It’s summer at Colgate and that means the University’s dedicated painters are in overdrive to make the campus look its best for the upcoming semester. The team of four includes Don Johnson, foreperson, along with Tim Ratcliffe, Brian Marks, and Kane Chlad, painters. They are a tight-knit group with more than 100 years of collective experience working at Colgate.
Each summer they collaborate with residential life staff to do a detailed inspection of all the rooms in each residence hall. “We create a list of repairs,” said Dan McCoach, architectural trades manager. "We use that list to complete repairs throughout the summer months." Each painter is assigned a number of residence halls and they get to work, fixing nail holes, and even repainting entire rooms if needed.
In addition to work on the residence halls, the team is busy elsewhere on campus painting lamps posts and handrails and refreshing the paint in the professors offices. They regularly touch up the Hall of Presidents and the front of James B. Colgate Hall.
“I’m getting ready to do the volleyball lines on the court,” said Marks. “Kane Chlad is working on the graphics on the hockey rink. We also paint the scoreboards, goalposts, and locker rooms.”
Smaller projects, like shelving and furniture, are painted in the paint shop located in the back of the facilities building, where two stories of shelves reach to the ceiling. The shelves are lined with paint cans, each meticulously labeled with its color and the building it belongs to. There’s Pepper White for the townhouses, Glamorous White for McGregory, and Gentle Cream for 10 Utica St.
In the course of a year, nearly every building owned by Colgate, both on and off campus, is touched by the painters. “They are the last ones in every room,” said McCoach. “They are the ones who make each room look its best.”
Despite their busy schedules, the paint shop recently devoted an entire Saturday in a volunteer effort to repaint American Legion Post 1492 in Leonardsville. President Brian W. Casey expressed his gratitude to the Colgate paint shop in a personal note sent to the American Legion.