That's what it's all about.

April 21, 2021 1:08 PM

After the street sweeper comes and goes, who comes by to pick up what's left over? The hokey.

Joanne Sullivan is a hokey in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and last year won the Commonwealth Heroine award for her commitment to the community.

posted by backseatpilot (19 comments total)

Man... I LOVE her. Thank you so much for posting this.
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 2:02 PM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Lock pickers also come out: the steel bristles of the street-sweeper's brushes are great for DIY picks and tension wrenches.

Or so I have read on the Internet.
posted by wenestvedt at 2:08 PM on April 21, 2021 [4 favorites]

When I worked in a chain restaurant in the late 80s, we had one of those devices that had a long broom-like handle, and rollers in a textbook-sized box that you'd roll on the carpet to pick up bits of dropped stuff during the day, without having to get out the vacuum cleaner. They called that device a hokey. Here's a vintage one on eBay.
posted by stevil at 2:17 PM on April 21, 2021 [4 favorites]

Or so I have read on the Internet.
posted by wenestvedt

So has it been written. So has it been done.
posted by Splunge at 2:35 PM on April 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

the steel bristles of the street-sweeper's brushes are great

These are actually one of the things I miss from Chicago; it was trivial to get a handful of nice metal bits simply by walking down the street.
posted by aramaic at 3:11 PM on April 21, 2021 [4 favorites]

So I'm guessing that the trash pick up stick is called a Hokey Pokey.
posted by BWA at 5:02 PM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I enjoy watching someone who knows their job and does it with a passion. That is something of value at any level...
posted by jim in austin at 5:10 PM on April 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Spot on with the title, backseatpilot!
posted by stripesandplaid at 6:11 PM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

So I'm guessing that the trash pick up stick is called a Hokey Pokey.

I write about a lot of Boston neighborhood news. A few years ago, somebody filed a 311 complaint about the lack of a hokey to clean up the trash just before a farmers market in a Roslindale park, and there was really only one headline I could use:

Why was the hokey pokey in Roslindale?

posted by adamg at 6:11 PM on April 21, 2021 [6 favorites]

So I'm guessing that the trash pick up stick is called a Hokey Pokey

I think the etymology may descend from hoki, Japanese for broom, transmitted either via the name of a popular carpet sweeper, Hoky, (as mentioned by stevil), and confirmed as a verb in this compilation of service industry slang, or some other unknown usage.
posted by zamboni at 8:07 PM on April 21, 2021

Maybe not. Hokey for street cleaner turns out to be a pretty old usage - established by 1903:

The department has been using a number of small, portable wire salamanders attached to the hokey carts, as shown in the illustration.

The illustration in question shows a barrel with wheels attached.

It also shows up in a municipal inventory in 1901, but as One hokey pokey cart and barrel. Since it's in a list of Property of the city in care of Surveyor of Highways, I don't think it refers to a cart for the summer treat directly, but as this article on hokey-pokey suggests, is a mocking reference to the small hokey-pokey carts that had been driven out of existence.

In 1904, several children’s deaths were attributed to hokey-pokey in New York. The Baltimore Sun picked up one story of a Harlem girl who died after eating three hokey-pokey ice cream sandwiches. A child in Manhattan died from “some kind of poison,” which the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported was “presumably” from hokey-pokey, which the boy had been fond of. The persistence of this summer treat was under threat of being banished from cities.

Ultimately, it was the ice cream lobby who encouraged a crackdown. When the Maryland Ice-Cream Manufacturers Association met at the Emerson in 1913, they declared that they only intended to “raise the ice cream standard,” not to drive the hokey-pokey men out of business. Nonetheless, health commissioners were asked to help “exterminate” hokey-pokey carts, and they soon began to fade from memory in Baltimore.
…
In truth, hokey-pokey never went away. While street vendors were no longer likely to manufacture the cheap ice cream in their homes, that practice was bound to die off anyway. In the early 1900s, Baltimore already had at least two factories that manufactured hokey-pokey. In the hands of corporations, hokey-pokey took other forms, including one popularized by the original hokey-pokey vendors: the ice cream sandwich. The hokey-pokey name lent itself to a popular song. Men who pushed carts to pick up trash for the city were later referred to as “hokey pokey men.”

So, from pseudo-Latin magical hocus pocus, to the figurative use as deception or fraud, to a faux ice cream dessert, to the sales carts, to a mocking reference to trash barrel carts as hokey pokey carts, to hokey carts, to hokey man, to hokey. Etymology is fun!
posted by zamboni at 8:49 PM on April 21, 2021 [7 favorites]

After watching this video I want to quit my software job and be a hokey. She makes it sound so satisfying.
posted by 3j0hn at 8:59 PM on April 21, 2021

“You lay down your penny; you demand your square.
It’s given to you on a piece of brown paper;
it looks fascinating… At first it is delightful.
The second mouthful is cool, but suggestive of oleomargerine;
the third is waxy and sticky; and then you take the last
with a wry face and are disgusted for buying it;
feel that it has upset your heart[/stomach]
and that you never want any more again.“
posted by ovvl at 6:58 AM on April 22, 2021

What was the popular song, zamboni?
In Michael Rosen's lovely anthology of collected children's playground rhymes, there's
'Hokey Pokey penny a lump
The more you eat the more you jump'
I'd wondered what hokey pokey is. AFAIK icecream came to uk with Italian immigration some time in the 30s - in the 70s all the fish and chip shops in my mother's North East village had Italian names like frex Parisi's and had started out as ice cream shops before diversifying. So I'm surprised the hokey pokey rhyme was collected in London schools if it was an American ice creamlike thing.
posted by glasseyes at 9:59 AM on April 22, 2021

And now that I've read the links, hokey pokey started in London apparently, and the Italian link is real.
posted by glasseyes at 10:04 AM on April 22, 2021

What was the popular song, zamboni?

The wikipedia article for Hokey Cokey, known in some places as Hokey Pokey is probably the best explanation.
posted by zamboni at 10:57 AM on April 22, 2021

Wandered over here after watching that Mortal Kombat opener someone posted, what a palate cleanser. This brings me back to when my manager taught me how to mop floors ("sideways figure-8s, and repeat.. otherwise you are just pushing the dirt"). Then I became one of the managers, and years later they told me about the "white gloves" joke that would go around behind my back, apparently I internalized the high standards that were taught to me. Every job has its reward, and this Public Works person is my kinda people.
posted by elkevelvet at 11:59 AM on April 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

No discussion about hokey pokey is complete without Richard and Linda Thompson’s contribution.
posted by TedW at 12:51 PM on April 22, 2021

languagehat has been likewise pondering 'hokey' etymology, and coming to similar conclusions.
posted by zamboni at 10:18 AM on April 23, 2021