Hanging Up His Hammer

In his Cal State Fullerton workshop of three decades, Fred Wantz is fond these days of handing guests a quarter and pointing to a birdhouse-sized wooden box.

“Go ahead,” says the 62-year-old university carpenter and former Boy Scout leader. “Drop it in. It’s for my retirement fund.”

The quarter falls into a makeshift coin slot and triggers a mousetrap inside, causing the miniature edifice to collapse. “Well, I guess I won’t be getting much for my going-away party,” he says with a wry smile.

Wantz, who constructed the joke and the contraption, has a million of them. But the affable 6-foot-4 carpenter will be taking his wisecracks with him when he retires Friday after 34 years of campus service.

“When people on campus see me coming, they always know to expect a cornball joke or something,” says Wantz, known for handing out wooden purple hearts from his shop to injured employees. “It helps the day go better.”

Faculty and staff members agree.

“He has a great sense of humor,” says Mark Shapiro, head of Cal State Fullerton’s Physics Department. “You don’t run into too many people like him. In his job, it would be so easy to be short with people, but he never was. He always did an excellent job and with a smile.”

Wantz’s arrival on campus in 1962 occurred months before the opening of the Fullerton’s first permanent building, the six-story McCarthy Hall. Among his first tasks was to glue a room number to each of the high-rise’s 2,200 doors.

“The trick was finding the right glue. Most of the numbers are still up today,” he says. “That stuff had an odor that wouldn’t quit.”

Since then, the campus handyman has taken pride in his regimen of daily tasks, which include hanging bulletin boards, installing towel dispensers and building cabinets or mailboxes. Heat, which causes doors to swell, also kept the Placentia resident busy most summers in his workshop--a former gymnasium he redesigned himself.

“There’s not a stuck door on this campus that I know of,” he says.

When Wantz arrived at the Fullerton campus, which then had only about 1,500 students and staff members, he was hardly so gregarious. He was a 27-year-old machinist used to working around loud noises all day and unaccustomed to conversation with co-workers.

“I was horribly shy when I got here,” Wantz recalls. “I was scared to talk on the telephone. But this job changed me.”

His peers are sad to see him leaving his post.

“They’ll never replace him,” says Joe Campbell, a building maintenance safety officer at Cal State Fullerton. “We ask him what happened around here in 1972 and he knows it. . . .”

What are Wantz’s plans for retirement? Volunteer work and travel, he says.

“I’ll tell you I won’t be watching any daytime television,” he adds. “And I suppose when I get the time, I’ll educate a paintbrush or two.”