THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509060656
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
SOME SCHOOLS have dress codes, conduct codes, honor codes.
Then there's Larchmont Elementary. It's got Curtis L. Code.
For 21 years now, he's maintained his own special code of cleanliness as the Norfolk school's head custodian.
Code's been keeping the old brick building on Hampton Boulevard squeaky clean for so long he's outlasted five principals and has seen children grow up and enroll their kids.
He's passed up countless transfers to junior highs and high schools.
``I thought about leaving, but it looked like I'd miss the little ones too much,'' he said.
He's 59 now, has short-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair and a passion for football, basketball and volleyball even though he doesn't play much anymore. Too old, he said.
During the summer and any other time there's a school break, Code and his team have the silent, old brick building to themselves.
Vacation time is when they dust the high places, scrub the low places and polish everything in between.
``Every summer we do the whole nine yards,'' he said. ``We start at the top and we just keep pecking at it till we're done.''
Four weeks ago, Code stood in a breeze in the front hall of the school, where a freshly applied coat of liquid wax dried on the floor, helped by several portable fans set at each end of the hall.
It was a nice floor, a clean floor, but the custodian missed seeing the kids from kindergarten to fifth grade scooting through the halls, seeing them go from first-day scared to shy to confident.
``They grow up, get married, get a job and come back and say, `Mr. Code! Are you still here?' '' he said. ``And after you've been in it so long, you just get attached to the building.''
It's his building, from roof to basement, from the shiny, dark green tiled hall floors edged in black to the grand gothic arches that embrace the front door of the school, built in 1913.
He paused at a classroom door. Code bent down and with his thumbnail, worried a little piece of transparent tape off the wood.
``I've got to watch my teachers,'' he fretted. ``I've told them Scotch Tape takes the varnish off.''
He knows every nook and cranny of this school. There's even a corner of his very own.
Down the staircase, in what used to be the furnace room, is Code's office.
Behind salvaged pegboard, neatly painted, two easy chairs sit right and left of an end table with a lamp and a small bouquet of silk flowers.
On a desk piled with paperwork are pictures of his family. His wife, Hilda, teaches special education in Chesapeake, where the Codes live. She stayed at Norfolk State University, while her husband, a Booker T. Washington graduate, quit the college in his second year.
``I had to start working,'' he said. ``I'd gotten married and had a family to take care of.''
Today, his oldest daughter, Hanako, is working toward her master's degree in nursing at Norfolk State. Then there's Christal, 16, and Carlton, 14.
Their father has taken every school district-sponsored class offered in his field. He's filled a binder with workshop certificates on basic electricity, minor plumbing repairs, air conditioning maintenance and preparation and painting.
``This one,'' he said, pointing out a workshop document titled ``Coaching and Counseling,'' ``is the one I'm most proud of.''
Junior high and high school students who work under him in a summer jobs program get to know Code's code, which tolerates no slouchers.
``It makes me feel good to teach them good working skills and responsibility and being on time,'' he said. ``And it's good to see them grow on the job.''
Code knows kids. They've changed since he switched careers. It was 1969 when he left a job in a Norfolk tobacco warehouse and started working for Norfolk Public Schools. When he started at Larchmont five years later, the school was still heated with coal stoves, and little troublemakers dreamed up nothing worse than firing spitballs at ceilings.
``Children are more destructive now,'' he said. ``It's plain vandalism.''
It aggravates him to find perfectly good bars of soap flung out bathroom windows and onto the school's roof, or to unclog toilets jammed with paper towels.
``Children have too much time on their hands.''
Like the wannabe plumber a few years ago.
``He brought a wrench to school and decided he wanted to work on something,'' said Code. The ``work'' took place on the flush valves behind the toilets in a boys' bathroom.
``It caused a flood like a swimming pool,'' recalled Code. ``You know that was an exciting day.''
Armed with evidence, the abandoned wrench, Code tracked down the perpetrator, who confessed.
``It's funny,'' he said, ``kids usually do tell on themselves.''
What's interesting is their reaction to their punishment.
``Sometimes they're sent to me and I have 'em pick up trash or something like that, and then,'' he said, slapping his knee, ``they ask if they can come back the next day.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN/Staff
Curtis L. Code has been head custodian at Larchmont Elementary
School for 21 years.
by CNB