Cabinet of Treasures

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“This is a piece of water pipe, cast iron, from 1909.” Next to it is a pipe made of cement and riveted sheet metal. “We still use this kind of pipe [on campus]. When there was a water main break last year, it was this kind of pipe. The metal is fine, it’s the concrete that crumbles inside it.”

“This is a Sproul observatory roller that allows the dome to turn.”

“This is from about 1870. It’s what held up the main stair in the original President’s House in Sproul. The cool part is it’s cast iron. The bolt is hand-forged. You can still see the hammer marks.”

“This is a toy I got from [Maintenance Manager] Bill [Maguire] to play with in the office. It used to run all over this place. It could show up at your office door.”

“This is an inert detonator made during WWII. We found it in the Science Center during the renovation in 2002.”

“No idea where from.”

“$4 for 50 gallons of kerosene when it was 8 cents a gallon. That’s real record keeping there!” Hain adds that coal deliveries stopped in the early 1950s.

“This is a snake used to clean drains. Someone pushed and pushed it and it turned into a knot. We had to dig out the pipe to get it out.”

“This is a Tom Cochrane invention, used to run through a pipe to make sure it’s lined up right. It’s wedge-shaped so it would push the pipe back into alignment if it was off.”

Apparently back in the early 1990s, the water pipe to the cooling tower cracked under the concrete floor of the concert hall in the Lang Music Building. “So we really thought we had a situation where we’d have to close the building and [drill] through the bottom [concrete] riser under the stage to replace the pipe. Tom’s invention let us slide a big piece of copper into the pipe to fix it.” The job cost about a third of what a contractor had quoted them for a fix. (Read all about it in this Bulletin article, "Steam Heat.")

Stu Hain, recently retired vice president of facilities and capital projects, is renowned for being a true collaborator. When I asked him to walk me through what he calls the “cabinet of treasures”— a tall, wooden, glass-doored cabinet in the Service Building—he brought with him longtime College mechanic Tom Cochrane.

Mike Boyd, a facilities project manager, walks by, quickly surveys the scene, and interjects, “I broke it all.” Among them, the trio represents nearly 100 years of shared experience fixing and caring for the campus.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Hain uses the designation of “treasure” lightly. And he’s clear about one point: “There’s no process by which we decide what goes inside this case.”

Here are Hain's thoughts on some of the many items perched in no apparent order, albeit amidst numerous architecture and other awards, on the shelves.

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