HOLLYWOOD — Cornelius Boothe could stop a hand-operated elevator level with the floor to within the thickness of a coin, on the first try, without looking, and he did it thousands of times a day for forty-six years.
Mr. Boothe, one of the last full-time manual elevator operators at a historic downtown Los Angeles hotel, died August 4 at his home in Hollywood. He was 94. His daughter said he died of natural causes, in the neighborhood where he had lived since 1951.
The elevators he ran were the old kind, driven by a brass control lever that a person had to feel rather than watch — easing it toward center as the car neared a floor, judging the stop by the sound of the motor and the give of the cable. It was skilled work that looked like standing still. Boothe stood in a mahogany car in a pressed uniform, opened and closed the gate by hand, called the floors, and delivered guests to their rooms with a steadiness the automatic elevators that eventually replaced him never quite matched.
He knew the building’s regulars, their floors and their moods, and he ran the car as a kind of moving lobby. “People told Corny things they wouldn’t tell the front desk,” said Alvin Truax, a retired bellman who worked alongside him for decades. “You had him to yourself for thirty seconds between floors. He heard every piece of news in that hotel first, and he never repeated a word of it. That’s why they trusted him.”
Cornelius Boothe was born in Beaumont, Texas, in 1931 and came west at twenty, taking the elevator job as temporary work that turned into a life. He raised a family on it, bought a small house off Franklin Avenue, and rode the streetcar and later the bus to work downtown for nearly half a century. He was proud that the job required a person, and quietly wounded when the hotel automated the last of the cars and moved him to a door-greeter’s post for his final years.
Boothe retired in the late 1990s and remained a fixture of his Hollywood block, a tall man in a hat who still, out of six decades of habit, held doors and let others step through first.
He is survived by two daughters, Yvonne Boothe of Hollywood and Carla Simms of Atlanta; a son, Cornelius Jr., of Sacramento; seven grandchildren; and eleven great-grandchildren. His wife, Odessa, died in 2011.
The hotel’s manual cars are long gone, their brass levers removed. His daughter keeps one thing from the job: the white cotton gloves he wore to run the elevator, laundered and folded in a drawer, worn a little at the right palm, where for forty-six years his hand had rested on the lever and brought the car exactly home.