Marketing exec known for big ideas
As a project during his semiretirement in the early 2000s, Boris Weinstein started carrying a trash bag and litter picker-upper with him on walks around his Shadyside neighborhood.
The exuberant former marketing executive looked so happy while filling those bags that he drew people to him in the cause.
He called his group Citizens Against Litter. By 2006, he had connected with people with the same passion in Homewood. They planned a fall litter pickup event on two different days in each neighborhood, joining forces.
Soon, he had built a small army of people, a coalition of crews in every neighborhood in the city and in surrounding suburbs and became known as Pittsburgh’s Mr. Litterman.
Mr. Weinstein died Aug. 1 at age 88 in Shadyside Hospital. The cause isn’t officially known, said his son, Carl.
“He had had cancer multiple times over the last 16 years and always beat it, so I don’t think that’s what it was,” he said. “He got every bit of life out of his 88 years.”
Mr. Weinstein worked for 27 years at MARC & Co. as head of media and communications. He helped the company grow as a regional agency. In 1986, he formed a smaller firm, The Carson Group.
“As a kid, I was always in awe of him,” said his son. “He worked with all the sports teams, with malls, and in the vanguard days of fast food he had clients including Pizza Hut and Arby’s, Kennywood park, Cedar Point. It was intertwined with our lives, and sometimes I went with him to events and promotions.
“He was a big-idea guy. When he started picking up litter, he was a one-man army, but he wouldn’t let it stop there. It needed to be a movement. He always had something big to live for, so cancer never consumed him. He was always upbeat.”
Carl Weinstein said his dad wasn’t a “hobby guy. His work was his hobby. But he was an avid reader.”
Mr. Weinstein worked on Pizza Hut’s National Young Readers Day campaign and is credited with taking the Book It! reading incentive program national.
An avid Pittsburgh sports fan, he conceived of and promoted the creation of the Art Rooney statue that is now at Heinz Field.
Mr. Weinstein was an early member of the Clean Pittsburgh Commission, which then-Mayor Tom Murphy established in 2005 to support de-littering efforts with the city’s own efforts.
Myrna Newman, executive director of Allegheny CleanWays, said Mr. Weinstein
“kind of single-handedly raised awareness about litter. The work he did was pretty incredible.”
Several years ago, Mr. Weinstein was awarded Keep America Beautiful’s Iron Eyes Cody Award, an honor for which people competed from across the country.
In 2007, Mr. Weinstein described his mission as “collecting and connecting” and said, “At 75, I now know that one person can make a difference.”
That year, he won a national program excellence award for the United Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs in New York. The award in part honored his work in establishing Black-Jewish camaraderie between people in Homewood and Squirrel Hill.
At the time, Bernadette Turner, who died in 2013, was executive director of the East Side Community Collaborative.
She said each neighborhood harbored preconceived notions about life in the other until the groups started meeting to plan the fall cleanup.
“Having them come to our neighborhood and us going to theirs, we shared our concerns and could see what it was we both have and don’t have,” she said. “It turned out not to be so different.
“A lot of preconceived notions then go out the window,” she said. “It’s given us hope that we can have what other neighborhoods have and develop relationships with them.”
“It became very obvious that what we had was something special,” Mr. Weinstein said at the time.
He wrote editorials and letters to editors. He called policymakers, urging their attention to litter violations. He advised more than a dozen neighborhood groups throughout the city, sharing his volunteer “zone” concept and helping organize Citizens Against Litter clubs.
He wrote a regular newsletter, which he called the Newslitter, a tool for spreading information and calling out business owners who didn’t tend to their alley Dumpsters.
In 2017, disabled by a hip replacement, he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he was withdrawing from his litter rounds and was looking for younger people to grab the baton.
“You might say I’m shelved,” he said then. “I want to pick up litter. I miss it terribly. I miss the connection with people. It was one of the passions of my life.”
A U.S. Army veteran, he was a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and started his career in the sports and news departments of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph and KDKA-TV.
He is survived by his children, Marci Weinstein Wiseman and Carl Weinstein, both of Los Angeles, and daughter-in-law, Sarah Weinstein, and son-in-law, Bruce Wiseman; his longtime partner, Evelyn Favish, of Squirrel Hill; and nine grandchildren and stepgrandchildren.