My Dad, Marlin Eller, was Deerfield’s first garbage “man”
In the last essay I shared that Dad and Mother, both 16 years-old, had gotten married secretly in the summer of 1932 in Greenville, Alabama. Dad left her shortly thereafter and returned to Florida to finish his senior year at Ft. Lauderdale High School.
He again drove the school bus from Deerfield to school. But like most teenagers, he wanted his own car or truck. However, he needed to make more money in order to afford it.
There weren’t too many opportunities for a young man in Deerfield to make money in those days. However. Dad’s entrepreneur instincts kicked in. He noted the residents of Deerfield at the time had to carry their own garbage to the dump, then located in Boca Raton. The dump was in south Boca, about a quarter mile north of the bridge on Dixie Highway, just west of the East Coast Railroad tracks. Boca was a small village at the time mostly made up of a couple hundred people who worked at the Boca Raton Hotel. Deerfield, with about a thousand people, is where most of the farmers, workers and business people lived, but they had to cart their own garbage right by the front of granddad’s house on Dixie Highway to dump it in Boca Raton. (Sorry to all my fancy friends now living in Boca, but that’s the way it was. You were Deerfield’s dump. Smile.)
Anyway, Dad took note of this dump traffic and started surveying Deerfield residents to see how many he could sign up for him to carry their garbage to the dump. He soon had enough commitments to persuade granddad Eller to sign the bank note he needed to buy a truck on which to load the garbage. Thus Dad became Deerfield’s first garbage man; or maybe it would be more correct to say.... Deerfield’s first garbage contractor!
David Eller
(PS) To read all the preceding essays, go to observernewspaper online.com, and scroll all the way down to the index entitled “The History of Deerfield Beach.”

David Eller