News from June 11, 2009 issue

Local News
The Crittenden Press Full Version (PDF)

Garbage route a way of life for 89-year-old
While most people were still snoozing or up getting ready for a day of barbecuing and recreation, J.A. “James” Dempsey was tramping through weeds along a fencerow behind his home looking for just the right board.
That’s how Dempsey began his Memorial Day before heading out on his trash run to collect from as many as a dozen locations that day.
“I get behind when I take the day off,” he said.
So, it was business as usual on the holiday as he climbed into his pickup, already chock full of smelly garbage sacks stacked against the custom-made sideboards jutting high over the top of the cab. Dusting off the pillbugs on a damp area of the board he settled on, he positioned it just so between the bed of the truck and the black and white sacks of trash.
“That’ll help keep it from flying out,” Dempsey said, showing how the board would later be used against the tailgate so he can fit in more bags. Since the county’s convenience center charges a flat rate on each pickup load, the more trash he can fit into the back of his truck, the better the profit margin from the nominal fee he charges his clients.
“What tears me up most is that $50 a load,” he said, explaining the economics of hauling trash. “You see why I mash ‘er down?”
Despite his wife Gertie’s urgings to take the day off – the convenience center was closed so he wouldn’t be able to offload and one of Gertie’s nephews had just died, with funeral visitation scheduled for later that day – Dempsey made out just before 7:30 a.m., to do his job.
It was just another working day for a man who has known little but that in his life. As a child, he worked with a cross-cut saw and on the family farm in Dekoven. As a young man, he was able to avoid the draft that fueled the nation’s Wolrd War II efforts. So, he helped build Camp Breckenridge in his native Union County and contribute to construction of the airport in Sturgis. In 1951, two years after marrying Gertie, Dempsey sought work with the railroad.
“Just give me a job, and I’ll show you,” he told his eventual supervisor at the railroad.
They did. And he did.
With a secure job, Dempsey and his wife were ready to start a family, so in 1952, Gertie gave birth to James. Dempsey fed his family with the job at Illinois Central Railroad for 30 years before retiring.
“There was a lot going on over those couple of years,” he said as he hastily recapped his life while making his way from his Crayne home to the first stop, the last house in Crittenden County before crossing over into Fredonia along U.S. 641.
After adding a couple of bags to his load and a quick conversation with his first customer of the day, he pulled from his pocket a biscuit he had swiped from the fare Gertie provided for breakfast that morning. The biscuit is for a haggard old dog making his way through another day. Like his feeder, the mutt doesn't complain about the aches and pains of the day, and soaks up the attention... and biscuit.
“They like to see me coming,” he said of the furry friends he’s made at his stops.
They seem to treat him better than the mailman, too. He’s never been bitten nor attacked.
Planning ahead for the day, Dempsey leaves the initial stop and heads into Fredonia for gas. He grumbles a bit about the $20 bill he pulls from his pocket not getting his vehicle nearly as far as it used to. But, he won't complain much, not even about the atrocious smells and nasty spills that soil his work uniform, a pair of blue coveralls.
“You get used to it,” he said pleasantly.
As he crosses off the stops on his route, he loves to tell stories he’s accumulated over the years. He clearly enjoys sharing a ride in his truck, a rare treat. He’s had it before, but that was training a partner years ago that didn’t work out.
This time is different. He takes pride in showing off his routine, even making a list of stops and a cordial note scribbled by the shaky hand of a man just a few months shy of 90. He has even cleaned out the passenger side of the bench seat where he normally keeps a few trinkets and tools of the trade. Apologizing for any mess, he explains one of the tricks of the job he learned years ago.
“I keep this bottle of water in case I get choked up on a hot day,” he said.
That’s it. A bottle of water and a rag to wipe his face. No snacks. No radio. No cell phone. Just a man and his job.
Dempsey’s Memorial Day route left a lot of people surprised to see the 89-year-old working on a holiday. Some had hardly made it out of bed before Dempsey was headed to their trash cans, some with the money for his weekly pickup taped under the lid.
He’s not very formal about his job that way. There’s a mutual trust between him and his clients. He knows where the trash is, and they know where to leave the money. One client on his Monday route has even given him the code to the garage door keypad so that he can grab the sacks from bins inside.
Dempsey handles the bags, some almost too heavy for a young man to lift, and hurls them atop the heap in the bed of his truck. With a grunt or two, he manages. Before the bags spill over the sides or begin to roll back down the hill of refuse, he makes his way atop the mound, using the sideboards and a metal support to steady himself. He won’t work his way down until the trash is just so, tightly packed so that it won’t fly out as he heads down the highway.
There’ have been more occassions than he cares to remember where he had to retrace his steps, stopping along the roadside to pick up an errant bag or two that tumbled out of the truck. He’s had vehicle breakdowns, most always with a load of trash aboard. It’s happened to all makes and models, so he has no brand loyalty.
However, he’s kind of partial to his current rig, a 1984 red Chevy with a suped-up 454 under the hood. He likes to tell of stories where drivers trailing him pull out to pass in the most dangerous of areas – curves and hills.
“I hardly ever run over 50 mph, but I’ll hit that gas and, ‘Vroom!’,” he exclaims. “Boy, they don’t think this old truck has it in it.”
Over the years, Dempsey has been more reliable than his trucks. He hasn't missed a day on his trash route – or so he can remember – soldiering on through the bad days. On Memorial Day, in fact, he was nursing an entire body left sore from a spill he took two weeks earlier.
“I fell flat on my front,” he said, patting his coveralls on the chest and legs to show where he hit.
His hands are dirty and show the wounds of almost eight decades of hard work – some old, some fresh from the day’s work. But those hands are still strong, whether clinching to carry an oversized trash bag weighted with cat litter or clasping around the steering wheel of his old red truck.
Those hands have never failed him, and he doesn’t plan for them to anytime soon. He’s not looking for a career change, sobaticals or help. He just makes it through each day with all he’s ever known. Work.
“They won’t let me quit,” he said of his family. “They say I’ll wither up and die if do."
But at the end of his Memorial Day route, he had made it through another shift, home in time to attend the funeral service of a relative many years his junior.
The next day, though, he was right back at it.
"I won’t even consider quitting,” he said. “I guess I’ll do it ‘til I die.”

City’s loan fund helps Riley grow
When Todd Riley wanted to grow his business, he couldn’t think of a better lender to finance the expansion than the very city his business has called home since its doors opened in 2001.
“I don’t know of any banks right now that are doing four or five percent commercial loans,” the owner of Riley Tool and Machine said last Friday, lauding the City of Marion’s economic development financing arm that has allowed him to expand his machine shop to an international business.
It’s not that Riley, 39, is knocking the banking industry, but in business, money saved is money earned. In this case, he earned several thousand dollars in savings.
By using the City of Marion Revolving Loan Fund, an economic development tool that allows the city to finance business growth at low interest rates, Riley saved $7,500 or more interest over the five-year term of the loan. A conventional bank loan would have charged a much higher interest rate.
When Riley was approved for the city-financing, his business was fledgling, only three years old.
After working for years as a tool and dye maker, he wanted to establish himself in Marion by opening his own business and growing it into a secure future for himself and his family. So, in 2004 he approached the city about backing his plans to purchase new equipment and reach new customers. Since being granted $60,000 from the city’s revolving loan fund in 2005, his business has flourished.
He now machines and welds for businesses across the nation and into Canada.
“The city took that risk, that is what I am so grateful for,” Riley said Friday, as he showed City Administrator Mark Bryant around his plant off Moore Street.
The revolving loan fund was established in 1988 from a $500,000 grant from Kentucky’s Department of Local Government. The fund has grown to about $750,000. The fund can be used only as an economic development tool. It is a self-replenishing pool of money, utilizing interest and principal payments on old loans to issue new ones.
Riley’s bread and butter has become the tire industry, or rather the shredding of tires for recycling purposes. Riley and his 11 employees toil with welders, grinders and machining equipment to produce razor-sharp industrial blades for tire shredding. His proprietary process for sharpening those blades makes it possible for waste tires to see another life as rubber mulch and fuel for power-generating plants.
At one time, Riley was running multiple shifts and employing as many as 23 workers. But the extra shifts and management of those hours were not the most efficient way to carry on his business, so he streamlined to his current operations.
His business has become so successful that Riley acquired a second loan from the city through the same fund to physically expand his plant. With the money, he added self-designed welding, grinding and machining booths that make the job easier and reduce health hazards for his employees.
As Bryant toured the facility Friday with workers scurrying about in the midst of the busiest season for the company, he complimented Riley on his business-sense, even offering more loans the entrepreneur may need to sustain or grow the pace.
“Like I said, don’t hesitate to approach us again,” Bryant told Riley with a handshake.
Currently, the city has a half-dozen outstanding loans to local businesses through the revolving fund, but more capital is available to help others. Riley said the initial application process was a bit more complicated than what financial institutions may require, but his second loan was much easier to land.
“It was a little bit more work the first time,” Riley said. “The second time it was like gravy.”
Bryant said the city must be protective of the self-sustaining fund and requires a pretty careful vetting process for granting loans. The loans, he said, must be used to stabilize or increase the workforce at the applicant business.
The city’s revolving loan fund was also used in 2001 to help D&D Automation establish its operation from the ashes of Tyco. D&D initially employed about a dozen workers and later was absorbed by Safetran Systems. Safetran has now grown to employ nearly 100, with the addition of 150 permanent jobs announced last month.

Prisoner captured after leaving work detail
An inmate who walked away from his work detail on Crayne Cemetery Road Tuesday morning was captured without incident less than an hour after he escaped.
Ryan Knight, 20, of Princeton was on work release from the Crittenden County Detention Center about 8:30 a.m., when he slipped away from his supervisor and work crew and got into a vehicle waiting for him at Crayne Cemetery, said Jailer Rick Riley. Knight was located in a Ford Explorer which was parked in a cornfield at the intersection of Crayne Cemetery Road and Ky. 902 north of Fredonia. The vehicle was spotted by Lt. Kevin Rogers, a Kentucky Vehicle Enforcement officer, who had responded to the area to help search for the escapee.
Knight and a female accomplice, identified by Kentucky State Police as 18-year-old Sarah C. Sorrells of Eddyville, were inside the Explorer, which was parked less than four miles from where he escaped from the work detail. Authorities were not sure why the vehicle was backed into the cornfield. A chain saw, which Knight had been using to trim ice storm debris and hanging limbs from the right-of-way of the county road, was found in the back of the SUV.
The county jailer said Knight and three other inmates were working with county road department employee Mike Weldon when the escape took place. County road department employees who supervise work releases program are not armed nor trained to confront escapees, said Crittenden County Judge-Executive Fred Brown.
Brown commended jail personnel and law enforcement agencies for responding and apprehending the escapee in a matter of minutes.
Knight was cutting limbs and trees with the chain saw and the rest of the crew was following behind him with a chipping machine pulled behind a county work truck.
"They were in those sharp curves near the cemetery and (Knight) got out of their sight," Riley said.
The jailer explained that Weldon went to look for Knight when he no longer heard the chain saw running. When he realized the inmate was gone, he immediately called for help.
Riley said standard procedures kicked into gear and the inmate was located in about 45 minutes with help from area law enforcement agencies.
"We did everything right and were able to get him quickly," Riley added.
Knight is serving a five-year sentence on a Crittenden County burglary conviction. He is also facing a charge of first-degree criminal mischief in Caldwell County for which he has not been tried.
Riley characterized Knight as a "very good worker" who was assigned to the Level 1 Work Release Program, which means that neither a deputy jailer nor guard is required for him to be working outside the jail. Only a job supervisor is necessary for Level 1 work release inmates, Riley explained.
Knight has been incarcerated at the jail since April 7 and has given no indication that he was a flight risk or security problem, the jailer said.
Knight is the first Crittenden County Detention Center inmate to walk away from a work release program since the jail opened in January 2008.
Riley said that Knight, who has family living near Fredonia, was very familiar with the area where he was working on the road crew. The jailer said Knight had apparently pre-arranged for the female accomplice to meet him at the cemetery.
"From what we've found out, he was planning to go to Baltimore," Riley said.
Knight is charged with second-degree escape and theft for taking the chain saw belonging to the county road department. Sorrells is charged with second-degree complicity to escape. Both were lodged in the Crittenden County Detention Center.