Sometimes in our darkest hour, a light appears just long enough to get us through.
On a Christmas Eve long, long ago, a young man found himself in need of a miracle.
To understand the peril this former utility worker was in we need to recall what life was like some 40-plus years ago.
Back in the ’80s, there were no cellphones on which to call your spouse to say you’d be late for the holiday gathering or to ping a coworker to come to your assistance or to text 911 because you were on the verge of freezing to death.
Phone communication was carried over a vast network of wires connected to central facilities. In Chicago, Illinois Bell installers climbed poles to make those connections happen. Needless to say, they were well acquainted with birds, squirrels and freezing temperatures as they hovered among the rooflines, bringing human connection to the metropolitan area.
The disrupted path of a landline phone inside a newly converted apartment in an old factory district near Racine and Hubbard in Chicago is where our story begins.
Dave Cetera was a young union worker back then. He had a wife and a baby, and a big extended family waiting on him back in the southwest suburbs that fateful holiday night.
At 4:15 p.m., dispatch “informed me they had one last job … and no one can go home until someone takes it,” he recalled.
There went the foreman’s efforts to get everyone home early for the holiday.
“The good news,” Cetera said, the job “was an ‘IT’ — inside terminal. Should be easy and warm,” and come wrapped in overtime pay.
He arrived at 4:30 and was greeted by an anxious customer who’d been waiting all day for service.
As they climbed the stairs to the third floor, Cetera noticed the other floors were vacant.
Inside the client’s home, the heat was cranked. While the customer showed Cetera the freight elevator, he complained about how hard it had been to keep the loft warm. He said he was already late for a holiday party. Could Cetera just close the door, which would automatically lock, on his way out?
Cetera agreed, took off his coat and got to work.
He knew better than to let the customer leave, possibly leading to all kinds of liability, safety and theft concerns. “But it was Christmas and everyone had some place to be,” he said.
Cetera figured it was just a loose wire and he’d be out of there in no time.
“I put my toner/beeper in the wall jack and proceeded to the basement, to find and connect that wire,” he said.
The converted factory freight elevator was an 8-by-8-foot compartment with 4-foot steel walls, diamond fencing to the ceiling and some open cross bars attached to the center wire lift cable.
“I pulled down the metal mesh gate and pressed the basement button. Unlike modern passenger elevators with side-to-side door openings, freight elevators have a top and bottom metal-jawed mouth that clangs loudly when closed,” he said.
At the bottom, the jaws opened and he lifted the gate to exit.
“I used my flashlight to walk to the terminal and sure enough there was the loose wire hanging in the box, the toner sound emitting from it,” he said. “I verified his phone number on the correct IT binding post and attached it.
“Done.”
Not quite.
Cetera got back into the elevator, closed the lift gate, hit the 3rd floor button and shivered as the metal jaws shut.
It was chilly in the basement, the elevator was affixed to an unheated outside wall, and Dave’s coat and gloves were on the third floor.
The car rose about six feet, lurched and stopped. He tried again. And again.
He pressed other buttons, in various combinations.
Then he started yelling. “Hey, anyone up there?”
Silence.
He thought of those movie scenes in which people hoist themselves to safety through the car ceiling.
“I reached over the steel side walls, climbed the metal grid and started hand over hand climbing the horizontal rail to reach the center wire cable,” he said. “But the horizontal bars were greasy and slippery. I crashed onto the elevator floor.”
In retrospect, he realized he would never have been able to force open the metal door shutters anyway.
“I was trapped,” he said. “I yelled until I was hoarse. Fear makes you work until you can’t.”
As panic set in and cold numbed his chances, he sat down with his tack hammer and gaveled out SOS before he switched to randomly banging on the metal apron.
After about 30 minutes, Cetera realized he was going to freeze to death alone in the dark on Christmas Eve.
Then, out of nowhere, a voice.
It sounded like a man with “maybe a Hispanic accent.”
The voice asked, “Hey, you stuck in the elevator down there?”
“Yeah,” Cetera yelled back.
In the dark, Cetera couldn’t distinguish where the voice was coming from but he suddenly noticed a light near the top of the shaft.
“I wasn’t sure if it was reflecting from the third floor or if it was some outdoor light glowing in from the city,” he said.
“At the pinnacle of the shaft, three-plus stories high, I could see the outline of a man crawling across a narrow beam to the center of the shaft,” Cetera said.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing as his arm extended and his hand grabbed the cable wire on the pulley and gave it a tug,” Cetera said. “I heard him say, ‘OK.’”
Then it went dark again. “Down in the shaft gloom I could no longer see anything above me. I staggered to a standing position, pressed the third-floor button and up I went,” he said.
Inside the customer’s loft, he slapped the phone on the wall, heard the dial tone, grabbed his coat and tools, slammed the door and ran down the stairs to thank his rescuer.
“I was screaming, ‘Hey, hey, thank you, thank you,” but no one answered,” he said. He ran outside but there were no maintenance trucks or vans to be found.
As he stood on the street, watching the falling snow muffle the outline of cars and holiday lights in the distance, his heart swelled with gratitude.
He’d been rescued by a stranger on Christmas Eve. “I needed to see who or what had saved me. Was it a Christmas angel or one brave man?” he said.
He paused to take it all in, and then headed for home.
He’d carry the story always, and each Christmas he reopens the gift that couldn’t be repaid.
Donna Vickroy is an award-winning reporter, editor and columnist who worked for the Daily Southtown for 38 years. She can be reached at donnavickroy4@gmail.com.
