Bobby Towe: A True Craftsman

It is a little harder to write my annual thanksgiving article this year. A friend and great HVAC mechanic just died – finally losing his long running battle with cancer. His name is Bobby Towe. Bobby and his brother Bennie were a large part of what made my family’s business, Stanfield Air Systems, the type of business it was and continues to be: a place where craftsmen work for friends. Bobby’s brother, Bennie started working with dad soon after dad had opened his business. Bennie was working in a local cotton mill and was looking for a more rewarding job with better working conditions. He knew nothing about HVAC when he started with dad, but he grew to be dad’s right hand man having learned both the installation and service side of the business. Bennie had only been working with dad for about a year when he brought Bobby by. Bennie wanted his brother Bobby to have the same opportunity that he had. Bobby became the best sheet metal man around. He was a craftsman. Bobby cared about what he made, and I am certain, enjoyed creating. You may not regard plenums, transitions, and offsets as creative works of art, but Bobby treated each one he made as if it were going into an art gallery. After he retired from daily HVAC work he took up woodworking and carpentry. Not surprisingly, he became very good. He made furniture, shelves, and cabinets  - he still needed to create. He made a beautiful shelf system for my dad to hold his CD and tape collection. I always think of Bobby whenever I see it. That shelf represents how much dad meant to Bobby and how thankful he was to have the opportunity to work with dad.  This thanksgiving I am grateful to have known a true craftsman, Bobby Towe.  

Four Freedoms

I have been enjoying a thanksgiving weekend with my family. We spent a day looking at all the wonderful paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago. We saw the original Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom from Want.” I am sure you have seen it reproduced many places – a family is seated in anticipation of a thanksgiving meal and the turkey is just being placed on the table. It is one of a series of four paintings Rockwell did – each portraying an essential human freedom we often take for granted. They are Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. I realized that I enjoy these on a daily basis, but seldom stop to give thanks or even realize how privileged I am to enjoy them without a second thought. So this Black Friday I plan to take some time out from chasing after the next great deal to give thanks for the basic human freedoms I enjoy daily – and thank God I have the freedom to do it.

Thanksgiving 2011

Once again, Thanksgiving is here and I have so much to be thankful for its hard to know where to start. My family is doing well, my children are achieving and prospering, and my HVACR program has so many students that we have had to work really hard to meet their needs. All the Air Conditioning instructors at Athens Tech have really stepped up their game. Dennis Payton, Coleman Simmons, Gary Manley, Jack Parsons, Gene Smith, Bill Ely, and Kenneth Harris have done a stellar job this semester. I know that our students are fortunate to have the dedicated and talented instructors that I am fortunate to work with. We are coming to the end of our first semester since our system switched from quarters to semesters, and the transition has been smoother than expected.

I know that there are still far too many people without work and that the hard times have boosted our enrollment as people look to invest in their future. Our job as teachers is to insure that they have made a wise investment. We are preparing our students to answer the call when opportunity knocks. How many stories have you heard about someone being successful because they were in the right place at the right time? There is another part of their success that often goes unmentioned: they were prepared to answer when opportunity knocked. That is what students all across America are doing today – preparing for opportunities to come. Schools are bursting at the seams. We are planting the seeds of tomorrow’s success. I truly believe that a better educated, better trained pool of workers will propel our country into a time of prosperity in the coming years. Times will get better, opportunity will knock, and our students will be thankful that they were prepared to answer the call.