Seattle's 'Toilet Paper Guy' brought TP to the city's poor for 15 years

After 15 years of collecting and distributing half-used rolls of toilet paper, Seattle’s Toilet Paper Guy is calling it quits.

76-year-old Leon Delong came down with pneumonia last month, and is taking that as his cue to turn over his legacy to the charities he helped for years.

Shortly after he retired from his cable-splicer job at Seattle City Light, Delong grew restless. Around that time, he daughter, Allison, a manager for some of Seattle’s downtown high-rises, was wrestling with a practical problem:

Janitorial crews were replacing toilet paper rolls at night — no matter whether they were finished or not — to ensure prime office buildings were well-stocked every morning so that no executive would be stuck with an empty roll during the day.

“It’s the ‘can you spare a square’ problem, like with Elaine in Seinfeld, ” Allison told the Seattle Times. “These are Class A buildings. They absolutely do not want what happened to Elaine to happen to any of their tenants.”

These “stub rolls” — usually of high quality — would be thrown out every night.

“They were chucking them in the trash. It drove me crazy,” Allison said.

So Allison and her father asked the janitorial crews to save the rolls instead.

By last month, Delong was collecting half-empty rolls from nearly one-quarter of Seattle’s Class A buildings.

Every other week, he’d collect “three heaping pickup loads” of the stub rolls — about 2,000 to 3,000 of them — and deliver them to local food banks.

Packaged in groups of four or five rolls, Delong’s delivery quickly become a hot commodity.

“I’m telling you, putting out Leon’s toilet paper is no different than putting out T-bone steaks,” Anthony Brown, the manager of Northwest Harvest’s Cherry Street Food Bank, told the Seattle Times. “If we don’t hold some of it back, it’s gone in an hour.”

With Delong no longer collecting the rolls, the food bank has vowed to keep the program going using other drivers.

“I’m amazed how much this mattered to people,” Leon said. “To me it was just a nice thing to do. Now it’s my claim to fame. You know, I’m sort of proud of it.”

Read the entire story at the Seattle Times.