Gordon Giulio was always intrigued by garbage trucks. He started Giulio Disposal, and he also covered the city landfill site for several years, so there were a lot of trucks in our life. On every family vacation, it seemed, he would stop and check out a garbage truck.
Dad was a creative man. He had never been what one would call an excellent student — in school, he would joke later, he didn’t know there were As and Bs — but he could fix or build most anything. His first garbage truck was an old International dump truck. He would have to lift the garbage cans up into the dump box by hand, so he invented a dump hopper. That didn’t work as well as he wanted, so he made an electric plate form lift that would lift him and the cans up at the same time.
When Mom wanted more room because our double-wide was getting too small, Dad decided to block up the home — and proceeded to hand-dig and use a horse-drawn slip scoop to dig the basement. He had the slip scoop attached to his old dump truck, with Mom driving the dump truck. On one pass, the scoop got hung up and pinned him against the floor of the trailer. He said it damned near killed him before he got Mom stopped.
