Norfolk junk man sees more rivals, scarcer scraps

NORFOLK

With 550,000 miles on his pickup and 74 years on his weathered face, Booty the Junk Man is a barometer of the times. At the curb, the spoils grow ever slimmer, and competition to claim the castoffs more cut-throat.

“Put a washing machine out there and you’ll see,” says Booty, threading his battered ’89 GMC through a neighborhood off Granby Street. “It’ll be gone in five minutes.”

Strong scrap metal prices make even the most-decrepit appliance worth about $25 at the salvage yard. That, plus the weak economy, has spawned more scavengers like Booty – trash-to-treasure hunters who poke through the junk that residents jettison to the curb for city collection.

“I’d say there’s about 300 of us out here now,” says Booty, a retired trucker whose real name, Crawford Carey, surrendered to his nickname long ago. “Anything metal. That’s what everybody’s looking for. I like the big stuff though: refrigerators, air conditioners, washers, dryers, microwaves.”

They can be hard to find in a lean economy, when over-the-hill appliances get repaired instead of replaced with new. The rivalry for scarcer scraps can lead to a showdown.

Booty, who works alone, has been muscled aside by other junk men who work in twos or threes. Some teams use spotter cars to cover more ground, calling in finds to a truck driver who trails behind.

“They show up and start taking stuff out of a pile I’m working on,” Booty says. “I tell them, ‘Hey, I was here first.’ And they say, ‘Who cares?’ It didn’t used to be that way.”

He says he backs off and moves on: “It’s not worth a fight.”

Booty pulls out his permit, issued by the police department. This year, Norfolk became the first and only local city that requires scrappers to have one. The goal is to squelch at least some of the thievery that has skyrocketed along with payouts at the scale – a high, Booty says, that reached 13 cents a pound for scrap metal, 55 cents for aluminum and $3 for copper.

Permits aren’t granted to people with criminal histories. According to Norfolk police, 106 have been issued.

“But a lot of people are doing this without one,” Booty says. “I don’t know how they keep getting away with it.”

They get by because police are swamped and the region is sprawling, with countless neighborhoods to canvass and scores of scrap dealers to purchase the proceeds.

Booty spends three afternoons a week combing the streets of South Hampton Roads. On a good day, he’ll pluck as much as $150 worth of metal from the curbs. After a storm like Hurricane Irene soaks households, he might even double that.

“But sometimes you drive around the whole day and only find one thing,” he says. “It can be boring. But I’m a junk man. I come from a long line of junk men. That’s all I am.”

A native of Clifford Beach, N.J. and a Korean War vet, Booty says his mother and father had 23 children. He started salvaging “as a kid, just to get something to eat in the house. You can only stand so much oatmeal and potatoes.”

A gray two-story comes into view, with a mound of odds and ends stacked at its curb. Booty spies a silvery glint, stops and decides that a set of shelves with metal legs is worth taking.

Monika Mumm watches him toss the shelves into his truck with a thump. Down from Maryland, she’s helping her son renovate the gray house.

“Two other junk men have already stopped by here this morning,” she says. “I didn’t expect to see so many. That doesn’t happen where I’m from.”

Booty heads on to Ocean View, shelves rattling behind him. He rolls past neighborhoods with fancy names and landscaped lawns and gabled homes. His calloused hands steer the truck toward streets with bare yards, cracked driveways and swaybacked fences. Lower-income neighborhoods yield more junk.

“Rich people buy new appliances from Sears and have them haul the old ones away,” he says. “Poor people buy used. They go through a lot of washers.”

Besides, he doesn’t feel very welcome in ritzy communities, where residents look down their noses at his well-worn truck, with its “Booty the Junk Man” signs and another that reads “Honk if parts fall off.”

“I don’t care much for that kind of people,” he says.

Bernice, Booty’s wife of 50 years, rides with him sometimes. The couple moved south to Norfolk in 1996 to help care for Bernice’s ailing brother. The three still live together in a modest rancher near the airport.

Booty and Bernice get by on social security and his Teamster pension. They started scrapping locally about four years ago to make ends meet.

“But I go faster without my wife,” Booty says. “She wants to stop at every pile.”

He’s more selective, grading a heap’s potential from a block away while rolling along at 20 mph. “Nothing but wood,” he mutters toward a far-off mound.

Other piles offer dingy mattresses, rugs, cardboard boxes, bald tires, plastic buckets, dead TVs. Unlike some scrappers, Booty doesn’t stop to cut the steel springs from mattresses or gut TVs: “You only get a few bucks and it takes too much time.”

He hits the brakes when he spots a desk chair perched atop of a soggy blue couch.

“The bottom part is solid metal,” he says. “Five or six pounds.”

Some junk men would unbolt the pedestal and leave the seat behind. “I don’t do that,” Booty says. “If I’m going to take it, I take it all. I don’t like leaving people a mess.”

He says he has his standards. Tries to leave a pile as neat as he found it. Doesn’t dig through garbage cans. Won’t trespass in someone’s yard. Knocks on a door if he’s unsure an item is meant for the taking.

“One time I found a brand-new table saw and bench still in the box,” he says. “I guess there’s a million stories behind the stuff people throw out. Maybe they’re moving, or they got a divorce, or maybe they just got something new.”

Booty has a “country home” – a trailer on a few acres near South Hill – that he’s furnished with tossed tables and chairs that look perfectly fine to him. When he carts away a dryer, he always checks inside for coins, which fall from pockets into a space beneath the drum.

“One dryer had $78 in it,” he marvels.

There have been a few finds he regrets, such as refrigerators and freezers full of spoiled food: “Whew-wee, those are bad.”

At the end of a cul-de-sac, a Dodge pickup is parked at a curb. Its driver is closing the tailgate on a load of scarred appliances – a rival who just beat Booty to a windfall.

“He’s got about a $120 to $130 there,” Booty assesses with a sigh. “You just gotta be in the right place at the right time.”

There are plenty of losing days, when it costs more to run his truck than he earns. With luck, he’ll climb out of the hole the next day, or the next week, or maybe it will happen around the very next corner.

Booty feels blessed to have a strong back and simple needs: “My wife and grandkids keep me going. If I wake up in the morning, then everything’s fine. I go do what I have to do and that’s it. People think too much.”

Joanne Kimberlin, (757) 446-2338, joanne.kimberlin@pilotonline.com