When I was growing up in Indiana, there was a man that walked the streets and roads in my home hometown. His name was Sunny. Sunny would go at that time and pick up pop bottles along the roads and put them into a big duffel bag. A huge duffel bag. These bottles. Why was he doing that, Sunny? um would take them to the grocery stores and at that time he would give get five or 10 cents a bottle to return them to the grocery store.
That was the deal in the day and Sunny needed to do that to survive. He had as a child he had undergone a a an illness that had left his brain had been affected. So he was very simple-minded man. And as I was growing up in that small town, young kids my age would would point and say, "Ah, here comes Sunny. He's walking down the road. He's picking up bottles off the road." And some of the kids would laugh, right?
Hey, Sunny, did you find some treasure out there today? You know, and I never did that. And I felt at the time, oh, that's so wrong. That's mean. But I didn't have the guts to kind of like say, stop doing that, you know. Well, but Sunny, he would literally walk 30 miles between two small towns doing this. And that's how he made a living. And people would save pop bottles for him, too. They'd put them out on the doorsteps.
He would pick them up. I didn't think about Sunny when I grew up for a long time until I was 13 years old. and 13 years old. 1970 was the first Earth Day. And I was involved with my classmates picking up trash along the roadways of my town. And at the end of that day, we had lots of of bags of trash, bottles, etc. And on that day, I looked back at the ditch and it was perfectly clean.
And I swear I could see the shadow of Sunny along that roadway. I buried that thought and that remembrance for many years. And people would ask me,"What inspired you to clean up the earth, to be involved in the earth?" And I would say things like, "Well, I saw this movie growing up called Journey to the Center of the Earth, and I love geology, and it was exciting." Or, "I participated in the first Earth Day." But as I thought about it, one of those inspirations was Sunny remembering that man who walked along the roads of Indiana without any fanfare, without whatever and picking up trash and bottles along the road.
And I realized that seed that somehow that inspiration which was buried for many years kind of came to light again. So that inspired me to go to Purdue University to study the earth, to study how to clean it up, to go to University of Notre Dame to get education uh for that and to um to ultimately have a career that I have.
