Could be that it started with Manuel and his perpetual-motion machine or maybe it goes back to hunting turtles in a Kansas wheatfield. Ken Dunn was trying to explain his compulsion to save the world by driving a junk truck.
”Blowing around in the gutter, this stuff can make any neighborhood look rundown,” he said, while loading up 11 tons of yesterday`s newspapers. ”But if folks will bundle them up, we can sell them–this dumpster alone will fetch 500 bucks–and that can be seed money for a local economic-development project. One thing I learned from reading Emma Goldman–the old anarchist orator–is that to reform society, you have to put power in the hands of the people.”
The author of that neighborhood-rags-to-riches theory was standing in the middle of his muddy headquarters, an abandoned coal yard just south of Hyde Park. All around him were huge piles of broken glass and crumpled tin cans. In between those throw-away pyramids, a fleet of service vehicles was parked:
Battered, 10-wheeled trucks and rusted-out Volkswagen vans that looked like they were headed for the scrap heap themselves.
Other men look at an abundant society`s leftovers and think only of ways to burn or bury them. Dunn sees in those same garbage heaps the age-old dreams of Plato and Thomas More, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx–a utopia that would banish want and unhappiness from the face of the Earth.
In pursuit of that vision, for 18 years now the Resource Center, 6127 S. Kimbark Ave. (Kenneth Dunn, director and principal truck driver), has been scrounging Chicago`s streets and alleys. Currently, Dunn and his 17 paid staffers process 12,000 tons of scrap paper and metal a year, which makes their not-for-profit organization one of the nation`s largest recyclers, although so far they`ve simply managed only to break even. Dunn also serves on the Mayor`s Task Force on Solid Waste Management, and the Washington administration is considering the Resource Center`s proposal to establish a comprehensive recycling program for the whole city.
In Hyde Park, its home base, the Resource Center`s weekly, curbside pickups have become a way of life. ”Monday mornings,” the 44-year-old Dunn said, ”Dorchester and Blackstone, from 55th to 59th, are lined solid with stuff the residents put out for us. On those blocks, it`s so competitive I think people run out the night before to buy a bunch of extra newspapers–just so their curb won`t look naked compared to the neighbors.` ”
Yet that is to be expected of Hyde Park. Environmentalism is only one of library of ”isms” that have found an intellectual home along the tree-lined streets that nestle in the shadow of the University of Chicago.
Dunn`s real victory is in having sold the waste-not-want-not ethic to no- nonsense, bungalow neighborhoods such Pilsen and Humboldt Park, Back of the Yards and Englewood–in all of which the Resource Center maintains collection sites.
”Jump in,” Dunn said, tugging repeatedly on the truck`s passenger-side door handle. ”I got to drop this load off at a newsprint recycling plant out in Alsip. Then this dumpster goes back to our Uptown center, so you`ll get a junkman`s tour of Chicago.”
Bobbing up and down in rhythm to the potholes that marked his route, Dunn looked like a hyperactive model for Grant Wood`s ”American Gothic.” As if his squared-off jaw and cheek bones were not enough to mark his pioneer-stock heritage, he was wearing wire-rimmed glasses at least three sizes too small to be fashionable in hip, urban circles.
”Every time I ride through these bombed-out neighborhoods,” he said, while steering his truck through the West Side, ”I think of what my Dad was able to do back in Kansas.”
In the 1940s, Dunn explained, his father bought 600 acres that had been robbed of its topsoil by the great Dust Bowl storms of the Depression era. By working double shifts in a local factory, the elder Dunn supported his family while planting his fields with several seasons of alfalfa and clover-crops that, though they had little market value, restored necessary nutrients to the land so that he later could plant wheat.
”I must have been 4 or 5, my brother a year older, when Mom died,” Dunn recalled. ”So Dad would leave us in an open spot in that sea of wheat while he did his field work, and my brother and I`d spend the whole day digging for snakes and turtles. Growing up close to the soil, you learn respect for the environment. So when I read Hegel, I know what he means by saying that man is constantly looking for ways to turn nature against herself, but always with diminishing returns.”
It was, quite literally, only an accident that he found his way from Kansas to the great books, Dunn explained as his truck was being weighed in a south-suburban newsprint plant.
In the rural high school he attended, a coach who doubled as the math teacher freely confessed to knowing a lot more about forward passes than Euclidean geometry. So Dunn spent four years playing football and went on to Bethel College in North Newton, Kan., assuming that he would do the same there. But in his second season, an injury put an end to his athletic career, and out of boredom he started to read.
”Somewhere, I got a hold of Will Durant`s `The Story of Philosophy,` a book that really opened my eyes,” Dunn recalled. ”Wow, I thought: That`s what I want to do, ponder the big questions in life, just like Bertrand Russell and Aristotle. But when I didn`t get a scholarship, graduate school was out of the question.”
Instead, Dunn joined the Peace Corps and was posted to a remote village in the interior of Brazil. His mission was to work up an economic-development plan for a community that lived by subsistence farming.
”The peasants were a lot like these people here,” Dunn observed. His truck was once again bouncing through the streets of an inner-city
neighborhood. ”They were good folks. But they`d lived with poverty for so long that they couldn`t even imagine there might be another way. Except for Manuel, that is.”
Manuel Los Santos was a young peasant who had been trained as a machinery repairman by the owners of a sugar-cane plantation. Illiterate though he was, Manuel had an intuitive feeling for mechanical devices–and he had a dream. An abandoned irrigation canal ran through the hills above his native village. For years Manuel had listened to the rushing water and thought of how its potential might be harnessed.
”Manuel had no shoes and no education,” Dunn said. ”He`d certainly never seen a hydroelectric plant. But he had this vision of building a water wheel as the village`s energy source.”
To Manuel, the North American was a godsend who could help realize his long-deferred dream. The only problem was that, as Manuel originally envisioned it, his water-wheel scheme would have been too inefficent to produce much useful energy. So right in the middle of Brazilian jungles, Dunn had to put his apprentice through a course in elementary physics.
”He was so clever that he kept coming up with seemingly perfect solutions to the problem,” Dunn said. ”Once, he drew a picture of a generator and a motor with wires connecting them. `The motor will turn the generator,` Manuel said, `and the generator will supply the motor with electricity.` The only way I could talk him out of his perpetual-motion machine was to take the generator off of my motorcycle. Then we built a simple electric motor, so he could see that friction quickly brings a something-for- nothing system to a halt.”
Eventually, they did work out a practical design to tap the canal`s power and the peasants laid a pipeline of hollowed-out logs to carry the water down the hillside, where it turned a turbine that powered a saw mill.
”It took two years to build and we only got it running the very day I was leaving,” Dunn said. ”But when we finally opened the sluice gates, it all worked perfectly and that saw ran like a demon! So the peasants got a cash income from being able to harvest the forest around them.”
By that point, Dunn was grapling with an ethical dilema. Manuel Los Santos was possessed of the most inquiring spirit Dunn had ever encountered. The rest of the villagers wanted nothing more out of life than three square meals a day. Yet it bothered him, he said, that the United States was allied with the military dictatorship that governed Brazil and a tiny elite that monopolized the country`s wealth, to the detriment of the peasants.
Why would America support the rich and powerful instead of Brazil`s little people? And could something be done to balance that moral equation?
Dunn decided that he would have to return to the U.S. to find a way to save the Manuels of this world.
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By now, it was time to deliver the empty dumpster to the Uptown recycling center.
”Somewhere I`d seen a Time magazine article on contemporary philosophy,” Dunn said as he backed his battered rig into an empty lot on North Sheridan Road. ”It said that the most creative work was being done by Richard Peter McKeon at the University of Chicago. My Peace Corps supervisors helped me get an application in, and I was conditionally accepted into the program–pending an on-campus interview once I got back to the States.”
In the 1960s, when Dunn arrived in Hyde Park, Prof. McKeon was the unchallenged intellectual master of the university`s Gothic towers. Steeped in classical learning, he carried himself with a self-assured manner that many of his students thought was designed to make sure that they should not presume themselves capable of creative thought. Instead, they were to faithfully accept his analysis of 2,500 years of philosophical inquiry.
”Why do you want to study with me?” Dunn remembers McKeon asking at their interview.
”Because I`ve seen the inquities of the world and can`t understand them,” Dunn replied.
”Hmmm–very interesting,” the great man said, a bit thrown by that unorthodox answer, and puffing on his pipe with redoubled speed. ”I see by your transcript that you don`t have Greek and Latin. Well, that need not be an insurmountable problem. You can work up those languages your first two years here.”
”I`m afraid–” Dunn said, hesitating, then deciding that he hadn`t come this far only to wind up afraid to speak his mind. ”I`m afraid I just won`t have time for that. The problems I want to understand are so momentous, I`ve got to get right in and graple with them. I`ll just have to accept your translations of the great philosophers as accurate, sir.”
Perhaps just because it was such an unexpected tack for a fledgling student to take, McKeon did not dismiss Dunn out-of-hand. Instead, the great man and the over-eager student formed a curious kind of classroom alliance.
”Being a professor must be a lonely life,” Dunn said. ”Students ask questions not about what`s really on their minds, but in order to make points with the instructor. So even a McKeon never enjoys a true classroom dialectic.”
Unless, that is, he is fortunate to have a Ken Dunn sitting in front of him. For the next few years, as Dunn worked his way through the required course work for a Ph. D., his hand was inevitably the first to go up whenever the great man asked the class a question. Just as regularly, McKeon would explain to Dunn the naivete of his answer–but with an slight twinkle in his eye, as an unaccustomed reward for his disciple`s intellectual temerity. Over those same years, the hand Dunn waved in front of his professor became increasingly covered with grease and grime.
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A procession of street people shuffled into the Uptown center offering bags of bottles and tin cans for sale.
”When I came to Chicago, it was the first time I`d ever lived in a city,” Dunn recalled, ”City life seemed so crazy: I`d see grown men hanging around street corners in the middle of the day because they had nothing to do. Yet the gutters overflowed with all sorts of recyclable junk that could provide their neighborhoods with the economic power to create jobs.”
So Dunn started going around Hyde Park in a beat-up Volkswagen, persuading the merchants to give him their cardboard packing cases instead of burning them in the alleys behind their stores. At first, he made his rounds in-between classroom obligations. But as he gained allies in his recycling effort, the time came when he had to make a moral decision of his own.
”When I was two or three chapters into my Ph.D. dissertation,” he recalled, ”I said to myself: `If you get that degree, you`ll become just another professor who is out of touch with reality. But as a junk man, you have a chance to do a little something to make this world a better place to live in.` ”
Yet even after he abandoned the ivory tower for his salvage yard, Dunn kept up his philosophical apprenticeship. At least once a week, he would park his truck in front of the quadrangle to continue his long-running dialectic with Prof. McKeon. Indeed, in the great man`s later years, as first his eyesight and then his intellectual powers failed him, their master-student relationship was slowly reversed. Now it would be the philosopher-junkman who had to take the lead in their discussions.
”A few weeks before he passed,” Dunn said, ”I brought a tape of `The Tempest` for McKeon to listen to. Afterward, I found myself answering a flood of questions about Shakespeare`s dramatic intent.”
Nor did Dunn abandon his teaching vocation with his master`s death in 1985. On Wednesday evenings, he brings his junk truck in early so that he can get to the class on the Great Books that he leads at the University of Chicago. This term, Dunn and his students are working their way through Descartes` ”Meditations.” His own copy of the text is marked with greasy fingerprints.
”Doing a job like this,” Dunn noted, while shifting his truck into low gear, ”you never get completely clean. Sometimes my students see my filty palms and ask: `Oh, you been tuning up a sports car or motorcycle?` No, I say, I`ve got a day gig that requires me to work with my hands–best preparation in the world for philosophical inquiry. Fellow named Manuel taught me that. You ought to try it yourself sometime.”
