HAMILTON — A crew of five workers gets paid to clean up the grounds at the 265-acre Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, but volunteer Bill Stevens, 65, is in charge of a bigger job. The retired machinist climbs the 60-plus sculptures, some of them massive. Stevens washes and waxes them, refreshes their paint and welds the sculptures back together. He’s been at it since March, documenting the fix-ups for probably the first time since the park opened 15 years ago.

He’s sometimes called upon to do other dirty work, too. Like the time a couple of park visitors reported something that fell from the sky on the bronze sculpture of park founder Harry Wilks.“There was bird poop on Harry’s head,” Stevens said. “So I went over, and I cleaned it off.”

Stevens calls this his “dream job.” He recently took a break from cleaning up the Cincinnati Story sculpture that once sat in front of the Chiquita Building in downtown Cincinnati to talk to The Enquirer’s Sheila McLaughlin.

QUESTION: What led you to Pyramid Hill?

ANSWER: It was a story in The Enquirer when the park opened. I lived in Cincinnati. I thought, “That is really cool.” I lived at that time in Over-the-Rhine, and I spent a lot of time at Kaldi’s (a neighborhood coffee house). The bartender there said, “You need to meet my sister who lives in Hamilton.” She came down, and we met and we started a romance and decided to get married. So I moved up here. That was in 1998, and over the years I’ve had a membership up here. I’ve probably spent more time in the park here than most anybody else.

Q: How did you get involved with maintaining the sculptures?

A: I had come up a couple years ago and volunteered. I was working with the maintenance crew. We were down by the wedding chapel raking leaves. It darn near killed me. I left that day and was like, “I can’t do this.” Come to find out it was a good thing I had done that because I found out I had a heart condition.

This year, I had been up at the visitor center and saw a little (sign) that said “Need Docents.” I figured that would be really good. Someone (came) up to give a little talk about care of the sculptures, a guy that worked with the City of Sculpture. Me and one other person showed up for the talk. I didn’t want to work in an office. I wanted to work outside.

Q: What does the job involve?

A: With the exception of Abracadabra (a massive orange sculpture by Alexander Liberman) and the huge piece by the visitor center, I’ve crawled all over every piece in the park. The first thing I did, I took care of all the bronzes, just cleaning them real well and waxing them to protect them.

Q: What is your art background?

A: I was always drawing something. I wanted to be an artist but I got out of (Withrow High) school and became a machinist. After my second wife died, I moved from Cheviot to Over-the-Rhine. I got a studio down there before any development had happened on Main Street. I had that studio for five or six years. I painted. I did photography. I did some sculpting. I’d been involved with one of the galleries on Main Street and had done curating for them.

Q: Are there any sculptures you don’t particularly care for at the park?

A: Romeo and Juliet (by Sam McKinney). There’s just a little too much angst in it for me. (A description of the sculpture from the International Sculpture Center calls it “a contemporary depiction of Romeo and Juliet in a dream state of love, appearing as if to float, divided by a black granite monolith, metaphor for the families’ contentions and the death that Romeo and Juliet ultimately share.”)