Richard Hill, 85, elevator installer, repairman

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Richard Hill

Updated: January 23, 2012 2:12AM

Not many people would find value in spare parts scattered around a job site. But Richard J. Hill knew he could use them someday for something.

The former elevator technician stockpiled hardware, wood, pipes, cables and other materials in the garage of his Algonquin home and often made use of the scraps in ways “that no one else could really imagine,” said his son Ross.

Using old elevator rails, car rims and cables, Mr. Hill once constructed a boat dolly with a pulley system to launch the family’s ski boat in and out of the Fox River. He also built a “pretty funky-looking” go-cart with elevator wheels and a lawn mower engine and later converted it to run on a discarded car battery.

Often designing playthings for his children, Mr. Hill transformed long, slender pipes, typically found inside elevator shafts, into playground equipment, including a tall “climbing pole” the kids could “shimmy up and literally sway in the top of tree branches,” said his daughter Laura.

Not all of his projects were successful, though. He once tried to create a system of tow ropes to pull the kids from their house atop a hill down to the edge of the nearby Fox River.

“It just didn’t work,” Laura Hill said. “But I remember him dreaming that up and working on it for a long time.”

On Jan. 7, Mr. Hill died at a nursing home in Hinsdale. He was 85 and had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

The youngest of three children, Mr. Hill was born on Oct. 4, 1926, in Chicago as Richard Spychalski. (He legally changed his last name to Hill in the 1960s, thinking it would be better for his kids.) His parents, of Polish descent, ran a combination hardware store/tavern on Archer Avenue near Midway Airport.

Mr. Hill enlisted in the Army after high school and trained in Utah to become a military policeman, but World War II ended just before he was to be shipped overseas. After returning to Chicago, he began his nearly 40-career in the elevator industry. A member of the International Union of Elevator Constructors Local 2, Mr. Hill installed elevators in buildings in downtown Chicago, including Loyola University and the Palmer House.

Mr. Hill also fielded emergency calls as an elevator repairman and often had to rescue people trapped in elevators at odd hours.

“It was pretty common,” said his son. “My mom would cover the phone in pillows because she didn’t want the phone ringing at all hours of the night.”

Mr. Hill married his wife, Ruth, in 1949. As a young couple, the two would go dancing at the Trianon Ballroom in Chicago, along with Mr. Hill’s buddy Edward Pontarelli, who dated and ultimately married Ruth’s sister.

“We were together all the time,” Pontarelli said. They even shared a wedding day.

Mr. Hill and his family eventually moved into Pontarelli’s old house in Algonquin in the early ’60s.

Mr. Hill loved boating on the Fox River and watching races at the Santa Fe Speedway, formerly located southwest of Chicago.

He also enjoyed nursing his Oldsmobiles to keep them running for as long as possible, sometimes for decades. Once he fixed a broken ignition by rewiring the car to have a push-button start using an old doorbell button.

He finally had to give up one of his rusted cars after the brakes went out while he was driving and he narrowly escaped a crash into the river.

Mr. Hill quit most of the do-it-yourself projects when he started showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease a decade or so ago. Even in sickness, Mr. Hill remained the happy-go-lucky man his friends and family remembered him as.

“He was over six feet tall, and they called him a gentle giant,” Pontarelli said. “He always had a smile on his face.”

Mr. Hill “was bigger than life,” said his niece, Crystal Evans. “You couldn’t help but be drawn to him.”

Aside from his two kids, Mr. Hill is also survived by his wife.

A private service will be held later in the year.

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