Metal dealer talks trash, treasures

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April 7, 2016 - 12:00 AM

I

f Martians ever do visit our blue planet, there’s a good case for taking them to Ray’s Metal Depot as evidence of what industrial man has been up to all these years.

At an hour-long talk at the Iola Public Library — titled “Junk?” — in which Ray Maloney spoke to a small crowd about the history and impact of recycling in America, the owner-operator of the LaHarpe-based scrapyard touched on the many items he buys and sells out at the 24-acre section of land along Highway 54, known affectionately — especially by middle-aged men with a certain lust for home improvement — as “Ray-mart.”

A partial list of the recyclable items mentioned Tuesday evening, many of which Maloney illustrated with slides, include: aluminum cans; copper; zinc; insulated wire, including strings of Christmas lights; all kinds of brass (“here are some valves, tubing, a couple of faucets, brass shell casings, there’s a French Horn”); transmissions; lawn chairs; mobile home siding; lawnmowers (“best thing we ever did was start saving these mowers — sell a heck of a lot of these things”); electric motors; TV antennas; wheels; storm windows; coat racks; ACSR wire; pots, pans; light fixtures; “Russell Stover was bringing me a lot of aluminum foil for a while”; stainless steel; cast iron; car batteries (“I’ll give 10 cents a pound for those”); “here’s a big pile of cars that we mashed down”; oil field pipe; steel turnings; “engine blocks, hubcaps, more pipe”; spindles; “farm scraps”; car starters; oil cans; tires; motorcycles; old fencing; saws; “then, for you ladies, here we go” — Maloney summons the next slide — “yard art!” (which is to say, a giant wheel, a clothesline pole, part of an old wooden wagon, and an enormous ball of barbed wire); chain link fencing, which lay in Ray’s lot, side by side, in thick rolls, like great silver burritos; 55-gallon burn barrels, which you can buy for $10 a drum; tires; cinder blocks; H-beams, I-beams; “and then, of course, there’s our miscellaneous stuff….”

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