Meet the new member of New York City's sexiest Strongest

Sanitation worker part girlie girl, part tomboy
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, December 10 2011, 7:23 PM

A willowy blonde with perfectly polished nails and Dolce & Gabbana glasses is turning heads as she tosses trash into a truck.

Meet Mary Ellen Connolly, one of six women to graduate the city Sanitation Department’s 2011 class. She and 119 other haulers will be sworn in by Mayor Bloomberg Wednesday.

Working as one of New York’s Strongest is not for the faint of heart. Each worker lifts five to seven tons of garbage per day — from trash bags of rotten food to living room furniture to washing machines.

The job is tough, but also recession-proof — after all, the city residents create 12,000 tons of refuse a day.

Connolly, 36, said she couldn’t be happier in her new career.

“ I wish some of my girlfriends would do it,” Connolly said last week. “ It’s a great job.”

She’s obviously not a woman who says “eww” much.

“I’ m not squeamish at all,” she said. “ I was an X-ray technician in the trauma slot at Bellevue Hospital for 12 years, so I've seen a lot.”

The Queens native said she has always been athletic, playing sports in high school and faithfully hitting the gym for a blast of cardio and weight-lifting.

As I try to keep up with her on her Far Rockaway route, I imagine she can skip the gym, now that she does the waste can workout.

"I I like it, because I’ m outside and I’ m moving around,” she said. “And I liked helping people when I was an X-ray tech, and this is helping people, too.”

Anybody who lived through the Sanitation workers’ strike in the 1970s knows Connolly speaks the truth.

Like all 6,000 uniformed members of the city’ s Sanitation Department — the world’ s largest — Connolly had to pass a strenuous test, dragging bags and cans through an obstacle course.

Then she got the call that she would start 30 days of intense training in October, driving big-bruiser trucks and snowplows.

The timing wasn’t ideal — her wedding to restaurant manager Sean McCallion was scheduled a few days before the start of training.

“I spent my honeymoon at Floyd Bennett Field,” Connolly said.

She and the five other female newbies are far from the first women on the force, says the department’ s Chief Keith Mellis.


Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/meet-member-york-city-sexiest-strongest-article-1.989851#ixzz1gKgNmeZy