To the Dumps

"The town dump is just a nice place for people to meet, leave trash, vow eternal friendship and go their ways." So spoke Northeastern University's Professor Everett Marston of Duxbury, Mass, one day last week. Duxbury (pop. 4,280), like many upper-middle-income bedroom communities that sprawl around Boston, is the scene of a new form of social phenomenon--somewhat like the old town pump--that is coming to full flower in New England. In Duxbury's town dump, as in Lincoln's, Hingham's and Wayland's, local citizens who can well afford to pay for garbage removal prefer to haul away the week's trash in their own Chevrolets, Thunderbirds, Chryslers and Volkswagens. Thus, on every Sunday morning gather old friends--and new acquaintances--who dump their stuff, then stay around to exchange gossip, renew friendships and, in a most delicate way, pick up a few worthy items discarded by their neighbors.

In such a way one Hingham widow was said to have furnished her home; a Duxbury mother found a piano that served for music lessons for her four children; a Lincoln housewife found a perfectly usable playpen for her baby. To the dumps, too, come service committees from the League of Women Voters and even local politicians in search of a ready-made audience. On one recent Sunday, a crowd of happy-go-dumping Hingham residents showed up with jugs of martinis and plates of hors d'oeuvres, proceeded to make a three-martini cocktail hour to cap off the dumping chores.

But even the town dump can make for complexities. "Like everything else in this Atomic Age," muses Professor Marston, "our dump is getting organized and is not as informal as it once was. The privilege of taking things has gone." It may not be long before some cheerful martini-toting group, decked out in Sunday-go-to-dumping clothes, will be confronted by the ultimate of barriers: a sign reading NO DUMPING.

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