When You Need a Lift : Automation Has Almost Made Elevator Operators a Thing of the Past

Lost the back to your earring? In search of a pay phone? Can’t locate your dermatologist? Want to know where Zsa Zsa buys her hats? Or just need a lift out of the doldrums?

Try your friendly elevator operator.

Who, after all, is better suited to talk about life’s ups and downs--and a lot more?

“(The) elevator man knows everything because everybody talks to him,” says Lamar Walls, 55, a swing-shift operator in Pasadena’s seven-story Citizens Bank Building. “People get on the elevator and tell you they had a fight with their husband. . . . They got to have somebody to talk to, and most folk don’t have nobody to talk to, so they just use the elevator man.”

A good elevator operator, Walls will tell you, serves as part building manager, receptionist, security guard, tour guide and 10-second psychologist.

“I know the building. I know the people,” he says proudly.

Walls is one of Southern California’s few remaining elevator operators, a group on the verge of extinction because of the twin towers of cost containment and modernization.

“Elevators with porters are a nice romantic touch, but it’s only true for those buildings that can afford to have an operator--and have one for 24 hours a day,” says Anne Millbrooke, the archivist for Otis Elevator Co. in Farmington, Conn.

“I do happen to like being served by living people,” Millbrooke adds, “but for me, getting in an elevator is transportation. I want to get somewhere.”

Elevator operators are a resilient, as well as romantic bunch, fending off the march toward mechanization and automation with their attention to detail and personal service. Although many building owners talk of elevator conversions to save labor costs, attendants are winning over converts to their old-style, hand-operated equipment with each new lift.

Connie Hall, a spry, spunky grandmother with silver-streaked hair, has been riding the vertical rails at the San Bernardino County Court House since 1985. She operates two Otis cabs--elevatorspeak for elevators --built in 1922.

Unlike state-of-the-art Otis elevators in the First Interstate and Sanwa banks in downtown Los Angeles--sleek, sterile, supersonic transports traveling at 1,400 feet a minute--Hall’s elevator crawls, creaks and groans up and down three floors at about a couple of hundred feet per minute. The buzzer calling for service sounds like a tired New Year’s Eve noisemaker. When her main cab overheats and stalls from too much weight or frequent use, she shuffles passengers onto the back-up elevator, which she has to jimmy open with a coat hanger.

One recent morning, her jittery clientele, on their way to traffic court, child custody hearings or divorce filings, didn’t seem to mind. Many even prefer the rickety ride.

“Good morning,” says Hall, addressing her sleepy but captive audience. When her greeting elicits only a murmur, she bellows, “I c-a-n’t hearrrr you,” in her best drill sergeant delivery.

“Watch your arm there,” Hall cautions a late-boarding barrister. “Pull in your left foot a little--and don’t breathe.”

After shifting the car switch to the right, the elevator lurches toward the second floor, overshooting it temporarily before making a feathery, flush landing.

“You sure drive OK, Connie,” ripostes the lawyer, making his exit. “You’re better than any button.”

For eight hours a day, she chauffeurs passengers to meetings and appointments, joking with them, giving directions, answering questions, signing for packages and serving as a general lookout for the venerable courthouse.

Her greatest asset is the ability to rise to the level of any emergency. She has intercepted the fall of a fainting pregnant woman, cushioned the collapse of a heart patient and maintained calm in the midst of a claustrophobic crowd momentarily stuck in her elevator.

Says Hall, leaning against her cab’s makeshift bulletin board that proudly displays a picture of her “grandbaby”: “I jumped at the chance for this job six years ago, and I love it as much today because I like people and enjoy helping them every chance I get.”

Elevator operators, who work an eight-hour day and earn between $5 and $10 an hour, depending on seniority, learn the ropes of the trade from other operators or in some cases spend a day with the building engineer.

Training covers what to do in the event of fire, earthquake, power outage or any other emergency that would disrupt normal service.

Among the roughly 18,000 elevators and dumbwaiters routinely inspected by the Elevator Section of the Los Angeles City Department of Building and Safety, the hand-operated elevator is rare.

“You can almost count on one hand the number that are left,” Edwin Tubbs, the section’s acting chief, who says there may be five or six buildings in Los Angeles with elevators run by operators.

Although few in number, the manual passenger elevator still provides reliable transportation.

“They’re elderly, but passengers can ride them with absolute confidence,” says Tubbs.

At the historic Oviatt Building on Olive Street in downtown Los Angeles, Mildred Turner is completing the final leg of a 40-year journey operating elevators. Once an usher at the United Artists movie palace on Broadway, she was tipped by a police officer about a “really good job” running an elevator. She has made career stops at several L.A. high-rises, including Title Insurance Co. on Spring Street.

With her regular riders, there’s an unspoken communication about their destinations. Talk is not wasted on what floor buttons to push, but saved and savored for the more important things, like travel plans and grandchildren.

“I’m going to miss it,” says Turner, who is to retire in November.

Around the corner from the Oviatt on Grand is the Quimby Building, constructed in 1913 by a cookie impresario. Passersby often mistake the 13-story building teeming with tax attorneys and travel agents for the Franchise Tax Board or the Internal Revenue Service. Others just come in inquiring about a pay phone.

The operators also keep a keen eye out for vagrants and suspicious interlopers.

“They know who’s in the building and they monitor who comes up and down,” says lawyer Dale LaCasella, a tenant who often works late or on weekends. “If you’re here, they’ll make sure nobody comes up to the floor unless they’re supposed to.”

Feeling a sense of security is especially important if the building happens to be your home, says Gary Blum, a lawyer and resident of the Talmadge Apartments on Wilshire, where there are two personal service elevators.

“We are much more secure than those so-called security buildings,” Blum says, “which just means that they have an electric gate on a garage and that they have a telephone system to get inside.”

Return on equity is less clear to Monty McCormick, the comptroller at Henshey’s department store in Santa Monica, where there is a hand-operated Otis elevator car with chocolate-colored doors and chicken-wire windows.

“It’s a very real cost,” McCormick says. “Some of that is recouped in good will, but it’s impossible to measure.”

Unless, of course, you ask the elevator attendants at Henshey’s or their passengers.

“For kids it’s a new experience, and for older people it brings back the good old days,” says operator Colon Stallings, who adds that passengers often try to operate the car switch without him, unaware that he’s on board to serve them.

I. Magnin Wilshire (formerly Bullocks Wilshire) is an icon of luxury and a flagship of the Art Deco movement in Los Angeles. Here is a store where the experience of shopping is rewarded in a timelessly elegant fashion.

Central to that experience are two copper-gilded manual elevators recessed into Italian marble accented by gold chrome. Their chief operator, George Blackmon, sartorially sharp in a brown suit with a white monogramed handkerchief cresting from his breast pocket, exudes old-style charm down to his fingertips, which he deftly applies to the Otis car switch along five floors.

On Saturdays, customers, who have included Zsa Zsa Gabor--who buys her hats on the fourth floor, “5, 10 or 15 at a time”--and former Govs. Pat and Jerry Brown, queue up for his elevator rather than take the automatic one next to it. Longtime acquaintances admire his experience, his elegance and Southern elocution.

“Once I picked up a lady in the basement,” Blackmon recalls laughing. And she said, ‘I’m going down,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry ma’am, ‘can’t go down; this is the last floor.’ Well, she said, ‘Let me out on one, and then take me down.’

“The customer is always right; goes to show you.”

Another time, Blackmon was caught in the elevator during an earthquake. When he got off on the second floor, a crowd of people panicked and tried to get on. “I said, ‘No, no, no, stand still, be silent. Ain’t nothing you can do.’ ”

How do customers rate Blackmon’s overall performance?

“Boy, do we love to find him here,” says 40-year customer Lee Hutchings. “Suddenly there’s a personal touch, and it’s all yesterday again.”