“Company’s coming!” Caseworker, health inspector, church lady – whoever is coming, it means get the pizza boxes off the coffee table and pick up your dirty socks.
For the City of Springfield, the company is out-of-town visitors. Mayor Misty Buscher says that 2026 might be a record-breaking tourism year for Springfield thanks to celebrants of the American semiquincentennial, Route 66 worshippers performing their hajj and softballers flocking to Scheels eager to experience what Jonah felt like in the belly of the whale, all piling into town from places even duller than Springfield.
Sadly, the gateways to the city look more like alley entrances, lined as they are with roadside trash. Janitorial services are among the most basic of municipal functions but city hall can’t afford to keep the place nice. Ever resourceful, the new mayor has revived the late Mayor Davlin’s dormant Springfield Green beautification program, which will see citizen work gangs of volunteer adopt-a-streeters do for Springfield at least three times a year what your mom did for you when you were a toddler. It’s a new definition of public service, meaning it’s the public that must perform it.
Mayor B. is right to think that an already trashy street encourages visitors to misbehave. (“If they don’t care, why should I?” actually is a thing in the psychology of the litterer.) But messy streets are not just a problem in Springfield, they are a tradition. The town that Lincoln moved to 189 years ago did not impress most visitors because “absence of civic pride,” as one not very proud citizen would put it, “made [the streets] the dumping ground of the community rubbish.” That rubbish was still there a century later when Percy “Buster” Darling, described by local journalists as a “burly ex-policeman, ex-actor, boxing second and carnival factotum,” complained that “the mountains of ashes in our alleys look like the pyramids of Egypt.” Darling got himself elected streets commissioner in 1939 by promising housewives that the streets and alleys would be cleaned up “if I have to do it myself” and indeed, in office Darling occasionally put in a shift with a downtown street-cleaning crew.
Sadly for the city, Darling died after one term and his inspiring example died with him. Henceforth, if Springfield’s litter was going to be picked, it was Springfieldians who would have to pick it. In the 1950s the ladies (their word, not mine) of the Springfield Civic Garden Club declared war on what they called “rubbish-spreaders.” Their campaign found an eager ally in V. Y. Dallman, the famously fastidious editor of the old Illinois State Register. In his front-page column Dallman boosted the cause with some poetic propaganda in the form of “An Ode to the Litter Bug.”
You are a pest, persistent, mean;
Your filthy mind needs scrubbing.
It you don’t help keep our town clean
You’ll get a Garden Clubbing!
I grew up in that era. I’ve been called a lot of names but the only one that stings is “litterbug.”
The irony in cleaning up a city to impress tourists is that tourists are themselves famously untidy. In the 1960s Mayor Nelson Howarth, who also fretted about the impression Springfield made on tourists, worked to improve the Lincoln home area with water fountains and decorative gas streetlamps; he also worked to change the impression tourists made on Springfield by installing trash containers.
Unfortunately for houseproud mayors, it is easier to pick up a discarded cigarette butt than it is to stop some bum from tossing it out of his car window on his way out of town. If you ask social scientists who litters and why, they will point their fingers at younger people (especially young males); people who are lazy (make being neat easy by putting out lots of trash cans and people will use them); people driving cars (keeping somebody else’s street clean means keeping your car messy); and people whose weak civic identification means they don’t see the streets and sidewalks as “theirs.”
Not every visitor this summer will be a garden club lady, in short, and relying on volunteer adopt-a-streeters means that not every street will be adopted. You can thus be sure that the parts of town that need beautifying the most will get it the least. Happily, even if it doesn’t solve the litter problem, the new Springfield Green offers compensating rewards. Said the mayor, “Litter pick up is a very easy way to show the pride we have in taking care of our community . . . and it’s a great way to get outdoors and have fellowship with friends, coworkers and neighbors.” She’s right. There’s no fun like virtue-signaling if the day is nice, and as a fellowship opportunity litter picking ranks right up there with tornado cleanup.
See you there!
When Mr. Krohe is not sticking his nose into other people’s affairs he writes books such as Corn Kings & One-horse Thieves, a very good history of mid-Illinois with a very poor title.
This article appears in March 19-25, 2026.
I volunteer at a local thrift shop and try to keep the outside tidy. No one would believe the amount of cigarette butts that are tossed on a daily basis!! At one point we gave out candy to the customers, and it amazing how many of those wrappers are also tossed. I also have honked many times when the car in front of me tosses out the fast food bag. People are generally very lazy and lack the caring necessary to keep our city clean. It’s frustrating to say the least.