RW Keys and Son - Resource Bank

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page tab CRAFTSMAN 22 22 Reconstructing the Past for the Present
For forty years, DeKalb resident Roger Keys has been painstakingly researching and restoring historical structures throughout the Chicago and northern Illinois area. His portfolio includes everything from the dwellings of billionaires to a child’s playhouse, but all of his projects receive the same attention to accuracy and detail. Roger specializes in preserving the historical character of a building while taking into account his clients’ need for 21 st -century functionality and effi ciency. It is a balancing act that has put him high on a short list of specialists who can be trusted with the fi nest gems of the region’s rich architectural tradition. Today, a short drive in almost any direction from his loft offi ce in downtown Chicago will take you past a home or other building he had a hand in restoring. By rights, though, Keys should have been a tinner— a sheet-metal worker. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all sheet-metal men, and as a kid who was clever and enjoyed working with his hands, he might have been the fourth generation in the family business. Fate, however, in the form of family illness and a foxhole promise, intervened to take Roger down a very different path. While Roger was still in grade school, his father developed a heart condition, which made it impossible for him to continue working in his trade. Roger was obviously too young to assume his father’s mantle, so his father sold the business, and the line of tinners ended. At about the same time, Roger’s maternal uncle, Jim Collins, was fi ghting for survival in the Battle of the Bulge, a bloody clash that claimed the lives of 10,000 of his fellow soldiers. Praying for deliverance, he promised that if he survived he would come home and do something meaningful for the Catholic faith in which he had been raised. That’s how Jim Collins became a painter of churches, mostly for the Chicago Catholic Archdiocese, and how the young Roger Keys soon found himself apprenticed to a very different trade from the one he was born to. Only seven years old when he started working by his uncle’s side, the young Keys took an early interest in history, color, and detail. Responsible at fi rst for mixing paint and cleaning brushes, Roger soon found himself working alongside men whose origins refl ected Chicago’s diverse immigrant population. “I was really fortunate in that I got to work with and learn from a lot of old-world craftsmen when I went to work for my uncle,” says Roger. “He would employ as many as 30 men at a time, mostly Europeans from such countries as France, Germany, Sweden, and Italy. We thought of the work we did as maintenance, but a lot of it was really museum-grade restoration. Those people were true craftsmen.” Roger learned to do much more than swing a brush during his years with Collins Decorating, Inc. He was exposed to the crafts of papering, gilding, and plastering, among other decorative trades. Most importantly, perhaps, he was introduced to the tradition of competence, innovation, and resourcefulness that characterized the best practices of the trades, in a line that reached back for centuries. He worked four days a week as a painter, but one day a week he attended Chicago’s once famous but now defunct Washburne Trade School, where he studied not only in the hall of painters, but walked the halls of the other trades. There he observed the work of carpenters, plasterers, electricians, and many other trades taught at the school. “It was a pretty amazing place,” remembers Roger. “The various halls were full of tradesmen working at their crafts. It was a huge building, and you’d see one project after another.” Roger was being groomed to step into his uncle’s shoes, but unfortunately, Jim died before the torch, or rather the brush, could be passed. Roger was about twenty CRAFTSMAN 23 page tab 23
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