School Custodian Invents Device to Wash Out Those Window Pains

It’s not that custodians working for the Los Angeles Unified School District don’t do windows, Stan Bunyan says. They just don’t do them often enough.

“The windows get washed once every third year if we’re lucky,” said Bunyan, principal at the 15th Street Elementary School in San Pedro. “I can’t remember the last time a crew made it here.”

For that reason, Bunyan has been championing the inventive spirit of Crispin Salvador, a 55-year-old retired Navy man and, for the past nine years, head janitor at the school. Salvador’s achievement: devising a simple, cheap piece of equipment to clean the school’s second-story windows, a task the district’s window-washing crews don’t get around to often enough.

“It’s $3 in equipment and the rest in ingenuity,” Bunyan said.

The device consists of a high-pressure spray nozzle, a 12-foot-long piece of scrap electrical conduit pipe and a brass coupling that is hooked up to a garden hose. Salvador turns on the water, climbs a stepladder and sprays the windows.

Bunyan was so impressed with Salvador’s invention that he contacted the San Pedro Peninsula Chamber of Commerce. In a small ceremony Friday, chamber officials will give Salvador a letter of commendation.

“What we will do is basically congratulate him for taking the initiative and going beyond the call of duty,” said the chamber’s executive director, Leron Gubler.

Bunyan also has alerted school district officials to Salvador’s contraption, and estimates that for $6,000 the district could build about 600 of the devices for its schools.

A district official visited the school this week to see the device in action, but the verdict is still out on whether Salvador has come up with the window washer’s version of the Veg-o-matic.

District officials concede they have a problem with dirty windows. There are only 71 washers for the district’s 11,000 buildings, they say--one for every 154 buildings--and multistory secondary schools get priority over elementary schools.

But even buildings high on the pecking order do not fare well. A district spokesman explained that in the past 10 years, the windows on the four-story building where his office is located probably have been washed twice.

“It just takes them forever to get through all the windows,” the spokesman said.

Salvador, a laconic man, said he decided to build the window washer because he simply got tired of having dirty windows: “I like to keep a clean environment for the kids.”