The Preakness Cleanup

The first Saturday after the second Monday of May, the Preakness Stakes horse race was always held in Baltimore. However, this year, Pimlico Racetrack is undergoing a facelift, and the Preakness will be held in Laurel.

A little background

The infield of the racetrack is several acres and holds the biggest party in Baltimore each May at the Preakness. As many as 100,000 people can fit in that area, and they leave quite a mess behind. The next morning, there would be a sea of trash and cans. Back in the day, you could bring your own beer to the party. That ended several years ago. The race track makes more money when you buy their beer.

One year, an employee of the National Aquarium was sitting amidst the chaos with her husband. She wondered what happened to all the cans left behind. Did they recycle them? Surprisingly, the answer was no! The maintenance contractor (which was a job bid on every year by contractors interested in the job) said it was just too much work for his staff to separate the cans from the garbage.

Many people probably don’t know, but since its existence, the National Aquarium has always been finding unique ways to raise money to protect critical habitats. At the time, they had “rainforest parking meters” where people could add their pocket change to help save rainforest habitat in the Talamanca area of Costa Rica. The country is rich in biodiversity, has a stable democratic government and relies on ecotourism for its economy, which is why it was chosen.

They decided to make the Preakness Cleanup their fundraiser for this cause. About 100 brave volunteers, mostly employees or volunteers from the National Aquarium, came to the racetrack at 5:00 a.m. the morning after the race to clean garbage and pick up cans. 

Raising money for rainforest habitat

Thousands of dollars were raised each year. I was volunteering (and working part-time) for a reptile expo in Baltimore. Proceeds from our expo were put into the pot with the Aquarium’s money to help buy larger pieces of land in Talamanca. The idea was to build a “land bridge” that went the entire way across the peninsula of Talamanca. It would be protected and become part of the National Park system in Costa Rica. The land bridge would prevent truckers from carrying wood that was cut down from old-growth forests. They would be cut off from moving the trees. The idea was to stop the deforestation of this beautiful land.

The reptile expo raised thousands of dollars every year to add to the Aquarium’s donation through The Nature Conservancy. Every year, The Nature Conservancy sent a certificate saying how many acres we purchased. The price varied from year to year, depending on many factors such as how large the parcel was, how eager the owner was to sell it and the going rate at the time.

The expo was in the fall every year, and the Preakness was in the spring. Volunteers helped with both if they so desired. I believe I started volunteering for the Preakness Cleanup in about the fourth or fifth year it existed.

After several years, the land bridge had been a success. The National Aquarium decided to move their efforts to Brazil and raise money to fight deforestation there. The reptile show decided to continue with other, more expensive areas, but continued to raise money for Costa Rica.

Why me?

When the Aquarium decided to stop raising money for Costa Rica, they still wanted to support the efforts of the Preakness Cleanup, but no longer had the manpower to organize it. Jack Cover was the head curator at that time. He was a big supporter of the cleanup and the reptile expo. Jack gave me a call.

“We need someone to take over the Preakness Cleanup, and I thought of you!” Jack said enthusiastically.

I was shocked. I had no experience doing anything like that, and I said so.

Jack replied, “It’s a turnkey operation. You don’t need to know much. Come down to the Aquarium and let’s talk about it.”

I agreed and met with the person who was in charge of the Cleanup. They had a list of volunteers, a list of contacts for door prizes (more on them later) and everything they thought I would need to do the job.

My argument was, “You’re the National Aquarium! I’m just me.”

Jack said he would still wrangle some Aquarium people to help, and he did just that.

Reluctantly, I took the reins.

Time to get to work

In February that year, I started making calls and sending flyers (email wasn’t the big thing it is now). I sent emails, but most people changed email addresses frequently, and at least three-quarters of the emails on the list were no good. Press releases went out through the mail and by fax (we didn’t know emails for the press back then, either).

I was interviewed by print media, went on the radio and did live interviews with Channel 11’s Rob Roblin every year. I never did get him to help out, although I thought that would have been a nice visual. He refused me each time.

My friends volunteered. Aquarium people volunteered. Reptile expo people volunteered. We had an attorney with a lot of DUI clients who needed volunteer hours. They actually cleaned “port-a-potty row,” which was a major help. They also collected unopened beers and took them, but no one cared about that.

First, we carefully plucked out the cans from the sea of garbage and recycled them (thousands of dollars worth!), and then went back and raked up all of the trash.

Treasure hunt

We all wore Preakness Cleanup T-shirts supplied by Winner Distributing, the local Budweiser distributor. We wore work or gardening gloves over latex gloves. One year, someone had a bad cut from a piece of glass. People were not supposed to bring glass bottles, only cans, but there are always rule breakers.

Phillips Restaurant was in Harborplace at the time. They provided box lunches for everyone. I always made about two loaves’ worth of PBJs for the vegetarians. Phillips’ vegetarian sandwiches were just lettuce, tomato and cheese on a hamburger bun. Not great. Lots of environmentally-friendly people are vegetarians (including me at the time), and people were lining up for my PBJs!

More finds

It was a massive scavenger hunt as well. Jeff found a wallet that was empty except for five $20 bills. Jennifer found a Rolex watch. She later had it appraised and discovered it was real. No one ever called to ask if anyone had found that watch. She would have given it back. 

I found a gold charm of a dolphin jumping through a hoop. Frank found a $100 bill folded up on the ground. Joe found a gigantic bra. Whoever lost that really needed it! 

We found a lot of single shoes. How did people walk around with one shoe?

Nick was collecting Marlboro points from all of the empty cigarette packs. Who knows what he bought with them? Meanwhile, I was collecting Coke points, but we didn’t find many of those. I found a squirt gun and was squirting people who I thought were goofing off. In addition, I found a plastic sword that I carried around with me to threaten the lazy helpers. It was all in good fun, though. When I was interviewed for the news, I wore that sword.

And keys! We found about 20 sets of keys every year. Some volunteer gave the newspaper a quote about finding keys and the Baltimore Sun printed my home phone number in the paper! I was not happy. I had to unplug my phone and answer only messages for about a month. My phone rang constantly and at all hours with people looking for lost keys. Not many people had cell phones back then, or people would have lost those, too!

There were tons of baby pools (filled with ice and beer for the Preakness), blankets (one year we donated a bunch of those and they were disgusting to clean), towels, coolers (mostly broken), chairs, trash cans (people used to transport beer), lawn chairs and so much more.

Door prizes

Diane, a volunteer, was in charge of door prizes. We had so many door prizes that literally everyone got at least one! Once, we actually had a trip to Costa Rica as a door prize. A volunteer from The Nature Conservancy in Costa Rica came to present the winner with the prize. He helped clean the trash, too. 

Pepsi donated a bunch of gear for prizes. We had hats, keychains and T-shirts from them. I donated Orioles tickets one year. There was a bottle of wine. We had gift certificates from various places around town. You name it, it was a door prize. It took almost 45 minutes just to give them all away.

During lunch and while door prizes were given out, people showed each other the treasures they found while cleaning.

Lessons learned

A big lesson I learned is that you never feed people before you are finished. You will never get them back to work. They all disperse. 

One year, it was so hot that we had to stop and have lunch before we finished. Only a handful of us were left at the end. (That was not a year I was in charge!) Right as the cleaning was over, a large container of white paper napkins broke apart. The infield looked like it was raining paper snow.

Another important lesson is that you quickly learn who your real friends are when you ask them to show up at 5:00 a.m. to clean garbage. And most did it year after year.

The maintenance big-wigs always offered me rides on the golf cart instead of shlepping across the infield, but I wouldn’t do it. I said if my volunteers were not riding on a golf cart, I wasn’t either. One year the manager of the maintenance company told me that the boss doesn’t have to do what the underlings do. I would never ask my volunteers to do something I wouldn’t do. That’s just who I am. I cleaned garbage and picked up cans with everyone else. It was exhausting work, and most of us got very little sleep the night before.

The race track required us to finish cleaning by 1:00 p.m. because that was when off-track betting started. They wanted everything to be clean at that point. The maintenance company workers and some day workers they hired would clean the rest of the property, including the stands and parking areas.

Good times

I look back at the Preakness Cleanup as a good time. We were doing something amazing to raise money for a great cause. I volunteered for several years and ran the Cleanup for four or five additional years. Then they stopped allowing cans in the infield, and that was the end of it.

My first year in charge of the Cleanup was the best year because the price of aluminum was the highest. The going rate was about one cent for every two aluminum cans. We filled three 30-yard dumpsters and raised $9,400 from recycling! That is a lot of cans! And we raised $3,000 from cleaning the garbage and cans from the maintenance contractor.

It all started with two people sitting in the infield thinking about the cans. And that turned into a massive effort that raised money to help preserve hundreds of acres of rainforest habitat.

Your thoughts can turn into actions and can make an important difference in this world!

Please leave your comments below.

Read more by Holli Friedland.