Community profiles | community profiles is a weekly series that appears each monday and delves into the people who live,work and play in santa monica.
By JOHN F. MULLER Special to the Daily Press
Bill Spruell loves to talk. Day in and day out, he stands in the Fisher Lumber parking lot, yelling greetings and instructions to pedestrians, sedans and trucks as they pass through.
“Comin’ in, comin’ out,” his voice booms over the traffic as people and vehicles weave through the tricky corner. “Hello, sir. On your right. Through, through. Heads up! Comin’ in, comin’ in.”
Spruell has been working as the gate guard at Fisher Lumber since 1997. He plans to stay with the Santa Monica company until it shuts down next March. He is in charge of directing traffic, watching for thievery and making sure that there are no accidents or injuries in the bustling lumber yard.
“To the faint of heart, he seems like the crazy man out there at the end of the yard,” described one co-worker of Spruell, “but we all assure (customers) he’s on the payroll.”
Now 56, the Kentucky native moved to the Santa Monica-West Los Angeles area in 1965. After almost four years in the military, Spruell followed a path of labor intensive jobs to Fisher Lumber. While he was in the Air Force, Spruell counted money and made sure his Port Austin, Mich. base was fed.
The Washington-based lumber firm Weyerhaeuser Company sold the land out from under Fisher Lumber. The future of the property remains unclear. City Hall officials have expressed interest in the property, though it’s unlcear what they would do with the land.
Twice divorced, Spruell lives on the border of Santa Monica and West Los Angeles. He has no children.
Here, the Daily Press sat down with the gate guard to ask about his experiences in the yard and his philosophy on life.
What do you say to direct traffic? What do you think you’re known for?
“Comin’ in, comin’ out (laughs). All that I’m trying to do is make sure nobody gets hurt when they walk out the door. I try to keep them alert, make sure everything that’s coming is visible. That’s it (laughs). Just yelling. I’m not ‘el presidente,’ nothing like that. I’m just a regular old guy. That’s all.” (Three co-workers break in:) “It’s his catch phrases: ‘Comin’ in, comin’ out.’ Don’t forget ‘heads up.’ And he prevents about a million wrecks a day, because he directs these big trucks out of that small parking lot. He prevents people from getting run over. He’s even got little followers.” (Spruell laughs and resumes:) “Two little kids. I’ve got a couple of kids that tell their father, ‘we wanna see that guy that talks loud.’ Cute little kids. To me, they’re like my own little gang, you know? Little bitty guys like this (holds his hand about waist high) say ‘oh where’s the guy? Oh there he is. Oh, how you doin’?”
How do you please people? “I say good morning, you know, smile to their face, try to ask about the kids, the dogs, whatever pets they have, make them feel good. My thing mainly is to make them feel good... If I can say ‘good morning. Oh, wow, you’re not smiling today. Well, how are you doing? How’s your kids? How’s your cat? How’s your mother? How’s your father? I don’t even know your mother.’ Little normal stuff like that. So you feel better.
“Most people when you see them in the morning, they have a grumpy face, (because) they haven’t had their coffee yet, maybe their wife didn’t talk to them or whatever. But, if I can get a smile out of you, to me that makes your day better too. I’m like therapy. People say, ‘well, I feel bad.’ I say, well explain to me how you feel bad. Look around the world now. Look at Iran. Look at Pakistan. Look at Libya, and all these other third world countries where somebody’s jacking them up every day. Not here in the U.S. You might get a couple traffic tickets or something like that. Some police officer might go off on you sometime. But that’s not bad. Over there, people wake up and somebody’s tearing their door down.
“But people are always complaining. Why complain? Enjoy what you got now. In 12 more hours you might not have that to enjoy. The way we have these strange people running around and stuff, you know — they want to fly planes and blow things up, stuff like that, you know. That’s naughty, man, that’s naughty. Very naughty. But the human race is just the human race, that’s all. They make mistakes.”
What makes you smile in the morning?
“Just to be alive in the United States of America to me is the biggest smile in the world. To me, to wake up in the morning, knowing that you’re not going to get it, you’re not going to be dead yet, you know? To wake up is a bonus. Think about it. Somebody says ‘oh, I feel bad.’ You don’t know how bad it feels when you don’t wake up. So you can’t say you feel bad, anyway. If you’re dead you’re out of it. I’ve never been dead yet, but I’m saying, you’re alive. You’re in a great country. You’ve got a job. You’ve got people who like you. You’re around nice people.”
Why did you choose to take this job? “It’s a job, sir, just got to be working, that’s all (laughs).”
Can directing traffic in the yard be frustrating?
“Life itself is frustrating, it’s just one of the things about life you just deal with. Everything in life is going to get you anyway, so you might as well just deal with it. Just deal with it. Since 1997, no accidents have been here. Not on my watch.”
PROFILES, from page 8 COMMUNITY PROFILES What are the hazards of the job? Have people gotten close to running you over?
“A couple times. You got to be very quick, that’s all. They don’t mean it. It’s just being in the way sometimes, that’s all. You got to be nice and honorable, and treat people very well. It’s easy to do. You just got to have a smile on your face and say good morning, how you doin’? It works in any job, as long as you do it that a way. As long as you put them first, there you’ve got it in a nutshell.”
How did you end up in Santa Monica? “I moved out here in 1965. I went to the Air Force for almost four years. Got out. Sold cars for maybe a couple years. I drove for Bekins Van Lines for about eight years. A lot of hard work, cross country up in Canada. Interesting people, making a living. It was a very beautiful job. You go across country, you’re your own boss, you meet some interesting people. It was a real good job. To me, any job is good, as long as you’ve got something to do. If you ain’t got nothing to do, things get kind of cranky sometimes. From 1975 or 1974 off and on through 1994, moving furniture, driving a truck, nothing spectacular, just the old American way. Make sure you’re paying your taxes, and make sure the government is up.”
How has Santa Monica changed in the 39 years you’ve been here?
“I can remember I used to go walking on the beach at night and nobody would bother you. Now you’ve got to watch everything, keep turning around down there. It’s still a nice place though, still a nice place.”
Do you ever get celebrities in here? “You got Dom Deluise comes in, uh, what’s his name, the guy who played with Bill Cosby in ‘I Spy,’ Robert Culp, he comes in. Who else? Who was that dude? Magnum PI? The chick who played his girlfriend, she came here a couple times. What’s his name, the dude who played in the ‘Sixth Sense?’ Who is that guy? Bruce Willis. He’s cool. He’s very cool, too. Very cool.”
When do you have bad days? “I’ve had two bad days: I got married twice. And that was two bad days. And that’s about it. Everything else has been great (laughs). See, I’m bald headed. (Because of) my first wife, my hair fell out of my head. You get off work, you got to talk to the woman, you got to be very nice to them, and then say you get off at midnight, they want to talk until two o’clock in the morning. You’ve got to be back to work at four. That’ll kind of work your hair out, you know.
“The second one... she was just a woman. All women are the same. I don’t care what nobody else says. They’re all the same. I don’t care what color they are. They’re all the same. I don’t care if they speak German, French, or whatever. They are all the same. Women are women. You got to experience what I’m saying. It’s just one of those things that you find in life that you don’t forget. I can’t explain it about life. It’s just one of those things you will encounter, and you’ll say ‘oh, this crazy old dude was telling about this (laughs).
“Men are stupid. I ain’t going to lie about that. Men are very stupid. If they realize that most women... you just treat them nice and consider them, it works out very nice. But men are stupid. We are. A lot of guys don’t admit it, but we are. To me, the smartest thing in the world is a woman. I won’t talk a lot about that, but they are very smart. Oh, they might talk a lot. Women talk. They talk every day, same time and same thing. What use is that? But they do, every day. Men, ‘good morning, how you doin’’ that’s it.”
What do you think about Fisher Lumber closing? “You’ve got a bunch of nice people that work here, you know. That means everyone’s got to get a new job. We’ve got some good customers that come here that have been coming here since it’s been open. They’re going to hate it when we shut it down. I feel for those elderly people, especially. They’ve been coming here all their life and now they’ve got to do something different. And they love coming here.”
What are you going to do when they close down? “Well to be honest with you, I’m still a military guy, because I go day by day. In the service you went day by day because you don’t know if you’re going to be there tomorrow or not. I hope there’s something better in 2005 but I haven’t gotten anything yet. I’m just waiting to see what happens. I’m here with the company until we close down and then I go find something else to do, that’s all.”
When do you think you’ll retire? “Never. You got to at least cut grass or dig a ditch, whatever. Do something. Nine times out of 10, somebody says they say they retire today, next Friday he’s dead because he did nothing. You’ve got to do something. The body tells you you’ve got to do something. You’ve got to be moving around. If you’re not moving around, you will freeze up and die right there, you know. You’ve got to move around. Work is where I move.”
Do you think people appreciate what you do? “Every last one of them. Every last one of them. Yes, sir.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 5, 2004. Read the original PDF.