COMPANIES I ADMIRE / SANFORD, FLORIDA
Waste Pro.
The truck they
went back for.
Some company history fits in a paragraph.
Some requires a parking space.
An appreciation by Rob Urban
The Waste Pro Historical Foundation Museum
1975
A Ford. A first purchase. A reason to go looking.
There is a particular kind of affection in going back for something you used to work with.
You have newer equipment. The business has moved on. Yet the old machine still holds a part of your life that the replacement cannot carry for you. You remember who you were when you bought it. You remember what you hoped it would make possible.
Waste Pro’s museum account identifies a 1975 Ford as John Jennings’s first truck purchase. The company says it was tracked down, bought back and restored for display in Sanford.
That is a story with a verb in it. Someone went looking.
I keep coming back to that decision. Retaining an old possession can happen almost by accident. Recovering one takes intention. There is a search, a purchase and the further commitment of getting it into condition to keep. Memory has acquired a place on the work schedule.
Waste Pro has made room for that kind of remembering at its Historical Foundation Museum, alongside its regional operation in Sanford. The collection preserves waste-collection vehicles and the history around them. It gives the tools of a familiar trade a second job: helping us notice the people who used them.
Before the company,
there was a father’s route.
John Jennings founded Waste Pro in 2001. His own career in waste collection began much earlier: the company’s 2021 retrospective dates his first business to 1973.
There is an earlier family chapter, too. The museum describes a 1926 GMC flatbed as representing the kind of collection truck his father, Michael, worked on after coming from Ireland in 1930, aged seventeen.
The word “representing” does useful work there. It lets the vehicle bring that period within reach without asking it to be the exact truck from the family memory.
A truck gives a story about work dimensions. There is a place to stand, a height to lift toward, a cab to climb into. A person looking at the equipment can begin to ask bodily questions about the job. How did you load it? How much of the day was spent on your feet? What did you have to learn before you were good at it?
Those questions interest me because they lead toward a person. The machinery gives us a way to imagine effort that a company anniversary can pass over in a sentence.
I admire the decision to keep the father’s work close to the son’s story. It gives success a remembered beginning, with a young man earning a living and knowledge passing through an ordinary working day.
The people
who put the
past together.
SCOTT COLLIER & THE RESTORATION CREW
A restored vehicle contains two periods of skilled work. There is the work that made it, and the later work that helped it survive.
Waste Pro’s April 2020 account of its DeMartini truck names Scott Collier, then its corporate fleet maintenance manager and museum curator, as the leader of the restoration crew. They designed and built a body to match the original proportions and its period. The announcement dates the vehicle to the 1930s, while leaving its exact year unknown.
I like both parts of that account: credit for the people doing the work and room for what the surviving evidence cannot tell us.
Getting the proportions right requires a different sort of attention from simply making something look old. You are trying to understand another maker’s decisions. The finished object has to carry the shape of an earlier solution, even though your own hands are doing the work now.
That makes restoration an unusually generous use of expertise. A technician applies what they know so somebody else, perhaps someone who has never worked with a truck, can understand more.
It is also a reminder to look beyond the most visible name in a company story. John Jennings supplied the interest and commitment behind the collection. Collier and the restoration crew belong in the account of how that interest became something people could actually see.
The history is still being made while somebody is repairing it.
AN EVERYDAY MACHINE, SEEN AT HUMAN SCALE
There were stairs
on both sides.
The museum’s description of the DeMartini includes a detail that changes how I picture it: workers loaded the open body by using stairs on either side.
That small piece of information restores movement to the parked vehicle. You can begin to understand what the design asked a worker to do, repeatedly, over the course of a route.
Most of us encounter waste collection from the other side of the task. We put something out. Later, it is gone. The empty space is the result we were waiting for.
A collection like this gives the intervening work some of our attention. It makes the equipment available for a longer look. A stair, a loading height or the position of a cab becomes a clue to somebody’s working day.
I find that a worthy use of a museum. A familiar service has a history of human effort inside it. Preserving the machines gives us a way to approach that history with curiosity and respect.
A whole trade
fits in the story.
The collection makes room for other company names, too.
One of the most appealing details in Scott Collier’s 2021 interview with Waste Advantage is his description of the archive. The museum collected materials from other refuse companies, including competitors: photographs, brochures and memorabilia from across the trade.
That is an expansive choice for a museum supported by one company. It gives another firm’s name a place on the shelf. It recognizes that the history being preserved belongs to more people than the people on one payroll.
An old brochure can be surprisingly intimate evidence. Somebody once used it to decide what to buy. A manual existed because somebody needed to make a machine work. A photograph might preserve a person’s face after the business name on the truck has disappeared.
The large vehicles draw attention, but these smaller things can bring a different scale to the story. They were held, consulted, filed away. They carry the practical language people used with one another.
In a business, knowledge arrives from many places: previous jobs, colleagues, suppliers, competitors and the person who shows you how to do something properly. A collection that acknowledges that wider world feels appropriately generous to me.
The people who remember
can add something the label cannot.
Collier also described visitors recognizing trucks like ones they had worked with and sharing their stories during tours. That observation has stayed with me.
It changes who gets to be the expert in the room. Someone who came in as a visitor has knowledge the display needs. They can remember how a machine behaved in use, what took practice, what an experienced coworker knew.
There is dignity in being asked about work you understand. Years of ordinary competence become interesting to someone else. The thing you did so often that it stopped needing explanation is suddenly worth explaining.
Waste Pro’s account of a March 2021 visit by industry veterans offers another view of that connection. Jennings welcomed people whose careers had crossed his own, including former colleagues from other companies. The museum became a place to revisit shared work as well as old equipment.
That is a lovely possibility for an industrial collection: a room where a vehicle can start a conversation between people, and where the conversation brings the vehicle back into human use, if only in memory.
A place for the work
to be remembered.
What I admire about Waste Pro’s museum is the attention it gives to a trade woven into everyone else’s day.
There is the Ford someone cared enough to recover. There are the people whose skill made an old truck presentable and understandable again. There is room for another company’s brochure, another worker’s recollection, another child’s question.
Keeping these things asks for space, maintenance and continuing interest. The decision has to survive beyond the moment when collecting an old truck first sounds like a good idea.
The recovered Ford makes that commitment wonderfully concrete. Once, it was a purchase made for work ahead. Later, it was a purchase made because that work deserved to be remembered.
I am glad someone went back for it.
Rob Urban
A few things
before you go.
Where is the Waste Pro Historical Foundation Museum?
The museum is in Sanford, Florida, alongside Waste Pro’s regional operation. Waste Pro’s corporate headquarters are in Longwood.
Why is the 1975 Ford part of the story?
Waste Pro identifies it as John Jennings’s first truck purchase. The company says the truck was found again, repurchased and restored for the museum.
Who restored the DeMartini truck?
Waste Pro’s April 2020 announcement credits a restoration crew led by Scott Collier with designing and building a body that matched the original proportions and period. The truck is dated to the 1930s; its exact year is unknown.
How can I arrange a museum visit?
Use the tour inquiry form on Waste Pro’s official museum page and confirm availability directly. The page currently lists weekday tours, excluding holidays, subject to availability.