By Sylvia L. Lovely,Guest columnist

When Labor Day comes around, I often think of my father and Foreman Gudgeon. I grew up with stories of Gudgeon.

He was my dad’s boss in a significant portion of the years that he worked as a drill press operator for National Cash Register. Foreman was his job title, not his first name – and I have no idea as to his fate. But I do know he played a major role in my father’s life – and my own, for that matter.

Still, one can take things for granted when recalling the impact of certain people. But a few years ago, when my mother lay on her deathbed, I heard the stories once again – and this time they played loud and poignant.

I heard about my parents leaving their beloved Kentucky for Dayton, Ohio, where my father went to work for NCF. I heard how they stayed just long enough for my brother to be born at Grand View Hospital before returning to Kentucky to make a go of farming a small hilly plot of land near a small hilly town called Frenchburg. It didn’t work out.

I never asked, but I suspect it had something to do with me being born – one more mouth to feed, a kid to clothe and send to school, the latter being my most abiding memory of my childhood. My parents might have had only eighth-grade educations, but it was going to be different for me and my brother. And, indeed, it was. They headed back to Dayton with all they had – an old truck, a ribbon of road in front of them and, as mother would call it, a ton of gumption.

One story in particular stands out, and it centers on Mr. Gudgeon.

Upon returning to Dayton, my father set out to reclaim his old job. He told me of heading for the personnel office and being told there were no openings – “Sorry, Mr. Leach,” they said. As he relived a defining moment in his life, my father was breathless describing how he didn’t walk, but ran, all the way to the building where he knew he would find Gudgeon.

“Gudgeon!” he implored, “I have to have my job back!”

No doubt he explained the dire straits he was in, and having mouths to feed. Gudgeon didn’t hesitate. In rather blasé fashion, he simply told my dad to report for work that very night.

For the next 25 years, my father would work on the line – refusing promotions to the job of foreman himself. “I don’t want to boss my friends,” he would say, a stance I found puzzling even as a child. Today, I understand much better.

Recently, I visited Dayton and looked upon that hallowed ground of NCR. I had heard that buildings that once littered the landscape like a particularly nondescript college campus were all torn down. I had just heard the president of the University of Dayton describing the purchase of the land and of working with the community to plan its future.

How interesting change is – not bad, necessarily, just inevitable.

I wondered what the land would become. And I wondered when the last of us would be gone who once waited in anticipation each Christmas to ride into the big city of Dayton to see the mammoth Christmas display. Maybe it wasn’t so mammoth, but I prefer to remember it as such.

I believe my life story is a charmed one. I’m not famous or rich, but I was given a gift passed on from NCR to Gudgeon and to my parents. It was the gift of opportunity.

I doubt if my father getting his job back through sheer pleading with his foreman could be repeated today. His great fortune of claiming his spot in the middle class was peculiar to the time, when education wasn’t as much a prerequisite to finding good work as it is today. He was raised poor, with no running water or plumbing and barely able to get shoes even in the winter. He was a product of a beautiful, but unforgiving, Appalachia.

And yet, he was able to seize – by luck or willpower – the advantage of being one of a vast number of workers who populated the great factories strewn across the great cities of the north like Dayton, Cleveland, Detroit, and Gary. Even the downtowns of those great places were magical and bustling.

And then the bust! After decades, his job was suddenly gone. There was nothing a man in his mid-50s with limited education could do at that point, save for what he wound up doing. My parents moved home to Lexington to care for my boys. For the next 20 years, that was their job. They could not have been more qualified.

I looked at the empty land where my father once toiled. Standing there at the former NCR site, I looked around and saw in the field a reflection of the hopes and dreams my father brought to this place. I could see him running across the field, fueled by desperation and determination, to seek out Gudgeon. And I recall how, today, maybe we need to recapture the kind of concern and help the foreman gave to my father so freely and off-handedly.

On Labor Day, as we look at a world where the demands on us seem only to grow in number and intensity, finding community and connection becomes all the more important. That was what was truly reflected in the story my mother repeated to me that day. That was the lesson perhaps we all should heed.

Sylvia L. Lovely is president of the NewCities Foundation, executive director of the Kentucky League of Cities, and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Kentucky Martin School of Public Policy. For more information visit www.newcities.org.