I was born in the same upstairs north bedroom in November of 1961. I went to Holmes County Joint Vocational School, the regional career-tech high school for our county, from 1975 to 1979. I studied welding and metal fabrication. I had been the kind of kid who took apart anything mechanical at age eight and put it back together by twelve. I had wanted to be a welder from the time I was four. I had decided this on the back porch of my grandfather’s house in 1965, when Reuben had let me hold his striker for him as he repaired a wagon hitch. The repair had been the first piece of metalwork I had ever watched. The first piece of metalwork had been my career path. I graduated from the vocational program in 1979 with American Welding Society certifications in shielded metal arc, gas metal arc, and gas tungsten arc welding. I took a job at a small Holmes County structural-steel fabrication shop in 1980. I worked at the shop for eight years. I returned to my old vocational school as a teaching assistant in 1988 and was promoted to lead welding instructor in 1989. I taught welding and metal fabrication at Holmes County Joint Vocational School for thirty consecutive years. I retired in May of 2019 at the age of fifty-seven.
I taught approximately two thousand eight hundred students across the thirty years. I sent one thousand one hundred forty of them into the AWS certification system. I sent another six hundred eighty into structural-steel and pipe-fitting apprenticeship programs across northeast Ohio. I sent another two hundred twenty into engineering bachelor’s programs at the University of Akron, Ohio State University, and Youngstown State. I have been, by my own quiet count, the welding instructor whose students built more of the infrastructure of central and northeast Ohio across the past thirty years than any other single career-tech instructor in the region. The retired Killbuck Valley structural engineer who ran the Holmes County Manufacturing Association told me at my retirement dinner in 2019 that every bridge in this county since 1995 has at least one weld made by one of your students. I had said I hoped that was a compliment. He had said it was the only compliment that mattered.
My wife, Hazel Galloway, and I had been married since 1983. We had met at the Killbuck Mennonite Church youth group in 1979. She had been seventeen. I had been seventeen. We had been married four years later, the autumn after I returned from a year of welding work in Cleveland that had taught me I did not want to live in Cleveland. Hazel had been a retired nursing-home administrator for the past nine years. She had worked at the Walnut Hills Retirement Community in Berlin for thirty-one years. She retired in 2016. She is sixty-two. She is the quiet center of every room she has ever stood in. We have one son. Wesley Galloway is thirty-six. He is a senior civil engineer at the Ohio Department of Transportation district office in Akron, where he has worked since his graduation from the University of Akron in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. Wesley specializes in roadside infrastructure design. Guardrails. Bollards. Traffic-control devices. Right-of-way safety installations. He is married to a high-school chemistry teacher named Saskia Witford Brewster. They have two daughters. The girls are nine and six. They visit the farm every other Sunday for dinner. Hazel makes pot roast.
The custom fabrication shop I run from the property is the practical infrastructure that made the response possible. The shop occupies the original 1940s small barn my father converted into his weekend tool shed in 1978. I converted it into the welding shop across 2019. The shop is forty feet by twenty-eight feet, with a concrete slab I poured myself in 2020. The shop holds my Miller Dynasty 280 multiprocess welder, a Hypertherm sixty-five-amp plasma cutter, two Lincoln 350 MIG welders, a Sherwood fourteen-by-forty metal lathe, a Bridgeport milling machine I bought used at an Amish auction in 2019, and approximately eighty-seven other small machines and tools accumulated across forty-six years of welding work. I run a small custom fabrication business from the shop. Annual revenue runs between forty-two thousand and fifty-eight thousand dollars across approximately one hundred twenty individual projects a year. The clientele is, by their own description in their referral conversations, small farms, small contractors, and small-home county tradespeople who need work that has to be right the first time. I am their first call. I am, by my own quiet bragging, the most careful welder in Holmes County. My students of thirty years are the second through the forty-eighth most careful.