Where Are They Now?

R ichard Reed has balanced a long career working for RayLock, Tarleton and the Texas Department of Transportation with his other passions — spending time outdoors and with his family. Now, he’s looking forward to retirement so he can travel the country with his wife.

Reed graduated from Dublin High School in 1984, and found his first job flipping through the classified ads in the newspaper. The position was at RayLoc, a company in Stephenville that manufactured components for NAPA Auto Parts such as water pumps, starters, alternators, clutches and more.

“I started out on what they called the water pump line at the time,” he said. “I worked my way up to what to call a coordinator, which was right underneath the supervisor. I would do lineups for the employees in the morning and get them going.”

He stayed on at the company for 21 years, until RayLoc shut their doors and he and to look for another job. His next position was at Tarleton’s department of housing maintenance. He’d spend most of his days fixing water leaks or other small repairs as they arose.

“It was a good job,” he said. “It was a lot of hours too, because you’re bringing in students from all over the world to bring into those housing buildings, and the parents want their houses to be good. We did a lot of work in that place.”

In 2011, after five years at Tarleton, another company started taking over the maintenance for the university, so Reed began looking for another job. “A buddy of mine worked at [the Texas Department of Transportation], and he called me and told me to apply,” Reed said. “I applied and got an interview, and then went to work on my birthday.”

Reed started as a road maintenance hand. “I would do whatever they needed me to do out on the roads,” he said.

After more than a decade with the department, he’s worked his way up to crew chief. Reed manages a crew of 11 workers. “I line everybody up in the morning and make sure that they are doing their jobs throughout the day,” he said. “Right now we are working to Steelcoat roads — Steelcoat is something you put on top of the roads to seal them. So we have to stay ahead of [the people spraying Steelcoat] and if there’s any nice failures or any bad spots in the road we go through and we fix all these spots up ahead of them and make sure the road is good enough for them to Steelcoat.”

The crew stays pretty local in the Dublin area, with the exception of natural disasters, when the state of Texas needs extra help from its workers in one area. “When they had that big flood in Houston, we went down there to help them out with cleaning up the mess that hurricane caused,” Reed said.

Reed plans to stay at the Texas Department of Transportation for another four years, and then retire. “Once I retire, me and my wife are going to buy a good traveling camper and we’re going to travel to state parks and be park hosts,” he said. “We want to travel all over, not just in Texas.”

Park hosting works on a weekly or a monthly basis, and hosts receive a free campsite in exchange for keeping the camping area clean and helping people in the park get where they need to go.

The lifestyle seems perfect for Reed, who already spends as much time out camping with his family as he possibly can. “We go out once or twice a month,” he said. “I go with my wife and my son, and we have some friends from church with kids themselves, and we’ll all book spots at parks and go stay the weekend.”

Reed and his wife Kimberly Reed have been married for 25 years. Their son Julian Rhett Reed (who goes by Rhett) is 12. Reed’s wife had cancer when she was in her 30s, leaving her unable to have children, so the Reeds adopted Rhett from an agency in Fort Worth. “He’s been such a blessing to us,” Reed said.

The Reeds live on 12 acres of land between Dublin and Stephenville. “We have a couple of cows and we have ninety-something chickens that my son takes care of,” he said. “He actually supplies the eggs to the Veldhuizen [Cheese Shop] and they sell them for him.”

Reed’s family is an important source of inspiration for him in life. “They keep me going,” he said.

To Dublin graduates, Reed offers the following advice: “If you have a dream, follow it,” he said.

Editor’s Note: This column chronicles what Dublin graduates have done since high school. If you have any suggestions for other grads, email publisher@dublincitizen. com.