Bob's Thought for the Week

In February of this year one of our veteran superintendents, John Hammond, announced his retirement.  John has spent the last 30 plus years building some great projects for the Williams Company!  John has built some of our biggest projects including the Home Depot Distribution Center in Baytown Texas, which at 755,000 SF was our biggest single project to date. John was also on the first Target project Williams Company did way back in 1990. Since that time, Target has become one of our most important clients.  John has probably built more Target Stores than anyone here at Williams.  Back in the day John was a road warrior, traveling to Texas, Louisiana, North and South Carolina and Virginia building both Home Depots and Targets.  In all of these remote locations John kept himself busy on his off hours by digging up old rocks, hunting for arrowheads, tromping through phosphate mines, searching for civil war relics or just being curious about his local surroundings.

John’s February retirement was short lived when we asked him if he would do just one more short project. We asked John to start the site work for the two Stetson projects in Deland.  We told him it would only be 10 to 12 weeks…and he believed us! It’s been a bit longer than that but John will officially leave this week. I met with the Stetson staff last week and they just couldn’t say enough about how John performed. Al Allen, head of facilities at Stetson, told me he arrived on site a few weeks about 6:30 AM to see how the new solar powered lights looked in the dark.  Al said, there was John, with a light on his head, pressure washing the concrete driveway before the sun came up. I know there were many times at Stetson that John had to work a half day (that’s 12 hours!) and a few Saturdays too. Through it all John kept a great attitude, kept a neat and clean site, made sure the client was happy, kept to the schedule, and had a few laughs along the way too. Stetson honored John last Friday with a lunch dedicated to him for an outstanding effort!

As much as I’ll miss the great work John has done for us for over three decades, I’ll also miss catching up with John’s latest adventure and zeal for life. I’m sure John will visit often with a new tale of some remote hole he has found that contains a 10 million year old shark’s tooth!

Godspeed my friend!