At 5:30 p.m. every workday, when most UGA employees are on their way home, Wylie Powers begins his shift, just as he has done nearly every day since 1978.And, just as he has done for almost 30 years, the 85-year-old custodian spends his nights cleaning Caldwell Hall until 2 a.m.
“The university is the longest job I’ve stayed on,” he said. “I’ve laid bricks and all that stuff. I couldn’t tell you every job I’ve worked on. I wouldn’t know.”
Powers admitted that others might not understand why he still works at his age, and at such late hours.
“There’s a lot of people worrying about me working,” he said. “One reason I work is I’ve been trained to work. When it’s my time to retire, I’ll retire.”
His work training began early: at 10 or 12 years of age, he was already working alongside his four siblings on the farm where his family sharecropped in Arnoldsville.
“I did what I was told to do-pick cotton and everything else,” he recalled.
In the meantime, he attended a “little country school,” where he met his future bride, Margery Powers. At 20, Powers was drafted into World War II, which sent him first to England-“it looked old-timey to me,” he said.
“I had never been to a place like that before”-and then France and Germany.
“We were in the second wave that hit the beach at Normandy,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about that. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
But he does talk about it, just a little: he mentions the fox holes he had to dig in the wet and cold, and-in a matter-of-fact tone-that some days he thinks about the war, and sometimes he doesn’t. Simple as that.
Powers keeps up with current events in Iraq, and is clearly pained when relating the news reports he hears on each new wave of deaths.
“Some people just don’t know what a soldier goes through, especially during war time,” he said.
After the war, he moved to Atlanta and then Athens to learn brick masonry. But, “we didn’t have much transportation and there were no jobs-you had to go so far to get a job,” he said.
“I started back to farming, I did.”
By the late 1950s, he had married Margery, and they had three young children: Sheila, Shirley and Kenny.
Powers grew cotton, corn, soybeans, wheat and vegetables.
“I wasn’t sitting around,” he said.
When he first took the custodial job at UGA to help support his children’s education, he kept farming for years, though now he limits himself to a mere garden.
Co-workers and supervisors are quick to praise Powers for his work ethic.
“He’s a good employee,” said Louise Huff, building service foreman for North Campus. “He’s never out sick. You can’t get him to stay out of work. He loves his job.”
Robert Jennings, night foreman in the psychology/journalism building, has worked with Powers for about 20 years.
“Mr. Powers is one of the most honest men who walk the Earth,” Jennings said. He still recalls Christmas 16 years ago when he lost his wallet at work, and Powers found and returned it to him.
Jennings tried to give Powers a reward, “and he wouldn’t take it,” he said. “I always tease him about it.
“He’s very dependable,” he added.
