When I was a very young reader of Mad magazine I would giggle in horror at its frequent jokes about dog poop all over the sidewalks of New York City, and the sometimes insurmountable challenge of avoiding it as a pedestrian. I therefore always felt a bit curious why the NYC of my adulthood—and the Boston of my younger adult years—didn’t seem to have this problem. Apparently a prime mover of this change was New York lawyer and legislator Edward H. Lehner, who died last month.

It’s funny how much he leaned on the technology of the “pooper scooper”, a contrivance affixed to a long pole, in order to overcome New Yorkers’ squeamishness about handling dog doo. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single person use such a thing, versus just grabbing it off the ground with a poop-bag inverted over their hand. I also didn’t know before reading this obituary that “curb your dog” signs—again, frequently goofed on by Mad—literally meant “force your dog to poop in the street, not on the sidewalk”. And these signs, and this policy, all went away after Lehner’s pooper-scooper law passed the state legislature in 1978.