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When I first heard about the “bottle boys,” I pictured Boy Scouts digging through the trash searching for cans and bottles to raise money for summer camp. So I was a bit surprised to find that these boys were, in fact, geezers my age, too old for three-legged races and tug-of-wars but not quite ready for the stretcher.
Walter Wilson is 90, but who’s counting? And Pete Petty is “too old,” which translates to 76. They lead a handful of volunteers along the McKenzie River whose motto is “a dime at a time.” And that translates to $155,000 so far.
It started in 2017, when a retired forester named Monty Wilson (no relation to Walter), asked Petty if he would join him as a volunteer to help clean campsites. Monty Wilson, a resident of the Blue River area, and Petty, who lives in Nimrod, would drive from campsite to campsite collecting trash and tidying up.
One day, they came upon a mother lode of cans and bottles bagged and ready for the taking.
“I told Monty, ‘Hey that’s some money there,’” Petty says. “‘We can’t just throw them away.’ And it just so happened at that time, the state of Oregon was ready to up the deposit from a nickel to a dime. So I said, ‘We’ll hoard these babies. We’ll stash them in my garage until that kicks in, and we can double our money.’ We found a windfall and turned it into a cash cow.”
So, hoard they did, and when the price increased to a dime, they cashed in and donated the money to the O’Brien Memorial Library in Blue River, where Monty Wilson was a volunteer. Since then, recipients have included the Orchid Health McKenzie River Clinic in Blue River; Vida McKenzie Community Center; Upper McKenzie Rural Fire Protection District, McKenzie School District SMART reading program, Boy Scouts, McKenzie River Community Track and Field Complex, and Walterville Grange.
Following the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire, which came on the heels of COVID-19, the bottle boys focused on helping the community recover. The fire covered 173,393 acres and burned hundreds of homes. One of them was Walter Wilson’s.
He and his wife, Joyce, had moved to the Vida area from southern California, where he worked in the Orange County Sheriff’s Department communications and technology division.
During the evacuation, he and Joyce stayed in Eugene, where he received a call from his friend, Fire Chief Darren Bucich of McKenzie Fire & Rescue, who said he had good news and bad news.
His beloved United States flag was still flying, Bucich told him, and his yard was unharmed. That was the extent of the good news. The bad news was that everything else was gone, and so was the community center he directed for some 20 years.
His gentle eyes turn steely as he thinks back to the fire, one of the largest in Oregon history.
“I absolutely hate that fire and what it’s done to me,” he says. “I had worked my whole life to get where I was. It was devastating, but I guess I compensated by getting involved in the community.”
If Vida had a mayor, it would probably be Walter Wilson, who has a hard time saying “no.” Not only is he involved with the community center, he also is active in his neighborhood watch and the McKenzie Community Communications, formed after the fire to provide an emergency radio network.
“I call him Mr. Community,” says Shelly Pruitt, vice president of the community center. “Sometimes I forget that he’s 90 years old, because he does so much for people.”
Pruitt, one of Walter Wilson’s neighbors, lost 43 acres of forest to the fire, but her home was left standing. When she replaced her shop, she formed a “coffee group” for people to get together, exchange information and support each other.
“We were all in the same boat,” Pruitt says. “Walt was always inspirational, but he was also honest about how things were going to go. Some of our conversations with the group were very healing. It was a safe place to share your feelings, because everyone was in the same boat.”
After the fire, Wilson and Joyce lived in a Eugene apartment for nearly two years before rebuilding was finished and they could move into their new home. One of the things he noticed at the apartment complex was that many people were tossing cans and bottles in the trash. That’s when he became a bottle boy.
Petty’s home barely survived the fire. Flames reached his pump house and burned a stack of wood but stopped short of his house. He says he feels guilty at times that his house was spared when so many of his friends’ homes were destroyed.
The bottle boys are more than a community resource; they are a demonstration of neighborly guardianship. The good thing about geezers is that they have seen a thing or two, survived a thing or two. Their wells run deep, and they know that a dime at a time is akin to a day at a time, and sometimes that’s how life must be lived.
The bottle boys are allowed use of a storage area behind the Leaburg Store, where they gather on Saturdays to sort through donations. The Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative sends a truck to pick them up. Oregon passed the Bottle Bill in 1971 becoming the first state to pass a deposit return system.
“I like how it’s volunteers, businesses and the state all working together,” Petty says. “When we work together, good things happen. It takes a village.”
