Hannah Jones/Winonan
Almost every evening, the halls of the Performing Arts Center echo with the sound of squeaky wheels and jingling keys.
With class over and most of the professors gone home, the noise carries easily throughout the building as the nightly cleanup begins.
Pushing along his cart of cleaning supplies and toting his ring of heavy, clinking keys, a gray-haired man in a sweatshirt, baseball cap and jeans moves with a quick, jaunty step. Every now and then, he drowns out the racket of his equipment with a loud greeting and rich, hearty guffaw. His nametag reads “William Koutsky,” but nobody calls him that.
“Bill!” exclaims communication studies professor Daniel Lintin, approaching. The other man smiles and momentarily abandons his cart to return Lintin’s salutation with interest. After a good laugh and a wave, Bill is off again, continuing his regular schedule cleaning and maintaining the Performing Arts Center.
This conversation repeats itself with every student, faculty member and staff member Bill comes by; he knows every single one of them.
Bill Koutsky has been working as a custodian in the Performing Arts Center for eleven or twelve years, now. During the course of that time, he has befriended nearly every student that has come through the doors. Odds are, even if you don’t know Bill’s name, he already knows yours.
“He’s just one of those people you feel you’ve always known,” said Kara Eggers, recent Winona State graduate.
“He knows everybody, and where they’re from,” said current junior Olivia Wulf.
At the time she met Bill, she hadn’t yet chosen her minor, and Bill playfully badgered her every time he saw her until finally she declared one in theater. Today he still smiles with pride and jokingly takes credit for the decision.
Bill has been working since he was 16. Through high school and college, he managed to hold down three part time jobs at once, one of them working for a dollar an hour at McDonald’s.
In 1975, he graduated with a degree in communication studies from Winona State.
One day, while working in the restaurant, Bill looked out the window and saw a radio station playing a show just outside. He told his coworkers then that soon he would be doing that. He remembers how his coworkers rolled their eyes and told him he was crazy.
He remembers even better how, the following summer, he proved them wrong. That year, it was Bill looking in on McDonald’s from the outside.
“I showed them,” he recalls, grinning. That was the beginning of Bill’s 30-year career in radio.
Bill worked for many years at the then-new “Home 101” station, where his big personality and unbridled sense of humor served him well.
“I had the freedom to do what I wanted to do—I could bring in anyone I wanted,” he says.
The following years, however, brought turbulent times for the radio station as it messily changed hands and owners, continually being bought and sold. All the while, from owner to owner, Bill miraculously stayed on.
However, the negotiations and constant shifts were draining, and soon left the job far less fun that it had been.
Bill, who up until that point had enjoyed every job he ever had, has a philosophy on work: “The day I say, ‘Oh, hell, I have to go to work today,’ it’s time to get out,” he says. He gave the station two weeks’ notice and retired from radio.
On one Friday afternoon after quitting the radio job, Bill was walking by Winona State when he ran into facilities manager Dick Lande. He asked Lande if there were any openings at Winona State. Lande responded that the only positions were a few possible part-time jobs.
Bill immediately inquired after them.
Lande, however, warned Bill that the jobs were only 40 hours a week, and had few benefits, to say nothing of insurance coverage.
Bill merely shrugged. “I said, ‘Eh, I’ll take a chance!’“
According to Bill, the other applicants had more experience than he did, but Lande took a chance on him.
Custodial work is a very different business from radio, but Bill was happy to have it.
“I just wanted to do something different,” he said.
But to Bill, being a custodian in the Performing Arts Center is about much more than just cleaning and maintaining the building.
“I think this job is about the relationships,” he said, “with the students, the parents, and the people who come in.”
“If they’re down about something,” he said of the students, “if I can say something, stupid or not, to brighten their day, cheer them up, I’ve done my job.”
“If he senses that you’re in a bad mood, it’s his goal to make sure you have a better one,” said Jaye Clarke, a current student in the theater department. Clarke recalled that during her work on Winona State’s production of the one-act play, “Sylvia,” Bill was her biggest cheerleader. “He still tells me he brags about me,” said Clarke.
“He makes everyone feel like a star,” said Eggers.
“He brightens up the Performing Arts Center,” said Wulf.
Bill’s support and generosity of Winona State’s students goes beyond even his sunny attitude and attentiveness. He also provides a theater/dance minor scholarship in honor of his uncle, also called William Koutsky, who was a Teaching Christain Brother with a passion for the arts.
Bill said, in a happy coincidence, every student who has ever received the scholarship has been someone he’s known. Although, that Bill knows these scholarship recipients out of the vast body of students who adore him is not entirely surprising.
Bill still keeps his resolution to only continue to work as long as it is enjoyable. When he was hired at Winona State, he was told he could stay on for about ten years. Eleven to twelve years later, and Bill still favors everyone who passes by with a smile and a corny joke, and show no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Contact Hannah at [email protected]
