VOL. 22, NO. 16	FEBRUARY 28, 1997

By Amy Callahan

Arnie Cox on a balcony in Low Library. Record Photo By Amy Callahan

ecause he is so meticulous, Arnie Cox decided to work round-the-clock for 72 hours during one particularly busy week last year.

"I worked here three days without ever going home," recalls Cox, Facilities Management's laborer for special events. Only occasional naps sustained him while he planned, set up and dismantled the seating arrangements for receptions, lectures and dinners in Low Rotunda.

This would be remarkable for any man, but Cox is 71 years old--a Columbia employee for more than four decades who is as conscientious as ever about his work.

"I didn't have to do it," he says about the three-day shift of heavy lifting. "I wanted to. I want my job done perfectly."

This is typical of the man known to out pace colleagues half his age.

"He really cares about what he does," says Marilyn Andzeski, special events supervisor for Facilities Management. "And more than that, he cares about the people who rely on his services. He sets out to make his clients happy and comfortable, and he does more than what's required."

Cox's life outside Columbia is as much a model of hard work and dedication. He was born in rural Georgia in 1925, the oldest son of a sharecropping family with 14 children. The family relocated often, finding work where they could, picking fruit or cotton in the fields.

"When you were working in a sharecropping atmosphere--where the boss supplied the work on his property--your life was not your own," he explains. And for Cox, that meant helping to support his family took priority over his schooling.

"I realized I could not compete with my schoolmates," he says, "and that meant I left school at a very early and tender age of eleven or twelve." Within a year or so, his father fell ill and Cox, barely a teenager, became the breadwinner for his family.

Cox does not have many regrets--but never receiving a formal education is one of them.

"I don't know if I would've become president of Columbia University," he says, "but I would have been on my way."

Not until 1952 would Cox return to the classroom to receive his certificate from P.S. 96 in Brooklyn.

As a young man he labored in Florida and along the eastern seacoast, receiving a draft exemption during World War II because he was working as a woodsman extracting turpentine, which was needed in the war effort.

In 1945, married and creating his own family, Cox came to New York City and began working as a janitor in the YWCA at 53rd St. and Lexington Ave. But as years passed, he needed higher wages to support his growing family. Every day at lunch he went to the employment office to find a better job. No work was available. Then one day a clerk called him over:

"I can set my watch by you," Cox recalls the clerk saying. "You must be serious. It's a shame to see you wasting time here. Have you heard of Columbia University?"

Cox told the clerk: "I've heard of it, but I've never been there."

So Cox was directed to Columbia's employment office, where again there were no openings. But the man in charge was so impressed with Cox, he told him to return the next day.

"I'll have something for you," Cox said the man promised. And so began Cox's service to Columbia in 1956. He remembers the University as a very different place. There was a grassy knoll where the law school's Greene Hall now stands, and on it a barn and fruit trees. He remembers picking apples and pears to eat with his lunch.

Cox eventually rose through the ranks at Columbia, becoming assistant to the director of facilities management from 1973 to 1981. He was also a leader in his Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn, where he served as president of the community council. He raised 10 children, among them a son who is a lawyer and a daughter who is a special agent in the F.B.I. Cox, who now lives near campus, is also an evangelist in the Riverside Church.

For now, he has no plans of retiring.

"I like what I do. I like seeing smiling faces," he says. "And I like that people appreciate what I do."