Elevator dispatchers?

There are still a couple of old buildings in what used to be the garment district in St. Louis that never automated their elevators. They still have the old fashioned lifts with a handle that a live human being pushes one way for up, the other way for down, then has to manually jiggle it back and forth to get it level with the floor.

We also have several post-war high-rises with some sort of bizarre elevator master control where the programmer can reset to have more lifts picking up passengers on the up ride, then rocket back down to the main floor, or vice versa. I guess the idea was to keep as many as possible on the ground floor in the morning, and the upper stories in the evening.

I’ve seen several old movies that feature big office buildings. The elevator dispatcher uses a “cricket” clicking device to signal the elevator operator. However, in “The Apartment,” my musical ears detected the sound of castanets being used by the elevator dispatcher in the office building. Castanets require a bit more skill to use, but hey, it’s also a bit classier!

In the 1970s, I worked at the May Company on Wilshire and Fairfax in Los Angeles. While the building had three, large automatic elevators, the fourth elevator was manually operated and almost never used. I got a quick lesson on its use when two of the regular elevators were out of service. I shuttled customers up and down the five-story art deco building for a couple of days while they fixed the automatic ones. It REALLY takes a bit of skill to work that handle that goes back and forth. When the doors close, you need to let off the handle…just a bit…or the door SLAMS shut, jarring the customers’ nerves. It took a while, but the customers liked the nostalgic ride back to a simpler time. It was fun for me, too! But I never carried a clicker.