West Lafayette garbageman legend calls it a career, 100 million pounds later

After 29 years and throwing more than 50,000 tons of trash at West Lafayette curbs, Brian Claxton ready to run his last route. His boss: ‘B’s a legend.’

Brian Claxton, a West Lafayette sanitation worker, is retiring this week after 29 years of picking up trash at city curbs. Here, he stands with a retired trash truck in the West Lafayette street department lot. “I remember when this one was new,” he said.

Let’s put it this way: The modern-day record for the shortest stint on the West Lafayette sanitation crew payroll was 37 minutes.

“That guy came in here, got on the back of a truck and got a whiff of that smell, all that juice starting to run, getting sprayed with it,” Ben Anderson, West Lafayette street commissioner, painting a picture this week of the forces testing his department’s ultra-short-timer.

“Then he’s out there lifting those cans, a few hundred pounds worth, probably,” Anderson said. “It’s work. It’s nasty, nasty, hard work. Even 37 minutes of it.”

So, understand when Anderson’s crews take a break late Friday morning, once routes are run, to send off Brian Claxton, a West Lafayette sanitation worker retiring after a combined 32 years after throwing more than 100 million pounds of garbage – a weight Anderson figures, in the days of automated lifts on West Lafayette’s new trash trucks, is a record that won’t be matched in the city.

“There’s nobody going to do what he’s done – forever. It’s just hard freaking work,” Anderson said Tuesday, after inviting city officials to Claxton’s retirement lunch at the end of the work week.

“B’s a legend and a champion.”

At the end of a shift in the West Lafayette street department garages, Claxton, wearing a safety yellow shirt with his “Big B” nickname on the front, says he’s stuck with it so long – every shift through rain, shine, 30 to 40 partners and two back surgeries – because he’s liked the work.

“It’s hard work, they got that right,” Claxton, 56, said. “So, I guess it’s just time.”

Claxton started in 1987, hired by David Downey, longtime West Lafayette street commissioner, after working for T.R. Ash, a waste hauling company. He left after an initial three-year stint, before returning to stay 29 years ago. Someone on his first day with the crews called him “Spanky,” and the name stuck – until Anderson pinned him with “Big B.”

“When I came in, I weighed 178 pounds – I was just a little, scrawny person here,” Claxton said. “Now, I’m at 275. I pumped up – had to work out every day. No choice, I guess.”

Anderson said that when Claxton neared retirement, he and others in the office started pulling tickets with load weights of trucks hauling first to the Tippecanoe Sanitary Landfill before it closed and then to the trash transfer station, both on North Ninth Street Road in Lafayette. Anderson discounted weights from the past two years, when new trucks meant crews stopped lifting by hand, and came up with 50,000 tons per man on Claxton’s two-person crews in all those years.

“We’re talking 100 million pounds thrown. At least,” Anderson said. “And Brian was the kind of guy who just did it. Day after day, did it.”

Claxton said he wasn’t keeping track. He just kept loading.

“If that’s what Ben says,” Claxton said, “I’ll have to take his word for it.”

The smells and the gross aspects of the work, he said he got used to and dealt with. Those weights, though, caught up with his back the first time, about 10 years in. When he was younger, it was nothing to grab a heavy trash can and twist his body to get the leverage to toss it. Until one day, he twisted, heard a pop and went to his knees. He said he knew he was in trouble. After that first surgery, he learned “nose and toes” techniques – making sure the nose is over the toes when lifting to keep from twisting – to keep going.

What were the heaviest days? Move out weeks at Purdue. The days when West Lafayette picked up grass clippings in trash cans. (“People could just pack those things,” he said.) And anytime some decided to clean out the garage. (“Sometimes, you’d wish they’d not do it when it was 90 degrees,” he said.)

Claxton said he watched families grow, often greeted by pre-schoolers in diapers running to the door or out to the yard to see the truck in freezing temperatures.

“We had some kids, 6 or 7, who liked to come out chasing us, carrying some piece of trash,” Claxton said. “I’d tell the driver to stop, and we’d let them throw it in the truck. They just loved that truck.”

This week, he’s running regular routes and picking up roll-off containers – “whatever Ben needs done.”

After Friday, Claxton says there’s a honey-do list waiting at home. He wants to spend more time riding his collection of Harley Davidson motorcycles – a 2013 Ultra Classic, a 2000 Softail Deuce and a 2003 Dyna Super Glide.

And maybe he’ll return part time, at some point, with the West Lafayette street and sanitation.

He just won’t add to his 100 Million Pound Club totals racked up over nearly three decades of hand-throwing trash cans along West Lafayette curbs.

“Those days are over,” Anderson said. “No one’s going to touch that, again. Not like Brian did.”

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