* * Frank Soriano might be picking up your trash

Frank Soriano is new to my neighborhood and on his regular walks, he picks up roadside trash. I met him recently and we talked about moving here and his efforts to improve our area.

He said, “I’m retired now. I was a reference librarian and I moved here a year ago from Morristown, New Jersey. I moved because my son is here.”

Two of his four kids were educated at Tech, but the other two have scattered about the country. He is in his early 70s and when he walks, he makes it a habit to carry a plastic garbage bag to pick up trash along the way and bring it home for proper disposal into recycling and regular garbage.

 He said, “With two of my children having gone to Virginia Tech, I was somewhat familiar with the area before I moved here. One of my surprises here is how difficult it is to volunteer for something. I have called on several agencies and told them about my interest in volunteering. But too many times I don’t get return phone calls. They say, ‘Oh yes, we can use you.’ But then they don’t call me back. I am still rooting around for something to get involved in.”

He worked with a series of charitable organizations in New Jersey before he moved down.

I said, “You seem to have a very strong community service ethic.”

He replied, “When I grew up, there was such a thing as a neighborhood. Everybody always looked out for their neighbors. If somebody got sick, someone would bring food. People watched out for other people’s kids as they walked home from school. There was a real neighborliness. That seems to have gone by the boards.

“Plus, I enjoy people. In my job as a reference librarian I was around people seven hours every day. Some people came in with serious problems…”

I said, innocently, “It’s not as if it is an oncology ward.”

He said, “Quite the contrary; it really is. Often when they got sick or when a family member got sick, people would come to the library to learn more about the illness. We had a large reference library and I was in charge of the medical portion of that. We librarians would spend whatever time it took to get these people the information they were looking for.”

Here in Blacksburg, Frank immediately looked for outlets for community service opportunities. He found beautification and trash collection to be perfect. He said, “It was something that I could do myself. The traffic along the street is hazardous, but I still manage to walk three or four times a week. Lately I have been finishing up on Farmview Drive and I have been working on Hightop Road.”

Frank has also volunteered for the upcoming annual Broomin’ & Bloomin’ community pick up event.

“When I first came down here with the kids, the highways didn’t seem to be as littered as in New Jersey. Once I came here to live, I have to admit that it is not that different. There are the same beer cans, bottles, coffee cups, and plastic bags that there are everywhere else. The Styrofoam and plastic bags are my first priority, because if the wildlife gets into them, it will kill them.

“I have had at least three people driving by stop to roll down their windows and thank me for what I’m doing. I would like to do more. The streams are all covered with litter. But picking up can be dangerous with steep slopes, poison ivy, and soon ticks. The last one I did… my back is still recovering.

“The Zika virus is carried by mosquitoes. Any bottle or can that is littered can collect water where the eggs can be laid. Littering is a now a public health issue.”

He said he thought most of the litter was from people who just chose not to care. There is a lot of construction in the area and he blamed the building workers. They may care less about the neighborhood than the people who live in it.

I asked if he was happy or resentful when picking up somebody else’s trash.

He said, “If I got ticked off for every can that I picked up, I’d have an ulcer. And I wouldn’t do it any more.”

So next time you’re in the south end of Blacksburg and you see a man picking up roadside trash, shout out a “Thank you” to him, and make sure you’re not contributing to his work load. He’s making our community a better place, one littered bottle at a time.