Workers scale KU Campanile for once-a-decade paint job

Butch Rice figures he’s got the best job on campus at Kansas University this week. It’s more than 100 feet above Mount Oread.

Rice and fellow painter Dave Tabor are applying nine buckets of white paint to the top of KU’s Campanile, which gets a fresh coat once a decade.

“I’d like to watch a football game from up there, I’ll tell you that,” said Rice, who works for KU’s Facilities Operations. “You can see quite a ways. You come up here in the morning and see all the fog. It’s a pretty nice view up there.”

Rice and Tabor started the project last week and expect to be done by today. They had to scrape the old paint off the 25-foot-tall metal projections, prime them and apply two coats of paint. They’re also painting the guardrail around the outside of the structure.

“It’s just maintenance painting,” Tabor said. “It’s been 10 years since it’s been painted last, so it’s ready for it again.”

The painters use a 100-foot rope to hoist their equipment to the top. They leave some of the bigger equipment, including an extension ladder, at the top of the bell tower during the week.

It takes four or five minutes to climb to the top. A spiral staircase takes them about three-fourths the way up — to where the carillon keyboard is — and ladders go to the top, where a hatch opens to the outdoors.

Butch Rice, of Kansas University Facilities Operations, applies a fresh coat of paint to the top of the KU Campanile. Rice, shown Thursday atop the KU landmark, expects the paint job, which began last week, to be finished today.

Tabor and Rice use a harness attached to a guardrail to keep from taking a 100-foot plunge.

“Sometimes you hang over the edge, and you feel it a little bit,” he said.

Rice said he could see most of the landmarks in the region from atop the tower, including the Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant, Wells Overlook, Clinton Lake and Midland Junction.

He said he floated the idea of painting the top of the tower crimson and blue, but university officials declined to change the white, because the Campanile is a memorial. The tower was erected in 1950 and 1951 to honor the students who died in World War II.

“It’s the best (job) I’ve done here so far,” said Rice, who has worked at KU eight years. “But it’s always fun working at the fieldhouse, home of the Jayhawks.”