was sandwiched in between two girls. If I did anything against my older sister, she’d beat me up and if I did anything against my younger sister, my mom would beat me up. So I kind of had to walk a tight line there.

Growing up, my father had problems with alcohol and my mother was kind of the mainstay that held us together. She didn’t drink, so she held everything together. She worked—she worked hard all her life.

She just instilled the value of work in our lives and the fact that you don’t get something for nothing. You just have to work for it.

That was what my mother taught me as I was growing up—that there is nothing anybody can’t do if they just apply themselves. Just don’t do it unless you feel that you’ve done it right, or tried to do it right. Don’t wait for somebody else to figure it out for you. Go ahead and get in there and see if you can’t make it work yourself.

I just do the best I can. I mean I’m going to fail sometimes, but just try to not make it a total failure and learn from that and make it work next time. I try to do my best and if it was up to someone else’s standards or below or beyond, then it was the best I could do. So that’s just what I strive to do.

There is new technology, but still one man’s got to do one job. It might have a different way of getting there and different tools to do it with, but it’s still a certain task that somebody has to do. You know, there are different types of materials and everything, but it’s still a process.

Do what’s right, knowing, that in the end, that’s what’s going to prevail. You know it’s just like if you tighten a screw. I mean, you know when it’s as tight as you can get it, you know when you’ve done the best you can.

Stories from the Field