Foster has been cleaning up town for 35 years
|
Foster started working with the city in 1967 when he was just 17.
“I had to go to Nashville to get a statement saying I could work,” he said of beginning work as a teen on the back of a garbage truck, which he calls “tail boarding.” He did that for several years, quit the city briefly, and came back to work in 1988.
In 2001, city officials changed the way garbage truck drivers do business. They converted to an automated system, which allowed for more efficient use of labor and reduced the sanitation department from seven employees to four.
Foster endured those changes, having already switched from tail boarding to being a truck driver almost a decade earlier.
The present system, accomplished with side-loading trucks that have mechanical arms to lift cans, is much easier.
“It was rough,” Foster said of the old days of back-breaking labor. “It was heavy cans and a lot of lifting. You’d pick up car motors, cans full of water, everything.”
Foster, whose biggest concern today is looking out for anything that might come in the way of a garbage truck that has a 33-cubic-yard bed, is one of two longtime employees of the four-person department. He has five different routes on five different days.
Since the other longtime member of the department is currently deployed overseas, Foster is considered the go-to person for questions related to sanitation and various locations city wide.
“He’s come all the way from riding on the back of a truck to operating the automated system,” said Public Works director Bill Brock. “He’s done it all.”
Public Works assistant director Brad Hennessee said Foster’s work attendance for a job that the general public sometimes takes for granted has been exceptional.
“He’s one of those employees who knows where everything is and he requires little or no supervision,” Hennessee said.
Hennessee recalled a time when Foster didn’t look so appealing, literally. Years ago, when a new employee was hired and wondered who to talk to about his first day on the job, Hennessee referred the new person to Foster.
“We told him to go look for somebody who looks like Charles Manson and go with him,” Hennessee said, drawing a chuckle from Foster, who admitted he used to look like the infamous cult leader but is actually a kind-hearted father and grandfather.
“He was known city-wide as a Manson look alike. He’s shaved since then,” Hennessee added.