Back then, an omnivorous burning barrel in our backyard consumed much household waste. More trash disappeared weekly as the garbage truck made its rounds to empty the silver cans parked at curbside. Most everything else we hauled to "the dump."

A mysterious place, the dump was a managed operation not to be confused with the work of slobs who pollute both society and backroads with their lazy indifference. A fellow in overalls stationed by the entrance gate monitored comings and goings and pointed out suitable locations for unloading.

Once instructed by the gatekeeper, we'd slowly wend our way among various heaps of others' castoffs, and I'd carefully scrutinize each one. Why anyone would want to get rid of good junk like that I never quite figured out. So I'd lug selected specimens home, there to reside until the inevitable disposition of my childhood some years later permanently banished them back to the dump.

Semi-intact radio and TV sets exuded powerful magnetism. Likewise the barest of essentials: a naked chassis festooned with glassy vacuum tubes, hefty black transformers, tunable IF filters and condensers in shiny cylindrical cans. Now like the dump, technological anachronisms all.

None worked, or course, or else they wouldn't have been there. But on occasion a bit of careful surgery might rescue a worthwhile component or two from death in the junk pile. And should a project demand a wheel or piece of metal or wood, recollection of a suitable candidate might dispatch me back to the dump to retrieve it before another junkophile snarfed it up.

But such dumps have been displaced by sanitary landfills.

Earlier this week I patronized our local facility, an efficient enterprise with a uniformed attendant to verify identification, weigh vehicles and collect fees. After the official check-in, I'm directed to the designated unloading area down the road. But no miscellaneous piles of junk along the way invite my perusal.

I back the truck up a concrete ramp and unemotionally toss my junk into huge metal dumpsters below, each marked according to its intended contents: metal, cardboard, etc. Biodegradable wastes go to a compost area not far away. Instead of the old-time smoldering pile, though, a magnificent "Boss Hog" machine, a 100,000 pound behemoth, grinds and recycles wood waste into mulch.

And should I spy a gem in one of the dumpsters, there's no way to lay hands on it. An alert worker did once fish out a huge slab of rubber and offer it to me for truck bed liner. He hated to see it wasted, and I use it still.

But the privilege of casually rummaging through others' junk, imagination stewing over how this or that might solve a pestiferous problem, has gone the way of the dinosaur. Even venerable auto salvage operations, once called junkyards, maintain computerized inventory that can be sterilely purchased over the internet sight unseen.

Environmental concerns, safety issues, throwaway materialism: these have banished the dump's ubiquitous piles ... and with them the unexplainable satisfaction of reclaiming and utilizing what someone else had given up as lost.