VIDEO: Community Clean-Up Day

ABERDEEN, Miss. (WCBI)- One northeast Mississippi community is getting serious about the age-old slogan “Keep America Beautiful.”

Aberdeen Mississippi is a city with a rich heritage. Downtown is the historic Elkin Theater. There are antebellum homes. There is the impressive modern federal courthouse building. And even city hall is an historic landmark.

But Mayor Maurice Howard is concerned about the another aspect of the city- it’s litter.

There was a lot of it in this field adjacent to the main thoroughfare through town Highway 45. That is why 80 city employees and volunteers came out for a city wide cleanup day.

“We want to make sure that we created some type of program to get the people out, get the constituents out, get our employees out to come and volunteer their time and pick up pieces of paper and make sure that our city and our streets are clean,” says Linda Record.

Record grew up in Aberdeen and recently returned when her husband retired.

“We wanted to come back home and make a difference. And starting with garbage is one of things we hope to get started. We really need to keep Aberdeen clean. I mean we need to start making an effort. We need to put garbage bags in our cars instead of throwing out our windows. We need to learn that cigarette butts are garbage,” says Record.

“Economically if we’re going to be an attraction we’re going to have to show industry a reason for coming to Aberdeen. And one of the reasons is that we’re going to be a clean city. We’re going to be a friendly city. We’re to be a health environment oriented city. It’s easy to get the people out to get something done in the city of Aberdeen,” says Record.

And Record says there used to be such a concerted effort to avoid being litterbugs.

“I remember a time when my husband and I were travelling through California. And our son accidentally let a map fly out the window. We stopped every place we could to try to catch up with that map. We didn’t want to be litterbugs. That is how important it is to us,” says Record.

The mayor says he would like to make this a quarterly event here in the city of Aberdeen and says he’s thankful to the many volunteers here who come out on a Saturday to help make their town a more beautiful place to live.