Memoirs Of A Vertical Transport Engineer At Chandler’s

This past June 8th marks 21 years ago that I left my then-last odd job before re-entering college & the remarkable journey I would be making. It was 1984 when I resigned my position as an elevator operator at Chandler’s Used Textbook store in Evanston, Illinois for summer school at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois.

For one and a half years, it was my job to move people up and down from the first floor, all the way to the fourth floor & down below to the basement, even pesky children, teenagers & old ladies who had no sense about themselves & lean hard on the elevator bell & then expect a nice friendly face to greet them.

It was October, 1982 when I accepted the position at Chandler’s. I thought it would be interesting to hold down a job of a dying field, similar to newsboys, boys & girls that delivered newspapers like me (before the advent of adults with cars taking over) & milkmen.

My main job was to transfer people from floor to floor, your typical mundane boring job, but I didn’t think it was so boring. For me, it was a chance to meet people, talk to fellow employees and to make new friends.

During my second month there, late November, a week before Thanksgiving, I had just come back from a Homecoming Weekend at Lincoln College, in Lincoln, Illinois, where I formerly attended school. I say formerly, because I had been academically suspended for poor grades, a running theme for me back in the 1980s.

It was & would turn out to be my second-to-last time to visit Lincoln College, at least visiting people I might have a remote chance of knowing. I had spent the weekend with friends and of course, I got wasted silly & smoked a couple of joints to boot!

When I returned home late Sunday night via Amtrak train & went into work the next day, the marijuana effects were still with me, as I kept missing my target. The fact of the matter was that running an elevator seems like a piece of cake, but when I first started doing it, it wasn’t all that easy.

You had to level the elevator to the floor it as evenly as possible. Management felt that since it was first month there, they decided not take discipline against me for missing the mark. If only they knew!

Chandler’s itself was incorporated in 1895 and closed its doors in 1995, I believe. Ah, progress, I suppose, but back to the story. The L-shaped building became that way because of the lack of funds it had reached during the start of The Depression in 1929.

And then there were the coal tunnels that I used to walk through beneath the bookstore itself. There was this little red door down below in the bookstore blocked off, usually by an overstuffed bookshelf that one could walk through and find one’s way back through the empty storeroom beneath the front of the store. I used to store my bike in the storage space.

It was a well-known used textbook as well as used bookstore back then. That’s where I bought most of my Beatles, poetry & Kerouac books. It thrived heavily with its office supplies as well as its stamps & coins on the third floor & the sportswear department that also sold Cub Scout, Boy Scout, Brownie & Girl Scout uniforms on the second floor.

The first floor was where all the office supplies were sold, as well as the engraving & wedding invitations services were run. The fifth floor was Chandler’s warehouse, an overstuffed floor full of boxes, paper & other things, good enough to start a nice fire within seconds with a can of gasoline & a single matchstick.

Chandler’s always charged double for their all of their office supplies because back in the day, there was very little competition nor were there places like Staples, OfficeMax or Office Depot.

When I still lived with my parents back in the 1980s in Morton Grove, Illinois, I used to pedal my three-speed bicycle to work every day, taking me up to 45 minutes to get there. The rest of time, mainly during the winter months, I rode the bus.

Out of all the ironies from riding back & forth from work, I used to pass on my way home every day a lavender home on the corners of Church Street & Florence Avenue in Evanston. During some time of that home’s occupancy, R & B singer Patti Drew lived there.

I loved the way that house looked! It was built in 1891, originally as a farmhouse, as most of the land in that part of town was still farm country. It would be, another 18 years, however in February, 2002 when I would move into the basement apartment of that house, living there for a total of two and a half years.


Of the many memories I have of working at Chandlers, I’d like to share three of my favorites with you, dear readers.

Six weeks prior to my arrival there, a young upstart actor named John Malkovich quit his job there. Management said he was a smart ass & would never amount to much. One of the older employees there showed me a shelf Malkovich had built. I decided to touch it for good luck. Apparently some of his talent from that shelf rubbed off on me.

I had my lion’s share of free time while waiting for people to transport, so I wrote a lot, mostly poetry & song lyrics. I wrote many poems, including perhaps the best & well-known of the bunch in that time period called Talkin’ John Kennedy Assassination Celebrations Blues.

I had written it based on the fact that a new holiday was created in the fall of 1983, called Sweetest Day. Sweetest Day as many of you know is just another excuse to buy useless gifts, expensive flowers & fattening candy & mostly greetings cards for your sweetie.

I had been looking for an alternative holiday to write about & to celebrate & it struck me that the 30th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination was coming up. So, being heavily into punk music at that time, I wrote the lyrics with a punk-feel to them. Later, when I attended Western Illinois University regularly I was taking a music class that required us to submit a song & actually perform it in front of our class (I’ll blog more someday about this song).

And finally, one night while transporting the owners of Chandler’s, the Johnsons (Morton, Patricia, Morton’s mother, Morton’s sons Bruce & Eric to the main floor of the building, one of the men farted! No one said a word after that happened & I did my best to keep from cracking up! The entire elevator reeked & when I reached the first floor & let them all out & waited for them to leave the building, only then did I let go a huge roar of laughter!!!