Whenever governments -- especially local governments -- cut back, there's always a lot of talk about "essential services" .... The ones everyone expects to be performed. This is a look at people who perform those "essential services." We spend time with a garbage man, a bus driver, a parking ticket writer, the owner of a barber shop, an aerobics instructor and the drivers of a van that checks on the health of pregnant women in the inner city.

These pieces originally aired on WAMU-FM in Washington in the late 1990s.