Wayne Leeman may be the owner of Leeman’s Rubbish Removal, but Michelle Leeman Kaler is the boss. At least, this is what Wayne says after working alongside his sister for the past eight years. The business started with Jack and Ruth Castner. By 1989, when they sold it to Michelle’s stepfather Joe Gifford, it had 25 customers. Joe brought in more and more customers until a heart transplant forced him to sell. He sold to his stepson Wayne around 2001, who continues to expand it, especially with his sister by his side. Michelle, who has done most everything in her 53 years, now adds bookkeeping and running trash pick-ups to her roster, the latest for this fourth generational Waldoboro woman.
My grandfather Eldred Soule had the cobbler shop right in town. He and my grandmother Miriam had a restaurant that was in Randy’s Movie and Pizza Shop. They also did the old theater and the bowling alley. I can even remember digging graves with my grandfather up at the Old German Church cemetery. Maybe I was four or five years old. I probably didn’t do much, but I remember we dug by hand.
My grandmother would make donuts every Wednesday, and everybody in the family would come to their house. Friday was Cards Night, and my mother would bring me and my brother over, and my aunt and uncle would come down, too.
My grandparents lived in that house over there, and they owned all this property almost to Route 1. Eventually they sold off parts. They even gave some to people who needed property. That’s how they were.
I’ve always been close to my brother Wayne. We’re only two years apart. When we were little, we lived in Round Pond, and we rode our bikes everywhere. Parents were always working, so everybody in town watched out for everybody’s kids. When Wayne was 10 and I was twelve, we mowed cemeteries after school with our bus driver. After Lincoln Academy, Wayne worked on the docks, and I worked with my mother at the take-out stand we had.
Sometimes I was working two jobs at the same time. I’ve been a sternman and worked at the seafood company. I polished buttons at the button factory, and when they shut down, I went to McDonald’s. I worked at Fieldcrest. I drove trucks for Bowden’s Egg Farm for four years. I’ve trained in every department at Hannaford’s because I worked there for sixteen years. I worked at Moody’s Cabins for a season or two. I’ve cleaned houses and managed properties. I’ve always put 100 percent into anything I’ve worked at. And I’m probably not done.
For now, I babysit my grandson and work with my brother because he needed help with the bookkeeping. I tried QuickBooks but there are certain things you can’t do on it, so everything is done by hand. I have my own system with index cards for each customer.
Riding with my brother, though, is the definitely the funnest part of this job. I ride with him on the busy days, and Wednesday is our busiest with over 100 customers. We laugh a lot together, even at how the roads are. We’ll be driving down a road filled with craters, bouncing up and down in the cab, and I’ll go, “Yup, we’re on the moon again!” We’ll do silly things, too, like have fart contests, and sometimes I’ll purposely have sauerkraut on a Tuesday night so I’ll have gas on Wednesday. And because I like to sing, Wayne plays the Pandora. I don’t care if it’s country, rock and roll, hip-hop, whatever – if I know it, I’ll sing it.
I run the back of the truck. I’m the one that gets out and throws the trash, and he gets out when we do dumpsters or come across a big load. The only thing I haven’t done yet is empty the truck at the transfer station in Bath. But I’m going to learn. Wayne never takes a vacation, and I want to be able to give him one.
Every day is different. You pull up at the same house every week, and it could be two bags of trash and a bag of recycling. Or two bags of recycling and one bag of trash. Or maybe they did spring cleaning, and now they have five bags.
Officially we have a five-bag limit, but it’s really not, because we expect you to have birthday parties, BBQs and spring cleaning. You have a life. So, we expect you to have extra trash from time to time. And some days you might have only one bag. It all works out in the wash.
We don’t require recycling, but we encourage it. About 85 percent of our customers recycle, every single week. We do single-stream recycling where everything –cardboard, paper, cans, bottles, and all plastics except for cellophane and bags – all goes in one recycling bag. When we get home, those go into a pile, and when there’s enough for the packer, we compress it and take it to Bath.
You don’t get rich in this business. We do it to pay our bills and try to stay ahead. And we do it because we’re all about the service. If you have a really long driveway, we don’t care how old or young you are. We aren’t going to ask you to bring it to the road. And we really try to take care of our elderly and disabled people. When a son called about getting a pick-up for his 91-year old mother, I told him, “We don’t expect her to drag it out anywhere. Where does she normally put her trash bag?” He said, “She puts it in the garage.” And I’m like, “Just have the garage door open. We can go in and get it. It’s no big deal.”
You got to have a heart. And we’ve always been that way, back from when my stepdad Joe had the business. It’s the way we grew up: you take care of the people in your community.
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