How do you spend your Saturday mornings?.

Thursday, October 07, 1999

How do you spend your Saturday mornings?

I spent last Saturday morning getting up close and personal with a shovel.

Yes, those wild and crazy volunteers for Spruce Up Austin, Inc. got together again. At least, four of them did.

Mike Ruzek, Dennis Maschka and I worked on the east side of Austin near East Side Lake.

Jerry Adwell and Austin High School varsity wrestling coach Bill Kinney and his wrestlers worked the west side of town along West Oakland Avenue.

At least, that’s what I was told.

People ask me "Why do you always write about Spruce Up Austin?" and I tell them, "Why not? They have never sued or written letters to the editor about me."

Spruce Up Austin, Inc. is a lot like the Minnesota Department of Corrections Sentencing To Service Program. You make a simple mistake and join, attend a few meetings and then find yourself performing physical labor under close supervision, while your friends drive by and wave.

Mr. Ruzek, or, as we have come to call him after several years of planting trees and really getting to know him, Mr. Ruzek) chose Richard Chuick as his partner, which didn’t surprise me one bit.

Ever since I said Mr. Ruzek had "rocks in his head" he has grown testy around me. Heck. It was an innocent mistake. What I meant was he has rocks on his mind, because of his passion for boulders. There was a time when he wanted a large boulder at every landscaping project in Austin, but we just ignored him, figuring his wife must have hid the remote from him again and he was taking it out on us.

Mr. Chuick did not have to be there last Saturday morning. His wife, Jan, is on the committee, but Richard isn’t. It is this kind of situation that keeps the number of married couples away from Spruce Up Austin.

That left Dennis Maschka and I to be paired up to do our work. We had a brand new Gator and Dennis did the driving, while I did the talking.

Our assignment – please pay close attention here, this is sophisticated stuff – was to mulch trees along East Side Lake Park.

The Austin Parks, Recreation, Forestry and Spamtown Belle Excursion Trips Department had cleverly left piles of mulch at strategic locations along East Oakland Avenue.

Dennis and I would fill the box on our Gator vehicle with mulch, pausing several times to lean on our pitch fork and scoop shovel to admire our work and wonder aloud what we were doing there.

Then, we would drive to a tree and – if you cannot keep up with the terminology I am using to describe this work, please go directly to today’s crossword puzzle – throw the mulch around it.

The work went well, but for the second consecutive year, hundreds of men, women and children marched in silent protest as we performed our task. Dennis said they were Catholic families walking to raise money for their school, but I knew better. A trained journalist knows these things.

The work also went fast and it was only a coincidence that the rest of the Spruce Up Austin members were absent. There are no hard feelings here. Heck, people have other things to do on Saturday mornings than apply mulch to trees.

For instance, I bet Bonnie Rietz, one of our members, who is also mayor of Austin, was busy at a ribbon-cutting for a new street light or something important like that. Jerry McCarthy, another member who is a very high-level mucky-muck at Austin Utilities was probably taking a refresher course in screwing in a light bulb. And, Gretchen Ramlo, still another member, probably got caught in traffic on the way to our work site.

Dennis didn’t say much. I thought, because I had the head of one of the most important city departments, sitting next to me, driving a Gator like stunt driver Joey Chitwood, he would loosen up a bit and give me the inside scoop.

I told him about the picture Don (Hooch) Hanson sent us and wanted published in the paper. It shows at least seven people, standing around looking at a hole in the ground and a city vehicle at an undisclosed location. Nothing is apparently happening and the Hoochster wondered who they were.

Maschka snorted when I told him this and I didn’t bring up the subject again.

My guess is it was either Austin police officers stopping at the White Whale to check on a crime or Austin school board members looking for answers.

Lee Bonorden’s column appears Thursdays