Coin-operated toilets make a comeback in Wichita, in an unlikely public place | Opinion

I hadn’t seen a coin-operated toilet in more than 50 years, until I recently visited the library in downtown Wichita.

They’re Baaack.

In an effort to fight vandalism and misconduct, two of the three family rest rooms at the Advanced Learning Library are now guarded by a technology invented in 1910 and seldom seen since the 1970s.

For those of you under 60, coin-operated toilets were once a common feature (and revenue stream, if you will) in public restrooms in many parts of America. Generally, the locks were situated on the door of the actual stalls inside the restroom, or on the entry door if the restroom in question was of the single-toilet variety.

Pay toilets were mostly an urban experience, so growing up in rural mining towns out west, I seldom encountered them. Cartoons and jokes about getting trapped outside a toilet without exact change were fairly common in magazines of the day, although toilet humor was basically banned from broadcast television.

By the time the TV show “WKRP in Cincinnati” did the definitive sitcom treatment in 1979 (in which an employee in the station’s carp mascot suit gets arrested after trying to slither under a stall door), pay toilets had essentially vanished from real life. For the record, Kansas banned them in 1976.

The only time I ever recall experiencing exact-change anxiety was in 1969, when we were making our more-or-less annual high-speed dash across the country to visit relatives back east. We’d stopped at an Esso station (now Exxon-Mobile) for gas somewhere in eastern Ohio or western Pennsylvania, and my dad and I both needed to make a more personal pit stop.

The modern gas station/convenience store concept with indoor restrooms hadn’t caught on yet, so service station restrooms were generally accessed from the outside of the building.

We rounded the corner of the station and my dad saw the coin lock gleaming in the sun on the restroom door. He checked his pockets and remarked “Oh for cryin’ out loud” (or words to that effect). It was back to the car, where my mother rummaged around and managed to dig up the required quarter from somewhere deep in her voluminous pocketbook.

That was the day we invented the family restroom. Mom and Sis went in first, while Dad and I guarded the door outside; then without allowing the door to close, we switched places.

So, imagine my surprise when a person I wrote about a few months ago, Karen Wild, posted a Facebook picture of the new restroom locks at the Advanced Learning Library.

They’re exactly the same as I remember them from the summer of ‘69. Same coin slot, same turn handle, same flash-chrome finish — even the same brand, Nik-O-Lock. It might make some people nostalgic for the good old days, although I can’t imagine who, or why.

I was surprised this company still even exists. I thought they went away decades ago.

Even more surprising, as I researched this, I found out you can’t buy these locks. They can only be leased directly from the company, a $500 yearly expense for two sets, according to Library Director Jaime Nix.

The only difference from the locks of my childhood is you can’t open the restroom door at the library with any of the coins in your pocket. You have to use a special token, available for free at a library service desk.

Wild is kind of sensitive to the whole library restroom experience, because in May, a security guard hassled her and another patron berated her, over taking her developmentally disabled son into the women’s room with her, which she had done for all 21 years of his life without previous incident.

As I said at the time, about the only thing that really changed is heightened sensitivity over who goes where after the Kansas Legislature passed the cynically misnamed “Women’s Bill of Rights.” The new law has nothing to do with women’s rights and is designed to punish transgender Kansans for existing by — among other demeaning and unnecessary legal provisions — requiring them to use the restrooms corresponding to their birth sex.

When Wild and her son Ellis had their issue at the library, the suggestion was they use the family restroom instead, so that’s what they do. Now that they put in the locks, Wild said, she has to hope her son holds it and doesn’t get too agitated while she obtains the token from the service desk.

And she said she feels for transgender individuals, who essentially have to “out” themselves to library staff by requesting a token for the family restroom, instead of just going where they used to go.

I can’t really blame the library staff for putting in coin locks, because they have had problems with the family restrooms.

Downtown Wichita has more than its share of, shall we say, wandering eccentric people.

And with the library being the only truly open public facility in the area, they congregate there.

Nix said custodial staff has had to close restrooms to clean up smeared-around human waste.

Also, the privacy of the family restrooms has been abused by people for everything from sponge-bathing and hair-washing to intravenous drug use. At times, as many as four unrelated adults have gone in together for interpersonal activities believed inappropriate to a library setting, Nix said.

The library staff considered just using regular locks, but couldn’t figure out how to without people stealing the keys, she said.

So Nik-O-Locks on the restroom doors are probably a rational solution to the immediate problem at the library, anachronistic and inconvenient though they may be.

But it’s just another Band-Aid on the gaping social problems that plague Wichita and Kansas.

The underlying cause of the library’s issue is there are too many people here with no place to go and nothing to do during the day. And too many of those people have untreated mental health and substance abuse issues either exacerbated or created by their circumstances.

I can’t help thinking if our government leaders would spend more of their time and energy dealing with that problem, our librarians could spend less of theirs monitoring toilets.