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Carlton: So these two lawyers were on the side of the road picking up trash...A Florida story

How did two prominent Tampa attorneys end up on the side of a road picking up trash? (No, not court-ordered community service.) A story of Florida, and how we trash it.
 
Perpetual roadside trash, the bane of many a Floridian's existence and enough to prompt two Tampa attorneys to take matters into their own hands.
Perpetual roadside trash, the bane of many a Floridian's existence and enough to prompt two Tampa attorneys to take matters into their own hands.
Published Jan. 4, 2019

It all started when the man in the blue shorts — a guy you could count on seeing running along the side of a certain road every day — disappeared.

And the roadside trash started to grow.

Lyann Goudie and Kim Kohn, two well-known Tampa attorneys who are partners in both law and marriage, saw him daily as they drove from their office in the city to their home in suburban Cheval. There he would be, Blue Shorts Guy, running along a pretty mile-long stretch of rural road called Ramblewood.

(Goudie, who has lived in Miami, New York and recently South Tampa, refers to her current neighborhood as "50 Shades of Beige." Still, she admits the life has its charms: the deer, the hawks and the quiet, the existence of sidewalks and the reduced odds of getting mowed down by a speeding city motorist.)

What was interesting about Blue Shorts Guy was he always had a trash bag for picking up roadside litter and generally keeping things tidy.

They didn't know how tidy until about six months ago when he didn't show.

As weeks passed, the random trash along Ramblewood, the plastic bottles and fast food bags, got worse. One day even an old toilet appeared. It stayed so long someone stuck a jaunty plastic poinsettia in it over the holidays.

Goudie, former prosecutor of murderers, current defender of the accused and generally no shrinking violet, brought it up on a neighborhood networking website:

Has anyone else noticed all of the litter along Ramblewood? Any ideas as to who we call to complain about it?

Somebody said they missed the guy in the blue shorts.

And someone else responded: Any one of us at any time can stop and pick up the trash.

It was like the perfect final line to a closing argument, effectively hammering the point home.

Which is how this week two prominent lawyers ended up walking the road filling trash bags — two brimming 55-gallon ones the first day — with all manner of garbage: tiny vodka bottles, empty apple sauce cups, the biggest beer cans they had ever seen, all apparently flung with impunity from passing cars.

This makes them part of a club, a small but thriving sub-sect of us Floridians who cannot take it anymore, the relentless trashing of where we live. You see them stalking beaches and parks stuffing their bags with other people's abandoned ice cream cups and greasy fried chicken boxes, used plastic straws and yes, even the occasional disposable diaper left near a perfectly good public garbage can.

"Plastic bags, plastic bags and more plastic bags," Goudie reports. "Cigarette butts, millions of them." And it's not just that it's ugly. What about animals going after trash and plastic with the smell of food on it?

Sunday they worked opposite sides of the street, Kohn in plastic gloves, Goudie with her handy as-seen-on-TV grabber. People passing by might have thought they were criminal defendants working off community service hours.

Now they are talking about regular volunteer clean-ups, and also, whatever happened to those anti-littering campaigns that were supposed to change our ways, like the anti-smoking and anti-drunk driving movements that had impact? Education has to start with very young kids, though surely they were not responsible for all those vodka bottles and tall boys.

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Monday, as they worked their way down the road, someone in a passing car rolled down the window and yelled out at them:

"Thank you!"

"We saw him every day," Goudie says about the guy in the blue shorts. "And you know, it never occurred to me to ever lower my window and say 'thank you.'"

They figure he must have moved away. Wherever he is, Goudie says, he's probably picking up garbage other people leave there. Because he is part of the club. And because apparently, even now, somebody has to.

Contact Sue Carlton at scarlton@tampabay.com.