UF Employee's Collection Reflects Nearly A Century Of Daily College Life

May 10, 2000

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Whatever else Ed Rapp may have done in his life, his claim to immortality rests in a plastic Disney World shopping bag in Neil Faulkner’s locker.

Rapp, Faulkner believes, was a plumber in the early 1940s whose job took him into the attic of the Thomas residence hall at the University of Florida. Half a century after Rapp fixed his last leaky pipe in Thomas, Faulkner, a UF maintenance mechanic, discovered the evidence of his presence: empty soda bottles, a wax paper-covered pickle jar, two personal letters and a stack of World War II-era magazines.

“I started brushing the dust off, and there on the top was a copy of Time with Heinrich Himmler on the cover,” Faulkner said.

He added the letters and magazines to his growing collection of what some might consider mere junk. Not Faulkner. The self-described history buff regards his finds as fascinating glimpses into nearly a century of day-to-day college life.

You might call him Curator of the Castoffs.

“It’s trash to most people, but it’s treasure to me,” said Faulkner, a native of Bledlow Ridge, England, who came to the United States 17 years ago. “It’s precious. Most people would have just thrown it away.”

Faulkner, 36, began working at the university 12 years ago and immediately fell in love with his assignment: general maintenance on four of UF’s oldest buildings, now on the National Register of Historic Places. Built in 1905, Thomas is grouped with three other residence halls: Buckman, also built in 1905; Sledd, built in 1929; and Fletcher, built in 1939.

Over the years, the red-brick, gargoyle-peppered structures have seen thousands of students, visitors, maintenance workers, custodians and repairmen. In the course of tracing wiring conduits in the basement or finding a leaky spot in the attic, Faulkner regularly unearths things accidentally — sometimes deliberately — left behind.

For instance, the panty collection.

Hidden above the vaulted ceiling of a breezeway in Sledd is a chamber Faulkner had to open once to reach some electrical wiring. Lying among the dust and wood scraps was a pile of women’s undergarments. Faulkner thinks they were the spoils of some long-ago panty raid.

“I mean these things are old,” Faulkner says with a grin, “like there’s bloomers and stuff in there.” He left them undisturbed. Some items, though, he rescues. One of his favorite recent finds is a crumbling leather wallet he believes was stolen and then pitched into a dank, dirt-floor chamber in the catacomb-like basement. Though the money and owner’s identification are long gone, the wallet still holds a 1930s-vintage St. Christopher’s medal and several faded black-and-white photographs that point to the owner having been a World War II G.I.

Barely visible in one of the torn pictures is what appears to be a man in uniform, perhaps a wartime buddy. On the back is the inscription, “Paris, 44 Dec 2.”

“I wish I knew who it belonged to so I could return it,” Faulkner said. “But at least whoever it was, we know a little bit about him.”

Some left their marks for posterity quite deliberately. Take the guy who stuffed a copy of the student newspaper, The Florida Alligator, into a whiskey bottle that he then crammed into a drawer under a built-in cabinet.

Faulkner found it, pulled out the newspaper — dated May 18, 1971 — and discovered the student’s somewhat profane message to future generations scrawled on a separate piece of paper: “Congratulations, you little … , you found this bottle!”

“I think he’d probably had a bit to drink,” Faulkner said.

But some of the most unusual artifacts aren’t portable. Access to the basement, for example, is restricted to maintenance workers, but until the 1960s students had the run of it. Their legacy: several whimsical murals depicting scenes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and storybook characters such as Alice in Wonderland and Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Sharon Blansett, assistant director of UF’s Division of Housing, said Faulkner’s interest is most welcome. “A lot of us really get into it … our facilities are so rich with history,” she said.

Faulkner hopes to display at least some of his discoveries in Sledd’s common area when Buckman and Thomas halls hit their centennials in five years. Until then, he said, he’ll keep his eyes open for new relics and new places they might be hiding.

“I’m sure there are a few I haven’t been in yet,” he said, “but I plan to find them.”