Jeff Kramer and friends were on a mission — for better or worse, they made it their goal to see all of the steam tunnels under the university before graduation day.
"It was like a quest in many ways," says the 2004 electrical engineering grad, who in the fall of 2017 became a technical advisor at Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc. after three-plus years at Microsoft. "We had to seek the old man who drew a map in the 1960s who worked at the Grainger Library. He gave us a photocopy of his hand-drawn map to take along.
"There was peril — not only from broken steam pipes that would cut or burn, the asbestos or the heat, but also from the sleepless librarian who caught us in the basement of the main campus library and called the police.
"There were discoveries — the Postal Room, where there were notes and letters reaching back to the 1920s, the racks for hanging police riot gear, the ancient graffiti from teams of students in the '30’s.
"For our small band of folks, it was an irresistible adventure."
