The Cowboy Window Cleaner

They call him Cowboy (By Dave Bakke): "They call me Cowboy. Cowboy the Window Cleaner,” says Robert McClure. “I can’t hardly walk down the street in this city without someone calling out, ‘Hey, Cowboy!’ ” McClure has been a fixture on those Springfield streets for about 35 years. You might not know his name, but there is a good chance you have seen him. He does windows — cleans them from one side of Springfield to the other. Forty clients or more use him. He cleans the glass at Fairhills Mall, Mel-O-Cream, Capital City Shopping Center, Henry’s Appliances, Qik-n-EZ, Fifth Street Flower Shop, doctors’ offices, dentists’ offices, Caritas Bingo Hall, and that’s only a few. Name a place. The Hilton? Yep. He washes both sides of the glass from inside the tallest building in town. “All but the 30th floor,” Cowboy says. “You can’t clean those from the inside, and it’s too dangerous for me to get out there.”

The Hilton calls every year or every other year. It takes Cowboy a month or two to clean the windows on 29 floors. The Hilton is a nice paycheck for him. Other places, not so much. But he makes up for it in volume. When he started washing windows as a student at Lanphier High School, Cowboy never thought he would still be at it today. It was Lanphier where he earned his nickname — he always wore cowboy boots to school. He says his epilepsy made it impossible for him to get hired anywhere after high school. “As soon as I put that down on the application,” Cowboy says, “it’s ‘bye-bye.’ ” Of course, that was long ago. He doesn’t fill out applications anymore. He realized that washing windows was his path. In his early years, he did The Hub and Fishman’s Sporting Goods on Washington Street and Sandy’s Drive-In on North Ninth Street. All of them are gone. “I’ve seen a lot of businesses come and go,” he says.

In the meantime, he has met the rich, the movers and shakers and the regular folks just trying to keep their business’s doors open. Developer Denny Polk? “That’s my buddy.” Mega-Realtor Charlie Robbins? “I knew him.” Hercules Gekas at the legendary Coney Island hot dog shop? “I did their windows for years.” It wasn’t long after Jack Gibson opened Gibby’s Orbits, his restaurant on South Ninth Street, that Cowboy showed up. That’s how he does it — goes to new businesses and makes his pitch. “I told him I clean my own windows,” Jack says, and Gibby’s is practically all windows. “But then he told me about his history and the epilepsy and about how he has cleaned windows all over Springfield for almost 40 years.” The result is that Jack has one less job to do, which is good because he is already the waiter, owner and janitor.

Cowboy starts working as early as 4 a.m. seven days a week. He has a few buildings to clean, and those are done early or on weekends. Because of his epilepsy, someone else has to drive him to jobs. When no one can do that, he walks. “By god, I can walk,” says Cowboy. “I’ve walked this city from one end to the other. I’ve walked it many and many a time.” “He’s a character,” says Pat O’Connor, owner of Fifth Street Flower Shop. Cowboy was born in Alabama, and Frank likes to tease him about that. Cowboy, as you can probably guess, can give as good as he gets. Cowboy says he sometimes draws a crowd when he cleans windows on a busy street. “They must love the way I swing that squeegee around,” he says. “I can wash some windows now, I’m telling you.” And what do you wash them with? “I ain’t tellin’.” Moving on, then …

There are perks to having washed Springfield’s windows for so many years. Sometimes, for example, a dentist will clean Cowboy’s teeth for free in exchange for window washing. The day he cleaned the glass at Gibby’s, Jack gave him a box of his famous mini-donuts. And there are the flowers and that bench in the park. On a warm summer’s day, in the fall, and in the snow, Robert McClure, not Cowboy the Window Cleaner mind you, but Robert McClure, finds a bench in Enos Park and he relaxes. He lights up a cigarette, and he thinks about … her. “I think about her all the time,” he says. He still can’t talk about her without being overcome with emotion. She is Bobbie Jean McClure, his wife. His late wife. “We were married 20 years, somewhere in there,” he says. Bobbie Jean was manager at Coney Island. After she died in 2002, the restaurant closed for a week. Robert still carries in his wallet a cracked and worn memorial for her that the funeral home gave him.

Robert had pictures from their wedding engraved into Bobbie Jean’s gravestone. He goes to Oak Ridge Cemetery to see it almost every day. He told me it’s nobody business if he goes 100 times a day. I am surmising from that that someone might have told him he goes there a little too much. There is a bench in Enos Park. Professionally engraved into it are the words, “In Loving Memory of Bobbie Jean McClure.” I asked him, “How did you get that put on there?” “Friends,” Robert said. Like he says, he knows a lot of people. Sometimes he knows the right ones. That includes Pat O’Connor at Fifth Street Flower Shop, the guy who teases him about being from Alabama. Every week or two, Frank manages to find an extra bouquet of flowers lying around. He gives those flowers to Robert. Robert lays them on Bobbie Jean’s grave. “I loved that woman,” he says through his tears. Still does.

When we were done talking, we walked out of Enos Park. The farther we went, the more Robert vanished and Cowboy returned. I tell you, it was like a window closing.