“That man is 70 years old!”
I uttered the statement with equal measures of shock and amazement at the scene unfolding before me.
It was Vic Bonagofski, the Cardboard King himself, and he was hard at work maintaining that moniker as he stepped off his bicycle to hulk it — and an attached cart filled with recyclables — across the intersection of Pearl Street and Reynolds Avenue.
“Are you sure?” one of my passengers responded, his suspicion piqued by the scorching temperatures that day and the obvious difficulty of what Vic was doing.
As it turns out, I was wrong.
Bonagofski was 72, not 70, when he met his demise two weeks ago in Centralia. By some accounts, he was making his usual rounds through the downtown area when his familiar means of conveyance, a bicycle and cart, spilled onto the railroad tracks.
He was struck and killed by a train.
For reasons I can’t quite identify, it pained me beyond the usual effects of local tragedy to imagine Vic meeting such an end.
We weren’t friends. We weren’t even casual acquaintances. In fact, we never met. In all my years of reporting the news in Lewis County on a number of beats, I never had cause to speak to him directly.
That’s not to say our paths didn’t cross. In a completely literal sense, that happened often. Whether I was at my former home on North Pearl Street or my current abode on Rock Street in Centralia, a week would rarely go by when my short commute to Lafromboise World Headquarters didn’t include a Bonagofski sighting.
He was normally toiling against the weight of the load he’d collected from area Dumpsters and recycling bins. I’d occasionally catch a glimpse of him in an alley well before the sun made its first appearance of the day.
Likewise, I’d often see his name inked in The Chronicle.
The stories were almost always interesting and entertaining. Whether he was insisting he didn’t need a license to drive — “It’s unconstitutional!” — or suing the county for $394 billion in losses for forcibly cleaning his property, Vic had a knack for ending up in print.
The unpublished anecdotes from reporters who had spoken with him were equally engaging.
He’d often clean himself up and throw on a dress shirt before The Chronicle arrived. He was always gracious and kind to those asking prying questions about less-than-flattering aspects of his life.
On one occasion, a Chronicle reporter received a phone call from a woman who had been dating Bonagofski at the same time he was facing abatement from the county on his Old Highway 99 property. The woman asked the reporter to bring a pack of cigarettes, and the journalist obliged.
When she handed the pack to the woman during an interview at the property later that day, Vic was embarrassed and outraged.
He snatched the cigarettes from the woman’s hand and hurled them over one of many towering stacks of cardboard.
Years earlier, at the age of 67, he sat down with Chronicle Reporter Dan Schreiber to discuss his love life, or more precisely, his lack of one.
He talked about how his shyness had prevented him from meeting a woman in his youth. He didn’t like being alone, he said, and his grand plan for collecting so much cardboard and recyclable material was to eventually raise enough money to attract a wife.
“One day I’ll walk up to that door, and say ‘Honey, I’m home!’” Vic exclaimed at the time.
And just like that, I’m back to contemplating the sorrow I feel for a man I never met. It’s almost as if we’ve lost a piece of Lewis County.
Perhaps it’s the sadness I projected on him, the belief that no man could truly be happy surrounded by garbage.
Still, Vic’s life was a noteworthy one. He lived by his own terms, even when doing so resulted in brushes with the law and a public perception of peculiarity.
He’s home now.
I hope, in some sense, he found what he was looking for during those daily rounds.
In the process of finding what others would consider trash, he never lost his odd ability to amaze, for better or worse.
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Eric Schwartz is the editor of The Chronicle.
