Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Nearly 10 years ago, one of my daughters was munch, munch, munching on a crisp apple in the back seat of our minivan during a family vacation. We were cruising through a state park with a window open. Next thing I knew, the apple core went flying out the window. And I went flying off the handle.

“What are you doing?” I yelled as I immediately pulled over. “That’s littering! Kauslers don’t litter!”

“Dad! It’s just an apple. It’s OK,” she said, reasoning that it either would decay or feed some wildlife.

It wasn’t OK. We hunted in the weeds for that core. I don’t remember if we found it, but our whole family sure remembers the incident.

I thought about it a few Saturdays ago as my wife and I picked up trash on the sides of South McDuffie Street, south of the five-way stop. We were participating in Homeland Park Pride Day.

We were there for two reasons.

First, if the Independent-Mail is going green, we can’t just talk the talk. It was time to set an example and support a good cause.

On a drizzly day, we filled five bags, mostly with plastic bottles, aluminum cans and glass bottles. You know, recyclables. No discarded newspapers. No apple cores. But lots of fast-food bags and wrappers and pieces of plastic foam. We rounded up one shopping cart, two tires … and a pair of pink panties.

Second, I wanted to apologize to the good people who organized this event. It deserved more advance publicity than the day-of three-paragraph news item that was buried among crime briefs.

That got me thinking. Since we changed our beat reporting structure late last fall, we haven’t done a very good job getting the word out to the community.

The cleanup organizers should have known which reporter covers Homeland Park. That would be Charmaine Smith-Miles.

Where once our reporters covered beats by subjects — an education reporter, a business reporter, a government reporter, etc. — now each one is a general assignment reporter assigned to a geographic area. In general, these areas are school districts.

We have started to publish a page with each reporter’s photo, phone number and e-mail address, along with a description of his or her beat area. We won’t run this every day, so before you recycle your newspaper (nudge, nudge), you can clip and save the page.

The next time there’s a person, place, event or issue in your area that you believe is newsworthy, please contact the appropriate reporter.

When in doubt, call our main newsroom number at (864) 260-1274 or send an e-mail to newsroom@independentmail.com.

And if you see anyone littering South McDuffie Street, call me. I drove through there Sunday on my way to Antreville to deliver a newspaper to a loyal reader who didn’t receive his Independent-Mail, and it disappointed me to see lots of trash in the ditches my wife and I had cleaned.

A few bad apples sure can spoil the bunch, bunch, bunch.