PUBLIC CAN RIDE TRAM STARTING JANUARY 19TH
my new dream job well not really but it would be cool.
Tram man goes back and forth and back
Thursday, December 28, 2006
By Spencer Heinz
By the lights of night and day, he sails above the city. He wears no cape, and he works out of a cabin that climbs by cable from here to there. About 50 times per shift under rain and sun and stars, he rides from bottom to top and back again.
Kevin Holtzman Jr. is the Portland Aerial Tram's first tramway cabin attendant, and as the city's last few elevator operators prepare to ride into history, he stands for what comes next.
"Bottom floor," he announces for fun because this is not a department store. The bottom is Portland's waterfront. The top is 3,300 feet up and away, to beyond the other tower near the top of Pill Hill -- the overlook that holds the expanding Oregon Health & Science University that spawned the construction of this ride. The point is to zoom its nurses and doctors and others -- and by late next month, the public -- between the old hillside campus and its new Center for Health & Healing below.
Holtzman takes them back and forth. Passengers board, and his fingers pinch his ID card into a tilt for easy reading: "Cabin Attendant." At 5-foot-9 with short brown hair, glasses, black trousers, steel-toed boots and a lightweight jacket with an L.L. Bean logo, the 29-year-old Holtzman was the first of six attendants hired.
"An all-around good personality," says the boss who hired him, tram General Manager Mike Commissaris, who looks for technical and people skills.
It was not Holtzman's burning boyhood dream to grow up and become a tramway cabin attendant. Then his horizons changed. Born in Florida into a family that moved to Oregon, he had worked as a paperboy, warehouse cherry sorter, shelf clerk in a discount store, English major in college and a credit union service rep before spotting an online ad for people to run the tram.
"I came in," he says, "pretty much as a blank slate."
This fall, he was dividing his time between an apartment in Eugene and his family's home in The Dalles. The tram people called back and hired him. He says his father, Kevin Holtzman Sr. -- a carpenter who has worked on the city's tram-linked $2 billion South Waterfront project -- was thrilled.
Young Holtzman went through training that ranged from operating the cabin control panel -- you touch the buttons to slow the cab or speed it up -- to how to disembark in an emergency by descending more than 100 feet in a harness.
He enters the good-looking new pod and replaces the morning-shift attendant. A ground-based tram operator oversees the largely computerized runs with, if necessary, override controls. The cab is the size of a den, vaguely egg-shaped and equipped to carry more than 70 patrons per run.
With them, Holtzman views, from the top of the run, the Cascades that rut the horizon like flash-frozen waves. The topography of rooftops, pitched to flat, reveals anything from sweet architecture to shingles begging for repair. From his ceiling, the control panel hangs like a finely sculpted periscope. And below it the floor shows touches of home -- a little broom and dustpan, plus a tiny straw mat of the kind you might want to put on your porch.
He says heights are not his fear. Aside from a momentary lilt while passing the tops of towers, the ride is usually smooth and nearly without sound. A "swing dampener" mechanism helps the ride feel like light rail.
"If something is safer than it needs to be," Holtzman says, "I'd have to say the tram is that."
Doctors and nurses and others get on. So far, things Holtzman says include "Any first-time riders?" and "Here we go," and "Tradition is to wave at the other car as it goes by."
The rituals are at least several days old in Portland's tramming history. He guards them with a level of pride. The kinds of questions riders ask him range, he says, from whether a cabin attendant has authority to marry couples to whether his cabin carries a restroom.
Those answers are no, but he does have a fire extinguisher, a first-aid kit, a heart defibrillator, usually a few doctors and what probably can be described as direct connections to a hospital.
"I tell them," he says, "it's only a three- to four-minute ride."
Spencer Heinz: 503-221-8072;
spencerheinz@news.oregonian.com
The lowdown on the tramway
Thursday, December 28, 2006
The tramway is about 3,300 feet long.
Peak cabin speed is 22 mph.
The cabin attendant pay scale is $9 to $15 an hour.
The tram is open, so far, only to OHSU employees. Hours are 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, closed Sundays.
The public will be able to ride after a grand-opening weekend Jan. 19-21.
The city of Portland is the tram's owner and regulatory authority. Doppelmayr CTEC, a subsidiary of a Swiss firm, supplied the tramway equipment, and maintains and operates the tram under contract with OHSU. Mike Commissaris is the Portland Aerial Tram general manager. He is one of 12 employees who maintain and operate the tram.
SPENCER HEINZ
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