DE PERE, Wis. — William Schweitzer likes old things.
He owns a vintage truck and, for the past summer, he worked as a lock tender on the Fox River.
“It’s a really unique job and it’s a lot of fun interacting with the boaters,” Schweitzer said. “Most jobs where you work in a customer-facing role you have deal with angry customers. I don’t think I’ve ever had to deal with an angry boater. People out boating are having fun.”
The 17 hand-operated locks trace their history to the mid-1800s. They’re still relevant today, helping predominately recreational vessels make their way up and down 39 miles of the Fox River, from Green Bay to Menasha. Boaters pay a fee to use the locks.
While the locks look hefty with lots of iron, Schweitzer said they’re not overly arduous to operate.
“The way this lock is designed is very ingenious. It’s a very ingenious piece of engineering,” he said. “It’s not all about brute force, it’s about smart and using gravity. There’s so much gravity and natural forces that go into the way this lock operates.”
Jeremy Cords, the operations manager for the Fox River Navigational System Authority, said the system is one-of-a-kind.
“It’s so unique,” he said. There’s no place else you can go — that I’m aware of — in the nation and have a system like this that’s this pristine and still in a hand-operated condition.”
The locks operate seasonally from the late spring through the early fall.
So who is actually running the locks?
“Anybody can be a lock tender if you’re strong enough to push the tripod around in a circle 12 or 13 times,” Cords said. “After training, we show you how to throw the valves on the doors to let the water out and, of course, you need to be able to communicate with people.”
That includes telling them about the history of the system, something Schweitzer said he’s aware of while he’s on the job.
“Operating all the old equipment is a lot of fun. It makes you feel like you’re part of the past interacting with tradition, something that’s much older and bigger than us,” he said. “I think of the lock tenders that have walked these same walkways and turned these same turnstiles that I am literally hundreds of years ago.”
