Hold your nose. The Classie Corner anniversary party, back after the Easter break, is stirring up the marvellous community of classified advertising. The April 10 post about an unusual business idea made this one (Tweed Daily News, 2001) float to the surface …
IT’S one of the smelliest jobs and you are unlikely to find it on the bulletin boards at Centrelink.
But, over the past 60 years, manure has helped Harry Granger, 73, "get out and earn a quid" when all else failed.
Harry, born in Goulburn, took up the profession when he was aged about 10, after his family moved to Sydney’s inner west.
He would nip up the road from his Newtown home to stables at Stanmore and bag up horse manure to sell door to door.
Even "a bit of cow" was on offer in the area that most know as a sea of houses.
"In my days you learnt to pick up things and earn a quid,’’ says the man who is now behind at least a few of the nicest gardens around Murwillumbah and Mt Gravatt.
Harry, a pensioner, bags chicken manure at a farm and sells it at markets, as well as advertising his loads in the Checkout Classifieds.
His emphysemia slowed him down this week after he spent a day at Mt Gravatt market.
"The car fumes come into the market and it upsets me,’’ he said from his sickbed in his Howard St, Runaway Bay, home.
Harry formerly smoked but his lungs also had to deal with a lot of smoke and high temperatures from his work in a lead smelter, zinc rolling and road sealing.
Roadwork brought Harry to the Gold Coast in 1971, when he was the foreman for contractor Percy Stevens on the Ashmore subdivision.
Harry laments the lack of a minister for everything Russ Hinze and Joh Bjelke-Petersen in government nowadays.
"They were the two that started it all,’’ Harry says. "If we had Joh (in government) today, we’d have a lot more money."
Harry wishes kids of today would show some the drive he had as a youngster, when he learned to pick up manure.
"I went to work in different places but used to do the manure part time," he says.
Harry has nothing but praise for three of the most important young people in his life. He has watched them grow up.
"My girls want me to give it (the manure) up," he says.
"I have three adopted daughters in Hong Kong.
"They are Chinese. I went there in 1999 and I was treated like royalty. Two of them got married while I was there.
"They are good kids, no hassles. I met them though a friend at Southport.
"They really respect their elders. They sent me money but I wouldn’t take it."
Between 1977 and 80 Harry operated Harry’s South Tweed Secondhand Goods, far from cutting clothes props from the scrub way before the Hills hoist, and from stringing up rabbits on a horse and cart.
Harry even spent his time in scrap metal.
His current product is tougher on the nose but easier on the hands.
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