24 I PSAI Association Insight, September 15, 2021
Pictoral History of Wooden Portable Restroom Units
(continued from page 23)
Requests:
As this series of articles continues
in our 50th Anniversary Year as well
as the update of "PSAI Through
the Decades" is composed, I would
appreciate any articles, stories,
remembrances, or any other
information that you could share to
assist in the preservations and the
publication of the amazing history of
our industry and our PSAI would be
greatly appreciated. Email Jeff or call
him at 770-206-0794. THANK YOU!
would place it outside the units and,
sure enough, the next week it was back
inside the unit. This continued for a few
weeks and finally he confronted the
job superintendent. This rather small
gentleman told Grandfather that at a
little over 5 feet tall, he could not reach
the seat in the unit, thus the concrete
block. At 6 feet 4 inches tall, Grandfather
realized that the seating area was too
tall and began lowering this height."
Remember, it was all trial and error in the
early days of hand-crafted wooden units!
Final Thoughts
"A picture is worth a thousand words,"
and in becoming familiar with these first
types of units, we can have a greater
appreciation of the hard work and
innovation of the founders of our industry.
Thank you so much to Nancy Gump,
Ron Inman, Bill Reynolds, Jr, and Satellite
Industries for your continued help and
support in providing images for today's
article. Your dedication to this endeavor is
greatly appreciated!
We end this with a humorous story that
further illustrates that the early operators
of our industry were on their own in terms
of the design of their units.
Nancy Gump tells of an interesting
discovery that her grandfather, Andy,
made concerning the designing of
his famous "Another Andy Gump"
restrooms. Nancy relates, "Each week
when my grandfather went to a certain
jobsite for service, he had to remove a
concrete block from inside the unit. He
Trial and Error
Although this photo resolution is not
ideal, this image shows advancement in
transportation technology. In the middle
of this shot, a flatbed truck is loaded and
will be pulling a trailer also filled with
units. The flatbed truck on the right is
carrying 8 units. We wonder what the
weight on those axles was!
Harvey Heather—a pioneer of our
industry who was featured in an
Association Insight story on May 26,
2021—and others solved the problem
of transporting units on a jobsite. This is
one of Harvey's wood units on a single
axle trailer that can be moved to meet
the customers' needs. Apart from the
materials used to build the unit, the entire
assembly is not very different from similar
options available today.
Transporting Multiples
United Sanitation Unit on a Single Axle Trailer
