Hickman’s Specialized Maintenance Technician has been single handedly keeping your school in working order for eight years

By Grace Gomez-Palacio | Reporter

On the morning of September 19th, I got to school at 7:00am for a very special assignment: To shadow Gary Mr. Brown, our head maintenance technician, for as long as I could. That ended up being until around 11:00am, but the time I got to spend with him was more than worth my while. Mr. Brown is a Hickman graduate himself, and when he came back to work at the school in 2011, he found himself as the only repairman the school was going to have, meaning that a job shouldered by two or three over at Rock Bridge or Battle was going to be his sole responsibility. He’s often found pushing his handmade tool cart around the halls or propping up his ladder to fix something inside the ceiling tiles, and most of the teachers we met today knew him on a first name basis. Mr. Brown is privy to some places around the school that no one else is– From the tunnels under the school to the highest point on the roof and everything in between, Mr. Brown has access to practically all of it.

Here’s an hour-by-hour account of our time together.

7:00am-8:00am

Mr. Brown starts his day at around 6:55am, where he heads up to his office/supply storage area on the second floor, near room 252 and across from one of the elevators. And this morning, the first work order he has to fill concerns an out of commission light in the Creative Writing room. 

At 7:21 in the morning, we’re off and walking down the hall, Mr. Brown wheeling his turquoise handcart through the deserted hallways. It’s sort of strange being at Hickman while it’s so empty, but we get to room 232 soon enough and he takes his ladder from the cart, props it under the offending light, and not even ten minutes later has it working good as new. It’s a process, Mr. Brown told me, that could take “some of the other guys around the district” up to an hour, since the other repairmen around CPS don’t have a cart filled with almost any tool one could ever need like Mr. Brown does. 

When he gets back to his office, he pulls up a map of Hickman on his computer screen, but it’s not like any map you’ve seen before of HHS– This map shows each and every room in the building, blocked off in different colors that indicate whether the temperature units are working there. This means that the temperature of every classroom in Hickman is controlled from here in this office, and not from the little thermostat you see on the wall, so teachers take note: Messing with that can adjust your room temperature, at the most, two degrees, and will also screw with the temperature of other nearby classrooms who are hooked up to the same big air conditioning unit as yours. So, if you can, leave ’em be!

8:00am-9:00am

Our next hour was kicked off by a call for help with a water fountain in the swimming pool area, and as we walked out to the swimming building, Mr. Brown explained that this is basically how his days would go. He gets through as many work orders as he can, usually pushing through the smaller tasks first, and he takes calls from all over the school whenever something breaks or goes haywire– For example, the low water pressure in a water fountain that was apparently getting on some nerves and required attention ASAP. Unfortunately, after we got down there and Mr. Brown properly disassembled the whole fountain, he couldn’t find anything amiss, even once he’d gone up to check the pipes above us in the ceiling. It’d have to be a mystery for another day, as right when announcements started, he got a different call, one that would need him to check the air conditioning in the boy’s locker room.

I had to sit that one out, but by the time announcements finished, he emerged from the locker room triumphant, and it was back up to the office for the both of us.

9:00am-11:00am(ish)

The last bit of our day had to wrap up around lunch time, due to all the rest of Mr. Brown’s work orders for the day involving the roof, which is– needless to say –off limits, as disappointing as that may be. Instead, he took me on a quick tour of some of the hideaways inside Hickman that he gets to see on the daily because of where and how his job tends to work.

First off: Yes, there are tunnels under Hickman. I have seen them. They are not comfy looking. There were, in fact, several cockroaches in one of them. None of them lead to anywhere outside the school’s foundations, so no worries; the most trouble they give anybody is Mr. Brown himself, who has to crawl through them while dragging all his tools to fix things deep in Hickman’s underbelly. And on the topic, I also got to see the boiler room and electric control panels, as well as the inside of the massive air conditioning unit that regulates the temperature for the entire Commons area (it’s worth mentioning that this unit happens to take up most of the space in Mr. Mr. Brown’s second floor office– seeing a machine that was smaller than your average human was a rarity this day).

After the tour, I was reeling from seeing confirmed tunnels and all the bits of Hickman trivia that Mr. Brown had picked up over his years here. We sat down in his office again, for a proper interview, where I learned that there’s graffitti from the thirties decorating the inner walls of the tunnels and what used to be the drama department, as well as the use of the mysterious ladder that sits on a seemingly unreachable ledge in the auditorium, only visible from the balcony. (Hint: it’s for Mr. Brown.) Mr. Brown has been here since 2011, and in his time here he’s accumulated a small collection of treasures from decades ago, whether it was the package of original stage light bulbs from the late 1920s or the stack of ’98 tabloids in his desk drawer, little spoils from what he uncovers while he’s in Hickman’s attics and closets. 

But, treasures aside, it’s clear the Mr. Brown’s hard work can go a bit unnoticed, so I asked him whether working at Hickman was actually enjoyable for him to do. His answer really shouldn’t have surprised me.

“I like it,” he told me, “a lot. When it started out, I liked it, just ’cause fact is I went to school here. And over the years, as things have changed, I don’t think I’d want to go anywhere else.” A firm believer in the reliability of old technology, Mr. Brown dismissed the idea of doing what he does at one of the newer schools in town, saying that even some of the new tech initiatives at Hickman alone are hard to keep pace with at times. But he does do his job extraordinarily well, and he’s been doing it long enough to be one of the most trusted technicians Hickman has seen.

He does, however, have a PSA for any students who might catch him in the hall, trying to repair a bathroom or a light fixture or anything else, really: “Leave your cellphones at home.”

Kewpies, if you see Mr. Gary Brown making his way through the halls, just know it’s to make sure you don’t freeze to death in your next class or have to deal with a broken overhead– And keep your eyes on your surroundings long enough to let the man get through!