September 28, 2006

Harold “Dunie” Hamilton checked in on the Dayton Street sewer replacement project last Thursday. He is retiring from his position at streets and sewer collection supervisor after 35 years with the Village.

By Lauren Heaton

After 35 years of making sure villagers’ roadways and sewer lines were clear and safe, Harold “Dunie” Hamilton is retiring this month, and with him goes the third generation of Hamilton/Bennings to serve the Village of Yellow Springs. Hamilton is the third Village employee to leave since the Village began offering early retirement packages in May as a cost-saving measure in a tight budget year. His last day is tomorrow, Sept. 29, and he said he is “kinda looking forward to it.”

He remembers when his father, Harold “Zip” Hamilton Sr., retired as Village road foreman in the late 1970s. “He told me he’d be watching for the weather on T.V. and he’d see storms and snow on their way and say to himself, hmm, I’d better get in and get some sleep so I can get up when they call me,” Hamilton recalled.

“See, I’ve been on call for 24 hours a day for 35 years,” he said. “I think the police department is going to call me just to mess with me.”

As supervisor of the street and water collection departments, Hamilton has managed the snow plowing of village roads in the wee hours of the morning and the replacement of frozen or clogged sewer lines in the dead of winter, and he has floated around enough in this small, independent municipality to pinch hit for the Village’s water and electric departments as well. His knowledge of Village roads goes deeper than his time because he trained with the family experts, including his dad, his dad’s brother, Bobby Hamilton, and his great uncles Chet, Doc, Rufus and Johnny Benning. He has worked under six Village managers, including Eric Swansen, who has relied heavily on Hamilton’s experience since coming to the Village eight months ago.

“Dunie knows what’s in the ground better than our maps can show us,” Swansen said.

It wasn’t easy for Hamilton to work with his family members, he said. “They were pretty rough on me.” His father expected a lot from him, and would always call him out first to help with a broken line or a frozen pipe in the middle of the night. Things were also more difficult then because the Village didn’t have the equipment it does now to facilitate the laborious process of unfreezing pipes, for instance.

“It was usually the worst times on a very cold night, we were working in the dark, and we had to watch out for dogs, powerlines and suspicious residents,” he said, recalling one man who thought they were prowlers and pulled a handgun on them. Then it was jackhammering into the frozen ground, sometimes hitting the pipe on the way in. And if residents turned their water on again too soon, the pipes would refreeze and it was back down in the ditch for round two, he said.

Then in the summer, it was the unbearable heat of the sun beating down on heated tar on the roads, and the crew back then didn’t take breaks like they do now, but instead worked straight through the day, he said.

Hamilton graduated from Bryan High School in 1963 and first came to work for the Village the following year. Though he was fascinated with large machinery used to dig up streets and move gravel, Hamilton said he never really wanted to do the hard work of manual labor. So he tried working for Yellow Springs Instruments for a time, but in the end, came back to a job he knew well, and one which allowed him to be outside much of the time.

He returned in 1971 under Village Manager Howard Kahoe, who told him, “‘We’ll hire you, but we’ll only pay you what you’re worth,’ I remember that real clearly,” Hamilton said. He filled in where necessary at first, going from the roads to the electric, water and utility departments and finally becoming road supervisor.

Hamilton has worked with a host of crew members, such as Joel Crandall, who retired several years ago, and Greg Jones, who is still a Village crew member, along with Dave Connelly, Kent Harding and Jason Hamby. Hamilton trained most of them, and has in turn learned a lot from the solutions they have come up with on the job, he said.

Hamilton joins other Village employees Mike “Zap” Applin, who retired in June as the electric and water supervisor, and Peggy Alexander, who retires with Hamilton this month as the Village’s personnel manager. The Village bought the retirement of all three employees, according to Swansen, who anticipates that several more Village and Yellow Springs Police Department employees will retire before next summer, some under the early retirement plan.

The Village will honor those who have left with a retirement party on Oct. 14.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com