ATYEO o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-09-28 published
He represented 'Toronto the clean' - at least abroad
He talked trash with the Soviets and lunched with the Queen while
dealing with garbage strikes and layoffs
By Noreen SHANAHAN,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Toronto -- The man who made green garbage bags fashionable for
curbside pickup back in the 1960s was Toronto streets commissioner
Harold ATYEO.
His mandate also included snow removal and the
earliest attempts at recycling - for instance, "bundle up for
Wednesday" newspaper pickup. According to former mayor David
CROMBIE, who worked with Mr.
ATYEO, his colleague's efforts were
the likely inspiration behind Peter Ustinov's oft-quoted description
of the city as "New York run by the Swiss."
Mr. ATYEO "was an excellent public servant with a strong interest
in the city," Mr.
CROMBIE said. "In those days, Toronto had a
great reputation as a city that works, as 'Toronto the clean,'
and Harold made an enormous contribution toward that."
One of his more popular legacies was a service that allowed senior
citizens to have their sidewalks shovelled for them, free of
charge. He was also involved in restoring the historic St. Lawrence
Market and Town Hall to their 19th-century splendour.
It wasn't all laurels, however. As streets commissioner, Mr.
ATYEO
faced garbage strikes, inclement weather and bad tempers as one
of the most picked-on bureaucrats at city hall, frequently blamed
for snowdrifts, stinky streets and litter.
Opinions differ as to whether Mr.
ATYEO was a visionary or a
pragmatist, but his efforts took him as far afield as the Kremlin,
New York and Buckingham Palace.
"He was a strong proponent of things that simply made sense,"
said his son Mark. "In Moscow, he was struck by the non-unionized
babushkas picking up street litter with corn brooms."
Harold ATYEO was the second of three children born in Camden,
Ontario, to Jesse May
(MANLEY) and Frank Wesley
ATYEO. In 1920,
when he was 2, his family purchased a farm in Lethbridge, Alberta.
He told stories about heading into town for supplies with his
older brother William and passing a community of Blood Indians,
who were living in tepees along the Oldman River Valley.
In 1923, the family moved back to St. Catharines, Ontario, where
his father worked first as a blacksmith, then as a hydro linesman
until an injury ended his career. As a teenager during the Depression,
Harold delivered newspapers and stocked grocery shelves to help
support the family. In 1938, he attended teachers college at
the Toronto Normal School (now part of Ryerson University) and
began his first assignment a year later, on the day Germany invaded
Poland and the Second World War began.
He soon became principal of a two-room schoolhouse in Amherstburg,
Ontario In 1943, conflicted about not being part of the war,
he left teaching and joined Ferry Command in Montreal, where
he worked as an air navigation instructor. In 1944, at the age
of 26, he realized that because of a punctured eardrum, he'd
never get his wings. Hoping to at least get closer to the action,
he joined the merchant marine.
The war ended shortly after his first trip across the Atlantic,
however, and he returned to the family home, which by then was
in Windsor, Ontario He took a job as an inventory clerk at a
department store. The war widow who hired him was Margaret Loretta
CASSON - they married in 1948 and moved to Fredericton, where
he obtained an engineering degree. After moving back to Ontario
two years later, he began his career in municipal engineering.
In 1953, he took a position as an engineer with the Township
of North York, which was amalgamated into the City of Toronto
the following year. In 1964, he took a job as commissioner of
the streets department in the city of Toronto and moved into
an office in the new City Hall. One of his early tasks included
posting newspaper notices urging citizens to "clean up, paint
up, don't be a litter bug."
From there, he moved on to being a kind of ambassador for the
city, culminating in a trip to Moscow in 1968, in the thick of
the Cold War, to meet with Soviet premier Alexey Kosygin and
make suggestions about such issues as street cleaning, snow removal
and synchronized traffic lights.
Ben GRYS, who was chairman of Toronto's public works department
at the time, joined Mr.
ATYEO in Moscow. He remembers his colleague
as approachable and open-minded, but noted: "He wouldn't mind
getting into a real knock-'em-out discussion to prove his point,
and in most cases, he was right."
On the way back from the Soviet Union, Mr. and Mrs.
ATYEO stopped
off for a luncheon hosted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
Although this luncheon made for a good family story, his son
said nobody knew exactly why his parents were invited in the
first place.
In 1972, Mr.
ATYEO instituted another significant change by reducing
Toronto's curbside garbage pickup to once a week, from twice.
"It would be a nice, clean operation," he told The Globe and
Mail at the time.
The schedule shift was an important step along the road toward
the kind of recycling and composting initiatives the city has
in place today, with garbage now picked up only once every two
weeks. Nevertheless, when it was implemented, critics saw it
as anything but clean. A union spokesman representing garbage
collectors told the Toronto Star that once-a-week pickups would
result in the trash "being carted off by maggots… hopefully they'll
walk in the direction of the garbage trucks." There were also
layoffs.
The streets and works departments merged in 1972 and fell under
the jurisdiction of commissioner Ray
BREMNER.
Mr.
ATYEO lost
his title and reluctantly moved into a new position in the property
department.
One of his last major projects for the city was in 1974, restructuring
St. Lawrence Market and Town Hall. "They re-established the St. Lawrence
Hall and did a lot of renovation in the South Market," Mr.
CROMBIE
said. "And here we are, 33 years later, [planning to] change
the St. Lawrence Hall into the Toronto museum… Harold would have
understood the vision."
Mr. ATYEO left Toronto in 1976 to take a job as superintendent
of works in Gravenhurst, Ontario, where he worked until retiring
a decade later. The end of his career, however, harked back to
his schoolhouse roots: He temporarily went back to work as a
supply teacher, teaching shop.
Harold ATYEO was born June 24, 1918, in Camden, Ontario, and
died of cancer August 26, 2007. He was 89. He is predeceased
by wife Margaret and leaves children Frank, Candace, Susan, Debra,
Mark and Jo.
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