SAMPLE PROFILE — FILM SLOT
His story is coming to the series soon.
Warehouse Years
Jerome Latimer came up in Danville, thirty miles east, raised by his mother and an uncle who drank. Nobody talked about trades at his school. You either went to college or you went to work, and he went to work.
For eight years that meant warehouses. Temp badge, twelve-hour shifts, forklift certification, layoffs every winter. At twenty-five he did the math on his life and didn't like the number.
Nobody's coming to hand you a plan. I was twenty-five before I figured that out.
The Union Hall
A guy on his loading dock had a brother in the pipefitters. Jerome drove over to the Local 149 hall in Savoy, took the aptitude test, and started an apprenticeship at twenty-six. The first year was humbling. He was the oldest first-year on every job.
Now he's a foreman running crews in the mechanical rooms under the U of I campus, steam and chilled water, work most people never see. He bought a house in east Urbana three years ago. First person in his family to own one.