Junk man is the (largely American) term for a person who buys, trades, or collects disparate items (scrap and usable or repairable things) considered of little or no value to their owners. This person then tries to sell or trade these items at a profit to other individuals and scrap yards.
Appearances in pop culture
The poet Carl Sandburg has a poem called "Junk Man," in which Death is personified by a junk man.1 In his song "The Pretender", Jackson Browne imagines that "the junk man pounds his fender", alluded as a Los Angeles neighborhood sight. In the television program Sanford and Son, the father's character, played by Redd Foxx, was a junk man,2 although even in those days the profession was not as common as it had once been.
See also
- American Pickers
- Dumpster diving
- Karung guni
- Mudlark
- Rag-and-bone man, the British equivalent of this vocation
- Sanford and Son, a television program centered on a junk man and his son
- Tosher
- Waste picker
References
"The Junk Man" Carl-Sandburg.com (accessed June 20, 2007) http://carl-sandburg.com/junk_man.htm ↩
"The Significance of Sanford and Son". Television Academy. Retrieved 2024-06-24. https://www.emmys.com/news/features/significance-sanford-and-son ↩