We celebrate our founder JJ Williams birthday this week! JJ was born on March 26, 1883 and later established our company in Orlando is 1920. I will be sharing some thoughts about JJ at
our Founder's Day lunch on Tuesday but in the meantime please read some comments from Alan Williams about JJ.
Born in 1883, he would have been 37 when he decided to stop being a farmer in north Georgia and move with his wife Lullabell and 2 kids to this place everyone was talking about- Orlando-where there were fortunes to be made building things. He came here in The Roaring 20s...which
in just a few years lead to the Great Depression, which would have happened when he was about 40. Orlando "stopped" (try finding a house today built between 1928 and 1940 inOrlando; there aren't many) so he headed out west without the family to help build the Hoover Dam (probably as a carpenter). I don't know if he was there for a week, a year, or for the duration of construction. I DO know that he would NOT have been flying home every 2 weeks to visit the family. He would have been in his late 50s when he was building houses in College Park, walking to and from the jobsite with his tool box on his shoulder (cars would have been a luxury about then). He would have been about 65 (and still building) when Ralph and Randall came home from the war. He would have been in his 80s when I was digging footings on my first construction project, so it's obvious that never had any first hand contact with him as a "boss."
More about JJ at our Founder's Day lunch!
No comments:
Post a Comment