There are many traditions people think about as they prepare for a new school year — acquiring fresh pencils and notebooks, shopping for a new outfit, adjusting summer sleep schedules.
But there is one tradition that most people probably don’t think about.
For 19 years, Vernon Nichols has reset all of the locker combinations for Winslow Junior High School before the start of a new school year.
All 700 of them.
The Show’s Sativa Peterson returned to her old middle school to meet up with Nichols on a Saturday morning in late July.
SATIVA PETERSON: Remember trying to open a school locker for the first time? Spinning the dial, holding a small slip of paper with the code, turning clockwise to the first number, then counter-clockwise to the next, hopefully pulling on the lock. The ritual is a rite of passage.
But, behind the scenes — at some schools — it’s someone’s job to manually change each of those combinations, locker by locker.
VERNON NICHOLS: My name is Vernon Nichols and I’ve been a locksmith since 1990. I started this 19 years ago.
SATIVA PETERSON: In Winslow, a high-desert town of about 9,000, in Northern Arizona, there is one junior high school.
Nichols sets up his tools: pliers, masking tape, graphite, and WD40. Facing rows of lockers, he divulges that each lock has five possible combinations inside its inner workings.
VERNON NICHOLS: And they rotate from one year to the next and then they start back over. So if the kids are not back again, you know …
SATIVA PETERSON: Clean slate.
VERNON NICHOLS: Clean slate, uh-huh. You stick your key in, open the locker, and the way the combination is changed there’s a button on the backside, you rotate the dial to zero, push in on the button on the back, turn it for one digit, rotate the dial till it clicks and the combination is changed.
SATIVA PETERSON: Alright, let’s do another.
VERNON NICHOLS: And sometime when you have to rotate the dial a full 360 degrees. OK, that one didn’t change.
SATIVA PETERSON: And how did you know? Didn’t hear the click?
VERNON NICHOLS: Didn’t hear the click, and when you’re holding the button in the back you can feel it, and you hear it.
When I first started things were stiff, tight, and I really didn’t pay attention to that, and I realized the more that they stayed that way the more they got worse, so I have started a repair and preventative maintenance schedule.
SATIVA PETERSON: And, do your hands get tired rotating all the locks?
VERNON NICHOLS: Yeah, I usually can work for about two to three hours, you’re up, you're down, you’re squatting on the floor. In the girls, there’s three different levels of lockers. And in the boys, there’s two different levels.
SATIVA PETERSON: That’s a lot of squats and bending.
VERNON NICHOLS: This is my summer exercise time.
That one didn’t reset to the proper one.
SATIVA PETERSON: So they’re finicky?
VERNON NICHOLS: They’re finicky, yeah. When I’m finished and it’s working correctly, I’ll set the dial to zero. Then when I get through doing repairs, maintenance, everything I’ll walk through and look at every lock and see if it’s on zero — I know I’m through.
SATIVA PETERSON: Oh that’s smart. I’m starting to realize just keeping track of the different issues is probably more work than the actual changing.
VERNON NICHOLS: Yeah, the more things acting up or not working correctly, the less I could do. If they were all working great and no problems, I could do about 100 to 120 an hour.
SATIVA PETERSON: For generations everyone who grew up here, took PE or played a sport passed through these halls. Nichols himself attended in 1963 and 64.
I doubt very many people think about how this is done individually.
VERNON NICHOLS: I thought, oh, you mean you got to take the locks off of every locker and put a new one on it. They say, well no, there’s five combinations in each lock. And I'm going like, OK, I’m used to padlocks. They have one combination. How do you get five in there?
SATIVA PETERSON: Well yeah, it’s a little piece of magic. Mechanical magic in our world.
VERNON NICHOLS: Yes it is a piece of mechanical magic. Some people are interested, some are not.
SATIVA PETERSON: How much longer do you think you’ll keep doing this?
VERNON NICHOLS: Well, I had somebody tell me recently I should quit; just be fully retired. But it’s fun. Who’s going to take my place?
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