d bag the bottles and cans. He routinely visited the mud bogs behind what is now Roseballen, where the homeless people invited him to their tarp city and where he often collected hundreds of cans and bottles at a time. The Strawberry Festival was also bountiful; it took him six hours to clean up the streets after the fair ended.
The beer and soda distributors would visit his home when he had 600 cases of bottles and 300 to 400 pounds of cans, cutting him a check for as much as $1,000 every few months. That ended in the 1980s, when the distributors were no longer required to take back their bottles, and Thomas turned his focus to aluminum cans, which he transports to Tacoma once he has around 700 to 800 pounds.
Thomas discovered Vashon during the Korean War, when he was in the C Battery of the 20th AAA Battalion, stationed at what is now the Eagles Club and trained to man a 90mm artillery weapon. “Fortunately, we never had to shoot it,” he said, smiling wryly. It was on Vashon that he met Andrea Mickle, the woman he’d eventually marry.
His wasn’t an easy path. After the war, he went to work as a laborer in Cleveland, lost his job and then came back to Vashon with his wife and baby daughter, virtually penniless until he landed a job at Boeing. There, too, he got a pink slip — losing his job with 15 minutes’ notice, he said — then moved to Colorado, where he worked as a milkman for 15 years. He returned to Vashon in 1974, after his wife’s mother offered the couple a parcel of land.
He pieced it together, digging graves, working at a service station and landscaping family plots at the cemetery until 1987, when he went to work for K2. There was a time, he said, when he dug graves by hand; it took him 18 hours to complete a job. His wife begged him to buy a backhoe. “‘Bill,’ she told me, ‘you better buy a machine, or you’re going to be digging your own grave.’”
Many know Bill Thomas as the guy who walks the streets, cleaning them up. People sometimes drive by and holler “thank you” out the window. The merchants know him, too. On this particular morning, a stash in a plastic bag was waiting for him behind Sporty’s, another one behind Perry’s.
He finds more than just cans, of course. Sometimes he finds copper, which fetches a good price these days. Occasionally, he finds money. One Christmas three years ago he discovered a $100 bill wrapped around a $10 bill. It wasn’t the first $100 bill he pocketed.
He knows many of the janitors by name. “Those are the best people to know,” he said.
He also knows Carl Hamol, the man who sweeps the sidewalk in front of the Vashon Pharmacy and other downtown businesses.
As dawn broke, he spotted Hamol, sitting on a window ledge, eating a muffin and holding a bag full of baked goods. Hamol said he had found the pastries on the doorstep of the pharmacy, left there, presumably, for him.
“It’s OK to sit down, but if I catch you sleeping, I’ll steal your buns,” Thomas joked, smiling at Hamol.
His brisk, two-hour trek finally over, Thomas walked toward his car as a soft morning light bathed the quiet town. There, on the roof of his white sedan, sat a single aluminum can — like some sort of gift dropped from the heavens. Thomas knew better.
“People leave cans for me all the time,” he said, as he stuck the empty in his trash bag.
