| For weeks, leaves have been piling up in Odyssey
lawns. But few businesses had more leaves than local
ice cream shop Whit’s End. “We have a lot of trees around here,” owner John Avery Whittaker said. “You couldn’t even see the lawn under all those leaves!” Whit decided to recruit Odyssey residents to help him with the massive job, offering a quarter for every bag of leaves. He was pleasantly surprised by the turnout. “I figured I’d get two or three kids for an hour or two, but more than a dozen people showed up,” he said. “I guess raking leaves can be a fun way to make money.” Before putting the leaves into bags, workers piled them more than 10 feet high. Some workers used teamwork to get the job done. Liz Horton coordinated a system of five people for greatest efficiency and speed. One person raked leaves into a pile, another put them in a bag, a third tied the bag, a fourth ran the bag to the front door of Whit’s End, and a fifth person cleaned rakes and provided new bags. Whit soon discovered he needed to add a size requirement for the bags. During the first hour, Max Hampton brought in 27 bags, but each bag had fewer than a dozen leaves inside. Trent DeWhite worked on an equation to find the exact angle of holding the rake that required the lowest physical effort. Unfortunately by the time he completed his calculations, all of the leaves had been bagged. Local mailman Wooton Bassett raked the most leaves with a whopping 50 bags. His secret? “I just imagine that the leaves are sleeping poisonous reptiles, and we have to get them in a bag before they wake up.” Wooton used the money he earned to buy more bags for future raking. |
