April 22, 2004
Welcome to campus: Carpoolers look forward to ‘Calvin day’ at the parking gate
Samantha Ogle and her carpool friends look forward to “Calvin day.” That’s the day that Calvin Swann is on the job at the 45th Street entrance to the University. As a traffic guide, it’s Swann’s job to check their U Passes and give them a carpool permit, but Ogle, a special events manager in the Business School, says he does more than that.
“It only takes a moment to help make someone feel good, and Calvin has the gift for doing that every morning,” she says. “He takes something routine and turns it into something special. It’s people like that who help you start the day off on a good note.”
How does he do it? He always has a smile, Ogle says, and a thoughtful way of asking about his customers’ lives. “A while ago I had crutches in the car and he asked me what had happened. Then after that, he’d always ask me how I was doing, was I recovering on schedule.”
Ogle probably isn’t the only one who feels that way about Swann. He’s been a traffic guide for 10 years and has worked all eight of the University’s gates. And he says he knows the names of “tons” of people who come through those gates.
“That’s what I find rewarding about the job,” he says. “To see a Down Syndrome child come through down at the hospital and know his name and his mother’s name and give them a smile. I always figure people could be having a rough day and I want to make them feel better.”
Nor does Swann reserve his talents only for the regulars. He takes his job of greeting visitors equally seriously. “I add a little more flair, a little more glitter and gold to the job of giving visitors smooth sailing,” he says. “I’m probably the first one they will see. I try to introduce them, to welcome them to the University.”
A native of San Mateo, Calif., Swann first came to Seattle in 1970. A football player like his better–known younger brother Lynn, former Pittsburgh Steeler great, he was here to play a game.
“I saw this place and made a decision to either live here or in Denver,” Swann says. Ironically it was the openness and lack of traffic (compared with California) that attracted him.
But the move didn’t happen right away. Swann spent time in Alaska before finally taking up residence here in the mid–80s. By that time Seattle’s traffic problems were beginning to rival those of Swann’s native state, but he stayed anyway, working as a longshoreman and then as a manager of cabin service for Delta Airlines.
Swann had sort of grown up in the air travel business, with an uncle who worked for United Airlines. “But I saw airlines go from giving passengers silverware to passing out packages of peanuts,” he says. “I knew it was time to get out.”
He began working at parking part–time in 1990 and became a traffic guide three years later. “What I like about the job is the personal customer service I’m able to give to someone,” Swann says. “It’s uncontrolled; it’s natural; it’s the way my parents taught me to socialize and communicate with people.”
When he isn’t on the job, Swann often does his communicating through food. He and his wife have perfected a recipe given to them by her father, which they’ve dubbed the Donnaburger, after her. It’s a special blend of seasonings mixed in with raw hamburger and then barbecued. One of his dreams is to open a small burger joint to sell the product.
Meanwhile, he’s just starting to market another food product, a beef jerky that he calls Earthy Jerky. The recipe for that was acquired in Alaska, when Swann was out fishing. “I met this man and I paid him to cut up my fish for me,” he says. “But he said he would show me how to do it. And it was so much fun that I ended up doing the cutting, so he gave me this recipe.”
The next time Swann went to Alaska, he learned that the man had died. “I miss him, I thank him, and I know wherever he is up in jerky heaven he knows that I’m keeping the tradition real with his recipe.”
Swann and a partner will be selling the jerky from a cart at the U.S. Olympic team trials next week in California.
“The thing about food — it doesn’t discriminate,” Swann says. “When you put love in the food, no matter where you are, that person could be of any nationality or ethnic background, when you put good food on the table, they’re going to love it.”
The same can probably be said for someone who is greeted with a smile at a traffic gate, something Swann has no plans to stop doing.
“Fourteen years, 10 years on the gate, nothing has changed,” he says. “It’s always a God bless, how you doin’? Whether it’s raining or not, that doesn’t make the day for me. I got a chance to see you, I got a chance to wake up this morning. And to me, that’s enough.”
