Laurel Locksmith Uses Job to Take Mind off Academia

The 63-year old man behind the counter at Murray Lock and Security on Main Street promises he gets plenty of sleep.

Desmond Michael Coverley said he’s not worn out from teaching five classes this semester in the allied health department at Howard University in Washington, D.C., the school from which he received his Ph.D. If he was exhausted, spending his afternoons in Laurel as a locksmith—where he has worked for “several years” would wipe away any stress, he said.

“It’s a kind of a break to get your mind off the academia, and go into doing things with your hands,” Coverley said. “Which I love to do.”

He’s not exhausted from writing four chapters of a book that he said would examine global warming and other changes in climate and their relationship to Biblical texts.

He has plenty of time to serve as the president of the National Society of Allied Health, and he’s certainly not too tired to go home and play his guitar or piano to unwind.

No, Coverley said he’s doing just fine and gets plenty of time left in each day to get some sleep, thank you– even if his math doesn’t quite add up.

“I do sleep. I listen to country western and watch western movies,” he said, shrugging off any suggestion that he doesn’t know how to relax. “I had a lot of years, and I still feel like I need to do more.”

Coverley was born in the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, at the end of the Bahamas chain of islands.

He said one of his grandfathers was French and the other black; one grandmother was Irish, and another was Chinese and Hispanic.

“So I represent everybody,” he said with a laugh.

Coverley said he learned to be a locksmith growing up in islands.

“Most of my life I’ve been doing this,” he said. “In the islands, when you’re growing up, like in the afternoons after school, young people at night time used to go to a trade … My first trade was carpentry (and) as a result I used to build houses, I do plumbing, I do electrical.”

Coverley is also an ordained minister, he said, and founded a Christian school on his home island before moving to Maryland in 1980 with his wife. Coverley said that after working in ministry, he wanted to pursue a Ph.D. so he would have the background to write about religion from an academic perspective.

“I was always interested in a kind of writing [to] reference Christianity,” Coverley said. “More or less defending the faith.”

Coverley and his wife, Linda, who live in Silver Spring, MD, have five children: four girls and a boy.