The Keys to Everything

The ring

There are, in fact, three rings, clipped to a single carabiner on Duane Kolsrud’s left hip. Together they hold 214 keys. Weighed for this story on the postal scale in the Founders Union mailroom, the set came to 2 pounds, 13 ounces. Kolsrud says the left pocket of every pair of work pants he has owned since 1998 has worn through first, “which is the only maintenance problem on this campus I’ve never been able to fix.”

He has been director of Facilities since 1998. In that time he has overseen every major capital project on campus, three chancellors’ first-week tours, two floods, one ice storm and the planning phase of the Founders Hall renovation. Through all of it, his has been the only complete set.

“There are other copies of every key. There just isn’t another copy of all of them in one place. That’s on purpose. If somebody needs every door on campus opened at once, something has gone very wrong, and I’d like to be there.”

— Duane Kolsrud

What they open

Kolsrud sorts the keys by color-coded rubber caps, a system he inherited, kept, and has explained to perhaps four people. With his permission, a rough census:

That is 214. One of the brass ones is the problem.

Two buildings that aren’t there

The two loose keys belong to the Quonset Annex, a war-surplus steel hut erected in 1947 to handle the postwar enrollment surge and later used as the Applied Arts kiln shed, demolished in 2004; and the old Heating Plant, a 1926 coal-fired plant with a 90-foot brick stack, taken down in 2013.

“People ask why I keep them. A building can come down, but somebody might still find a locked box that came out of it. It happened in 2016 — a cabinet from the Annex turned up at an estate sale in Tamarack, still locked. I drove out with the key. It opened. Inside were 1950s kiln logs and a sandwich nobody should describe.”

— Duane Kolsrud

The kiln logs are now in University Archives. The sandwich is not.

Cards and keys

Between 2011 and 2019 the university moved most exterior doors to Porter Card readers; today about 92 percent of outside doors open with a tap, and requests for card access go through the key and card access process rather than through Kolsrud’s pocket. He was in favor of the change and says so often.

The keys still matter when the power doesn’t. During the February 2019 ice storm, a substation failure took the card system down for 31 hours. Kolsrud and campus locksmith Ruth Engebretson walked the campus in the dark and opened 40 doors by hand so residence halls, the Health Sciences Center and the dining hall could keep running.

“Duane had a headlamp and the ring. I had a headlamp and a thermos. Between the two of us that covers most emergencies.”

— Ruth Engebretson, campus locksmith since 2005

The offers

Kolsrud has been offered a vice chancellorship twice, in 2009 and again in 2017, and declined both times. The story on campus is that he told each search committee he would rather keep the keys. Asked to confirm it, he said only that it was “close enough,” which is not, by Lyle Haugen’s standard, a number. (Haugen is profiled in this issue.)

Every new chancellor’s first week includes a walking tour with Kolsrud. Dr. Elaine Vandehey’s, in 2019, took six hours.

“I had been on this campus as a student, a professor and a dean for more than twenty years. He opened a closet in Millwright Hall I had walked past a thousand times, and there was a staircase in it. It goes to the steam tunnel. I still think about that staircase.”

— Dr. Elaine Vandehey, chancellor

It was also Kolsrud’s crew that found the 1994 ballot boxes in Founders Hall this summer, the subject of this issue’s cover story.

Key No. 214

The last key on the third ring is brass, about two inches long, with a bow worn smooth and a stamp that reads “WPI 41.” WPI is almost certainly Wesconsin Polytechnic Institute, the university’s name from 1937 to 1971; 41 may be a room, a year, or a cabinet. It came to Kolsrud on the ring he inherited in 1998, and it opens nothing he can find.

He has tried it, by his own account, in every lock on campus that is old enough, including the Founders Hall cornerstone vault plate (it is not a lock), the bell cabinet in the Welcome Center depot, and every desk in Millwright Hall built before 1971. Archives found no room 41 in any building plan from the 1940s.

“Somebody knows. Somebody who was here before 1971 had a reason to stamp that key. I’d like to hear from them before I retire, which, for the record, is not soon.”

— Duane Kolsrud

If you know what WPI 41 opens, write to magazine@uwporterfalls.edu. We will print the best theories in the spring issue and pass every one of them to Facilities, where they will be tried.