Two years ago I moved from one of the more desirable suburbs in the area to the city, buying a rehabbed row house in South Oakland.

Unfortunately there have been many days when I questioned my sanity; mostly on nights when my student neighbors were throwing parties that lasted till the next day or when they left trash all over their front yards, beer bottles and the occasional vodka bottle on my front wall or broken glass in the street.

I must also admit that my estimation of this current generation of students had hit rock bottom with their complete lack of respect for my neighborhood or me as their neighbor. But my opinion changed last weekend, a complete about face for sure.

I had signed up as a volunteer for the Redd-up Pittsburgh event that the city was holding in preparation for the G-20 summit. I figured we would have a mixture of students and residents hitting the streets that morning, maybe 50 or so. When I came around the corner at the staging area at the Oakland Planning and Development Corp. I was greeted by twice that number or more. Most were students, with a few residents (read: old people) like me mixed in.

The event leaders broke us into groups, assigning various sections of Oakland, including my bit of South Oakland, to target in our redd-up. I knew the teams would clean up the litter that their fellow students had strewn about with complete disregard for their neighbors but what I didn't expect was from them was a major assault.

Over the next couple of hours I watched these guys attack trash that had been around for months if not years. They grabbed tires from the undergrowth along Lawn Street, they picked up cigarette butts with a smile. Soon the pile of trash at the end of Lawn and Ophelia streets had grown from a few trash bags to an almost modern sculpture of tires, a wheelchair, a bed, a couch and a great collection of bike parts.

They did all this with smiles and pride. And what I found really interesting is that many of them were commuter students. Getting up early on a Saturday morning to pick-up someone else's trash and do it laughing ... imagine that.

Those students did a lot more than redd-up that morning, they changed one person's opinion about young people these days. Now if they could just come back in a week or so ...

Cartoonist Rob Rogers does "Rob's Rough," an early look at his work and his creative process, exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.