Six-year-old boy becomes garbage man for a day
SACRAMENTO, Calif.—Ethan Dean has always dreamed of being a garbage man. Tuesday, the 6-year-old lived that fantasy: riding shot gun in a booster seat through Sacramento in a truck labeled “Ethan’s Garbage Truck.”
Ethan, garbage man for the day, made a series of stops in Sacramento to collect trash and recyclables from places like the fire station and CalEPA, where his father works. It wasn’t a chore for Ethan, who has cystic fibrosis. When asked at one stop what his favorite part of the day had been, he said it was “cleaning up garbage.”
Throughout his trip, he wore a cape that said “Hero Ethan” and a big smile.
When Ethan visited the Make-A-Wish Foundation in February, he was asked a series of questions: What do you want to be? Who do you want to meet? What do you want to have? Where do you want to go?
In 2013, Make-A-Wish transformed San Francisco into Gotham for a 5-yearold boy who had battled leukemia for years and dreamed of being Batkid. Miles Scott traveled from one crime scene to another, rescuing a damsel in distress and thwarting the plans of The Riddler and The Penguin, as crowds of people cheered him on.
Ethan’s dream is being a less fantastic, more everyday superhero— almost all of his answers were garbage truck-related, said Jennifer Stolo, CEO of the local chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. He really, really wants to be a garbage man when he grows up.
It meant the wish he’d be granted wasn’t too mysterious.
“We pretty much knew it was going to be about garbage trucks,” said Ethan’s dad, Ken Dean, laughing. He’s been watching them come down the street since he first learned how to crawl, his dad said.