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MYRTLE BEACH Don't call Todd Cunningham "The Gum Ball Guy," or "Gum Man," or "Gumby."
He's big and he's carrying a steam-cleaning wand full of 340-degree water and chemical solvent.
In fact, if you're down on Ocean Boulevard on any weekday, you should thank him.
Special Projects Technician Cunningham is busy cleaning up spot after spot of ABC (already been chewed) gum that people have spit out or dropped over the years and that other people have stomped into flattened, blackened discs.
As part of the push to tidy up the Boulevard in preparation for the boardwalk's opening next spring, the Oceanfront Merchants Association bought a Gum Buster - a special machine that steam-cleans and scrubs each individual wad of gum on the sidewalks.
"It's not hard to do, but it is time consuming," Cunningham said. He starts each morning at 7, pulling the machine that's heating water and a biodegradable solvent.
The cleaning wand targets each chunk with a hot burst of steam and cleanser, disintegrating it. As the steam hits the gum, the blackening comes up revealing the gum's original color - and its scent.
"You can tell if it was cinnamon, or spearmint, or whatever," Cunningham said. He said he doesn't chew gum himself, and doesn't have a favorite gum smell.
A brass brush at the wand's end scrapes up most of the residue, though Cunningham said there are some oily leftovers the machine doesn't catch, along with the really old, kind of petrified pieces of gum.
"It's almost like plastic," he said.
Koribrett Turner-Vaught, with the Downtown Redevelopment Corp., says she's looking for something that can handle the leftovers, too.
Cunningham started a little more than a month ago, hired by Lanier Parking, the city's parking meter management contractor. Beginning in front of Ripley's Believe it or Not! museum at Ninth Avenue North and Ocean Boulevard, he has cleaned a couple of blocks so far.
He's working his way down to Mr. Joe White Avenue, and then will cross the street to the ocean side and work his way back up to Ninth Avenue North. Then he'll start in another section.
Depending how many black spots there are, Cunningham can clean 50 to 60 linear feet of sidewalk a day, he estimates. But he can only work when the weather's good and he has to rest his hands every so often.
"My hands get tired from holding the wand and gripping it, and from the heat it generates," he said. The good thing is he's never far from a shady spot and a cool drink where he works, and the other people working on Ocean Boulevard are hospitable, he said.
The bad thing is, he's still got more than 37,500 square feet of sidewalk to go.
