Jeff Armstrong: A remembrance

Yesterday we learned of the death of one of our beloved colleagues, senior facilities worker Jeff Armstrong. In remembrance, we're reposting this profile from the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of Portraits magazine written by our intern at the time, Theresa Hoffmann.

 

Jeff Armstrong's memories are a laundry list of Pitt-Bradford's beginnings: the airport, carnival grounds, and swampland that once made up the site where the campus stands today; the boardwalks that kept pedestrians out of the mud before sidewalks were introduced to campus; and the days when one of the old airport hangars served as the cafeteria.

Armstrong remembers these things because he started working for the facilities staff at Pitt-Bradford part-time forty years ago in 1971. He was a 16-year-old high school student, and Pitt-Bradford's campus consisted of the Emery Hotel downtown and a classroom building by the hospital to which students commuted via bus.

From 1972 to 1973 Armstrong worked personally for Dr. Donald Swarts, Pitt-Bradford's first president.

During that year, he frequently heard the president playing organ and speaking German with his wife. Armstrong built some of the walls around the president's home at 120 School Street himself with bricks recycled from the remodeled hospital.

In '75 Armstrong started working fulltime at Pitt-Bradford's current campus, where he still works today. Like many of the university's professors, whom he describes as “lifers, once they're here they don't leave,” Armstrong isn't going anywhere. He was born in Bradford, and when he thinks about his many years working for the university, he says, “I don't measure in years. I figure I've got five more snow plows.”

According to Armstrong, plowing snow is the hardest part of maintaining campus. It's a chore that starts early and continues all day. It takes intense focus on top of little sleep.

Armstrong said that the winter and spring of 1993-94 was the worst. The 32 inches unloaded onto campus that March “pushed us beyond what we could do.” Truckloads of snow were hauled out, but according to Armstrong, the facilities director Pete Buchheit still told the Pitt campus in Oakland that it was “business as usual” in Bradford.

Beyond dealing with Bradford's extreme weather, Armstrong and the 10 other facilities workers have a big set of jobs to do. Seven or more workers start every morning at 5:30 a.m. to prepare campus for the day. Armstrong also walks all over campus before open houses to pick up every single piece of garbage. Even as he walks from job to job he busies himself with kicking clods of mowed grass and mud off the sidewalks.

Several years ago, Armstrong helped a local Eagle Scout plant many of the young, colorful crab apple trees around campus. Though he is unsure how many trees there are on campus, “I can probably tell you who planted every tree.” He expertly explains the color contrast of red to white blossoms he concocted for the numerous strategically planted stands of trees throughout campus.

Armstrong says that the 2000s have featured the university's best students yet. He says they're “better behaved” than students in past decades. Armstrong describes the 70s as a “rock and roll” time when students were “tall and thin” and had “long hair.”

With the arrival of Campus Police in the '80s, Armstrong says campus became a lot safer. He recalls the '90s as a quiet time. Now in the 2000s, students have more tattoos and piercings, but Armstrong says they're “more academic… things have progressed.”

He's taken plenty of students along for some Bradford-style fun. A student from New Jersey had never shot a gun before so Armstrong, who says there's “more guns that people” in McKean County, took the young man shooting. Armstrong turned a student from Philadelphia who had never fished before into a lifetime fisherman. Armstrong says “I hunt and fish more than anything,” and he frequently takes both students and staff along.

He loves spending time with the varied members of the Pitt-Bradford family. That's his favorite part of the job: “all the people… so many individuals… they're from all over the world.” Armstrong describes Pitt-Bradford in the same way most people familiar with the university do: “you're not a number, you're a name.”

On the way to help retiring professor Isabelle Champlin move out of her office in Swarts Hall, Armstrong kids around with every professor he runs into. He and Champlin have an especially good time recalling the two Roman-style statues Tullah Hanley donated to the university.

Hanley, was a renowned art collector and generous benefactor at Pitt-Bradford who was also probably better known for her voluptuous figure and her former career as a belly dancer.

Armstrong was among those who picked up the statues, and he won his bet that the male and female statues would be nude.

Again, Armstrong proves he's the go-to guy for anything and everything when Champlin picks his brain about his paddling experiences on the area's rivers.

It's not just the staff Armstrong is in tune with; he says the students “tell me all their secrets.” He knows all their nicknames for buildings and areas on campus, and he relishes catching up with alumni as much as anyone.

Armstrong has had the pleasure of spending summers with student workers ever since the mid-70s when the student worker program was started. Students eligible for Federal Work Study also work with the facilities staff throughout the school year. He says “the system really does work” because he frequently catches up with former student workers who have found good jobs thanks at least in part to the work experience gained alongside facilities workers like Armstrong who knows the value of hard work.

For Armstrong, working at Pitt-Bradford is literally the job of a lifetime. He started working in landscaping and maintenance at a very young age, earning $5 for two days' work. He's been Pitt-Bradford's in-house jack of all trades since reaching legal working age.

K. James Evans, vice president and dean of student affairs, describes Armstrong as “one of those people who make Pitt-Bradford work.” Armstrong, he says, is always the first to recognize an impending flood and other weather phenomena.

Somehow “facilities worker” just isn't an accurate title. Having worked at Pitt-Bradford for so long, Armstrong has something different to do every day. He says he sometimes wishes he was the new guy so that his work would be less multi-faceted. Armstrong himself struggles to define what his job is. The only description that fits his work is “anything you guys want… we'll make sure you have it.”

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