No. 4 Memory Lane: All Fruct Up

Once upon an Earth Day. (OK, Gary, you asked: that’s our sales manager Jim Jones - not long out of college - on the far left. On the far right is Mary Kay’s oldest, now long past college - and thumb-sucking)

When I arrived at Bullseye in 1983 Dan & Company had been struggling to make colored art glass from recycled bottles for almost a decade.

One day we got a padded envelope in the mail. Inside was a 3 x 3 inch piece of dark purple (1128-00) transparent Bullseye sent to us by an amused customer. Inside the glass was a paper clip. I sent it down to the Accountant’s office (he’d been complaining about our wasting them.)

The handwriting had been on the wall (or in the glass) for some time. A railroad spike had landed on the rolling table some months earlier, having gotten by all the screens, metal detectors, and eyeballing that had been set up to catch that kind of stuff.

It was pretty clear: making art glass out of the post-consumer waste stream was beyond the abilities of this little factory. I felt really bad.

Now what? Simple. While Chemist Bob figured out how to reformulate all the glass recipes, we could PLANT TREES.

And that’s Sam, our ever-over-amped production manager, shoveling while we all watch.

(OK, even I - in all my naïve warm ecological fuzziness - recognized this for the GESTURE that it was)

But Earth Day was approaching. We had a little strip of neglected dirt on SE 21st. Envisioning a row of happy trees gobbling carbon dioxide next to the factory chimneys, I got Dan to hit up our landlord for some saplings. By law (yes, Portland has Tree Police) we were restricted to a particular species on our block. An ornamental pear. Landlord Howard complied.

As with most “improvements” Howard was quick to find a bargain. The saplings didn’t exactly meet code. And eventually our “ornamentals” dropped FRUIT. Lots of it. All over the sidewalk.

In the years since, stepping around the splatted pears, I’ve been gratified to reflect that better Bullseye minds than mine were working on issues of conservation and civic-minded manufacturing.

Next: What the Better Brains came up with.

ADDENDUM: in reply to Toni’s question below. Here they are all grown up. Clearly any Beauty Hormones floating around back then went to Marjie and not to these gnarly guys.