YOUR SPACE: For these 2 elevator operators, it's all ups
Think your job's obsolete? Meet Dale and Ingrid. They might be the last two elevator operators in the Pikes Peak region. Dale Bryan and Ingrid Spreuer divide elevator duty in the ornate brass Otis cage in the century-old office building at 130 E. Kiowa St.
Dale does Mondays and mornings. Ingrid's there afternoons and all day Friday.
Dale, a ruddy-cheeked 80-year-old, wears baggy shorts and totes a newspaper. Ingrid, stylish and 66, wears dresses and carries a BlackBerry.
A laptop computer plays - what else? - elevator music as the open-weave carriage gracefully creaks its old metal bones up and down the open foyer.
"It gives room for the imagination," Ingrid says in native-German lilt. "Go back and dream a little bit of the old times."
When not in motion, the grande Otis sits on the main floor, door open, ready for passengers, Ingrid or Dale at the helm.
They often get buzzed to go five loors up to take a person one floor down. They don't mind. That's why they're here.
Forget those elevator etiquette rules of no-talking-stand-still-look-at-the-floor. People here have to interact. Often the exchange goes beyond which floor and a numerical reply.
Dale is known to stop the elevator between floors and say, ‘OK, Jump.'"
Ingrid's more the nurturer. Greeting riders are pictures of a boy with her wide smile, her 10-year-old grandson. "I try to make people at home," she says.
Want a tour? She'll deposit you on the sixth floor then whisk down solo so you can watch in awe at how the cast-iron counterweights balance the load below.
Want history? "I explain what I know and a little bit of gossip," she says. "Not negative gossip, just gossip like whether it ran on steam from the Cog Railway and would go slower when the cog was running."
Questions rise about spirits in the underground of the downtown corner. "People try to ask me about this building being haunted," she says. "I don't think it is."
Just don't look in the basement.
"The guts of it looks like something out of a Frankenstein movie," building manager Gary Wallace says of the elevator.
Otis workers monthly inspect and grease cables. "It's low maintenance and it's never broken down," Wallace says.
There are no plans to replace Dale and Ingrid with push-buttons. "It keeps the building unique. A couple years back some businessmen from Japan wanted to buy it and dismantle it."
Dale was hired on eight years ago after an elevator operator died. "She had a heart attack and it took 10 to 15 minutes to get her out of the elevator and to the hospital. By that time she didn't have any hope of living," he says.
He's not worried about a similar fate. He's happy to be working at 80. He was a West Coast schoolteacher for 35 years. "I started in high school, then flunked and went to junior high, then flunked again and went to elementary."
A lady friend talked him into moving to her Colorado duplex after he retired. She lived upstairs, he says, and he lived down.
Ingrid, a widow, rides the ups and downs of the stock market on her laptop. She was lured by a late night TV infomercial for a stock trading computer program. "I said, That's me. I need to be out of debt."
Want a stock tip?
Think Otis.
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Tell me your stories: 636-0253 or andrea.brown@gazette.com
