The Author
The Gutter Grunt??
My career as a gutter grunt began back about 1970 when I got my first taste of sludge, literally. I was working as a pollution abatement peon in the Ohio Dept. of Health’s wastewater engineering division before there were any environmental protection agencies. But when the Ohio EPA was born, next thing I knew I was pulling filthy, smelly, oily water samples out of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland where US Steel and about 1000 chemical plants were dumping every nasty thing you could imagine straight into the river. But it was crawling back up into industrial sewers to collect samples that led to the sobriquet “Gutter Grunt.”
The Cuyahoga soon after became internationally famous for catching on fire. But I swear it wasn’t my cigarette that lit the river up. Really. I don’t even smoke.
Thirty-five years later, here I am, schlepping around in the poo again — philosophical poo, this time. Just as bad. Just as smelly. But you can’t torch a river with it.
And so I remain,
The Gutter Grunt
