Kirby Williams acquired his career skill set before he even graduated from high school. Since he was young, he’d help his father fix the family car. “We didn’t believe in taking it to a mechanic,” he said.
In eighth grade he started working on a dairy, learning the ropes of farm work.
When Williams graduated from Dublin High School in 1982, he began working on Dublin-area dairies full time. He started out milking and feeding cows, and eventually moved into the breeding side.
Though he loved his work at the dairies, Williams also had an interest in being a mechanic. He’d grown up helping his father work on his car, plus his father worked at Rayloc Automotive in Stephenville.
After more than ten years working for dairies, Williams took a job at Rayloc working the night shift (it was company policy to not allow relatives to work the same shift, and his father was still on the day shift).
“I worked in receiving,” he said. “We would get junk parts in from all the Napa stores and we would have to separate it.”
Williams worked nights for a year until his father retired and he could start working days. He also developed his technical skills, learning to build alternators for imported and domestic vehicles. “I became a specialist,” he said.
The Stephenville plant closed in 2007, but Williams continued to work for the Rayloc company for another few months.
“I was in the process of looking for a job, and they actually called me and asked me if I’d be interested in going to Maryland and teaching people to build the import alternators,” he said.
Williams was in Maryland for six months, until his wife graduated college, and then moved back down to Texas. His wife’s family is from South Texas, so he moved there and took a job at Formosa Plastics, a plastic and petrochemical company, and then another job at Dow Chemical.
After a few years at the chemical plants Williams moved back to Dublin to work with some family members at their machine shop.
When his wife’s mother got sick, however, he went back down to South Texas to help take care of her. Now, Williams works in land and wildlife management.
“We have four or five big ranches that we work on,” he said.
Some are historical properties, dating back to before Texas was still part of Mexico.
“We pull trees, we spray brush, we will do some plowing, and my boss he goes up in a helicopter and flies around the property and gets head counts of deer there,” Williams said. “And we as we’re working if we see wildlife like quail or prairie chickens — because they’re trying to reinstate them back down in South Texas — I will drop a pin on a map and it’ll show the rancher what animals are on his property.”
Williams enjoys the work, and plans to stay there as long as his mother-in-law needs extra care. At some point, he hopes to move back to Dublin.
Williams and his wife Donna Williams have one child together, and Williams has six more from his previous marriage. He has 11 grandchildren.
Williams’ advice to Dublin graduates is to learn from their mistakes. “My screw ups made me change for the better,” 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.