One man's garbage is this kid's treasure.

This is a view of the bridge taken from the dump.






During the 50's ,long before re-cycling, there was a great place to play in Parkdale, The Dump.
The dump was located on Riverside drive where Bagnall’s mills eventually built their building supply store.
There was no organized garbage pick up , most people had an old barrel in their back yard and burned what they could. The rest was stored in a pile behind the barn. Once a year it was hauled away, usually by a man with a horse and dump cart. In our area it was Mr Matthews from the old CAA grounds. (Charlottetown Athletic Association) This was shortened to The C A Grounds.
In those days Riverside Drive didn’t rally exist, there was no road between the dump up to the current QEH site just open water.
Carts and trucks would arrive with the garbage and dump it, some of it directly in to the water to reclaim land , the rest through out the dump. There was always a number of fires burning in the dump. I recall two houses close to the dump. Gunner Bell lived next to there in a swampy area. When it rained his bottom floor was flooded. Up a little further , the Murphy’s, Max and his family.
We spent a lot of time at the dump searching for treasure. H.H. Marshall, the company that distributed magazines would take their stuff there to be burned. The stores that sold magazines would tear of the front cover from out of date magazines and return it to Marshalls.
Now timing is everything, every kid loved comics and you had to be at the dump at just the right time to look through the comics before they were burned.
Doesn’t sound to difficult, except for Duddley!!!
The dump had a care taker who directed the traffic and kept the fires burning and liked to go through the garbage looking for stuff to sell. He had a shack in the middle of the dump were he ate his meals and took a nap.
Duddley Dump Rat, that’s what we called him, legend has it “he could take the comic book out of a kid’s hand with a pitch fork at 100 paces". Anyway he would throw the pitch fork at us as we scrounged for comics.
Clark Fruit would dump rotten fruit there also, usually Monday morning. We would try to be there for their arrival and root through the Oranges looking for some only partly rotten and have a feast.
The other thing of value to a kid were the orange crates. They were made of wood about 30 inches long and a wooden divider in the middle. Who ever designed is owed a debt of gratitude by guys from my era. The crate was just the right size to hold comics, two stacks. Comic trading was a ritual also. On winter nights when you had nothing to do, no TV no Radio and all your comics read, you would call up a friend (Soupy Campbell down over the grocery store)and say “do you want to trade comics?” The answer is always “SURE”.
So of we would go with our orange crate filled with comics, one brother on each end, and walk to our friend’s house.
He would take out his crate, we would then look over his, and he ours, setting out the ones of interest. We would do this in absolute silence.
When we each had examined the others comics we would check the number each had and trade comic for comic and off home to read.
As we grew into our teens the dump continued to hold it’s grip on us.
Wacky Carver was an avid sportsman and loved shooting. He had a Ford Panel truck in which he put a hatch in the roof. If you were lucky enough to be up at Wacky’s oil shed when the urge hit him , off you would go to the dump. Wacky would let us drive the truck through the dump as he jumped out of the hatch to shoot rats and crows. I don’t think I ‘ve ever been in a place with so many rats, we would have to fight them for the food.

The dump eventually closed, the land settled and building were erected over this massive garbage pile.
When the dump officially closed and was covered over the rats moved on through out Parkdale. Every home had a rat problem for the next few years. Our dog at the time slept in the barn and every night she would kill rats. It was not uncommon to see rats running across the streets during the day light hours.
I ran into Duddley years later, he was living in a boarding house with a group of old men. We had a chat and laughed about the pitch fork and the rats.
As we were chatting a few other men were discussing things from their past.
The conversation was on equipment that lasted a long time. Each man told a story about, a car, a tractor or an other implement that had great longevity.
Duddley who was listening to this piped up and said
“Why back in our old home, we had a pendulum clock, it ran so long the shadow of the pendulum wore a hole in the back of the clock. None of the men could top that story.