'It's a Real Compulsion'

Behind the Giant Eagle in the Edgewood Towne Center shopping plaza, there is a chain-link fence that stretches across a grassy hill. On windy days, it’s likely that circular advertisements and other debris will have blown out of shopping carts or across the parking lot and into the fence.

It’s not the most exciting bit of information, but it’s something Jeff Kandra recalled as he sat barefooted on his front porch for an interview. Giant Eagle, Kmart and Wendy’s are all sources of an above-average amount of street debris, he said.

Kandra knows this because at least twice a week he walks out of his house on McClure Avenue carrying a ball of plastic shopping bags and spends upward of an hour picking up trash around Swissvale.

No one pays him to do it. He’s not a member of a civic organization. In fact, if you ask Kandra what motivates him to clean the streets, his answer is simple.

“It’s a real compulsion, almost like an obsessive compulsive thing,” Kandra said. “Over time, I guess I just developed a habit.”

It’s not his only compulsion. He’s been known to cut grass and shovel sidewalks for neighbors, even going as far as to paint the house of one neighbor, Kimberly Davis, at no charge. All of that has earned Kandra a reputation as an unsung hero of the neighborhood.

“He’s the kind of hero you don’t associate with capes,” said Kimberly Davis, who lives next door to Kandra, adding that he tends to shy from public attention.

Even so, Kandra’s actions have helped carry his name across the Swissvale community.

“His reputation precedes him,” said Mayor Deneen Swartzwelder, who doesn’t know Kandra personally but has heard about him from other residents.

While many residents chip in to take care of the community, few exert as much effort as Kandra, Swartzwelder said.

“It’s refreshing that somebody cares about the community at the level he does,” she said. “We need a few more like him.”

A 47-year-old human resources consultant who works from home, Kandra lives with his wife and two of his three daughters (one is studying art at Temple University). A Swissvale resident for 20 years, Kandra said he’s been on McClure Avenue for 19 of those years, just down the street from Word of God Parish, which he attends.

“I’ve told my wife I plan on dying in this house,” Kandra said. “The neighbors are close. I mean, I can reach out and touch Kimberly’s house...I love that sense of community.”

While Kandra maintains that his cleanup efforts speak to a compulsivity about his personality—"Whenever I see something that needs to be fixed or worked on, I generally go out of my way to do it,” he said—he also added that he’d like others to look favorable upon the community.

“For people who are passing through Swissvale, I hate for them to look around and see debris,” he said. “I think (what I do) makes the neighborhood a nicer place.”

Kandra said he spent 11 years in college, attending Duquesne University, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Akron. During that time, he enrolled in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he spent a summer overseas in non-active duty.

“It was an adventure,” he said of the experience. “I’d recommend it for anybody.”

But ultimately, Kandra said, he knew his heart was in other things.

“They have a lot of control over you,” he said. “It just wasn’t the direction I wanted to go.”

According to Davis, who has lived next to Kandra for 11 years, he has always been a positive influence on the neighborhood. Once, Davis said, she broke an ankle and Kandra began cleaning her sidewalk and steps; that lasted for the next four years.

“(He has) no ulterior motives; it’s his heart that’s working,” Davis said. “There’s no expectation of getting anything back—you just do.”

A single mother whose daughters are now in college, Davis works night shifts as a clinician at Re:solve Crisis Network, a partnership between Allegheny County and Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, to help put her kids through college. Aside from sleeping, she spends little time at home, she said, and she’s considered moving to a smaller residence.

“(But) I always said I’d never leave unless I came home and saw a ‘For Sale’ sign in his front yard,” Davis said.

If it seems like Kandra’s enthusiasm is limitless, he does have one caveat: he won’t trim hedges.

Kandra explained that trimming hedges was his childhood chore, and he still finds the activity off-putting.

But there’s little else that irks Kandra. In fact, he said, he rather enjoys cleaning up the streets, an attitude he said other people find hard to believe.

“The crossing guards—they talk to me as if I must hate doing this,” Kandra said. “I think it’s a privilege to help out in any way I can.”

Kandra realizes that what he does isn’t for everybody. And while he doesn’t condone littering, he also doesn’t begrudge those who aren’t actively fighting it.

“I don’t feel that everybody has to do it,” Kandra said. “If someone walks past a piece of trash, I don’t look down upon them. Other people help the community in their own ways.”