Bill Mantis’ bicycle is outfitted for a man on a mission.
There’s a pannier and a plastic tub attached to the back of his red e-bike and a “grabber” or “reacher” tool at the ready. Mantis, who lives in a condo in Lowertown St. Paul, picks up trash in his neighborhood and on the nearby Bruce Vento trail.
He’s casual about his mission. “I do it out of boredom, as much as anything,” says the 80-year-old retired teacher and contractor/carpenter.
Mantis might try to sell his rescue of recyclables as an everyday sort of activity, but he admits he worries about the environment.
“The main thing for me is the solid waste problem,” he says. “It’s so bad and getting worse – and nobody seems to be doing much about it.
“This gear allows me to pick up litter without having to dismount,” Mantis said in an email. “The bike is much faster than walking, and much easier on my arthritic ankle. It makes it faster and easier to bring litter back to the trash container in the parking lot. Recyclable items are placed under the bucket and brought back home. Trash goes into the bucket, which, in turn, eliminates the need for a plastic garbage bag – which only adds to the waste stream.”
Mantis separates the recyclables because he figures the city doesn’t have time to sort the items. He brings them back to the recycling bin in his condo. (He also monitors the recycling bins there to “pull out all of the sh*t that doesn’t belong there.”)
Mantis and his wife, Chris Trost, moved to Lowertown about 10 years ago to help aging parents in Minnesota after a decade in Florida. Before the Florida hiatus, they lived in St. Paul’s Irvine Park neighborhood.
He figures he bikes about three times as much as he drives his car, but wasn’t always an avid biker. He bought an e-bike about 10 years ago.
“I have a history of volunteering,” Mantis says. He worked at Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity ReStore and tutored Somali students at Higher Ground. “It’s kind of an urge to keep going. I probably retired too soon.”
Mantis taught social studies at South Washington County Schools – working with 8th graders and seniors at Woodbury High. He started his teaching career in Pittsburgh, working with emotionally disturbed students. “It was good for a deferment from Vietnam,” he says.
He got an undergrad degree from Yale and a masters in teaching from Harvard. But teaching wasn’t for him, Mantis says. He preferred working as a contractor and carpenter and built “a couple of” houses around the Twin Cities.
“Teaching is a hard job,” he says. “It was physically easier for me to work construction for 10 hours than teach for five hours.
“And if that included school cafeteria duty, construction work was cleaner.”
The construction skills come in handy when Mantis visits Greece for two months every year. He took possession of the house where his mother lived from age 3 to 10 in a small village in Greece. The small house had no plumbing or windows when Mantis and Trost began renovations.
Mantis’ mother was born in Reading, Penn., but when his grandmother died, his grandfather sent his children back to his home country of Greece, where they were raised by their aunt and grandmother. Mantis’ grandfather had a house built in Gythio so they could live in a village large enough for a school.
Mantis’ mother returned to the U.S., where she met her husband, also from a Greek family.
Mantis’ father was a PhD student in atmospheric physics at New York University when Mantis was born in New York City. The family moved to the Twin Cities in the 1950s, where Mantis’ father worked at the University of Minnesota.
Mantis has an 8½-foot sailboat and advocates for the city to put a dock on Phalen and Como lakes so he and other sailors would have a place to launch. He plans to build a small sailboat in Greece on this year’s trip for the son of the couple who are caretakers of his property there.
He wrote and self-published a book entitled “The $50, 5 Hour Canoe Sail Rig: a complete builder/ user/ experimenter/ historical guide and philosophical treatise” and has assembled and sailed sailing canoes in Minnesota and in Florida. Trost and Mantis had a 22-foot Catalina sailboat when they lived in Florida.
Trost was the executive director for the District 16 (Summit Hill) Planning Council for 10 years, worked with a native plant group in Florida and is president of the Norwegian American Genealogical Association.
The streets and trails that Mantis tends might get a little trashier in the future, though, as Mantis and Trost plan to move to a cabin they’re building on the St. Lawrence River near Superior, Wis.
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Article and photo of Bill Mantis by Kathy Berdan. Photo of Bike by Bill Mantis.