TRADE TALK:
RON CALHOUN UNION PIPEFITTER Ron Calhoun is a proud union pipefitter, but he didn’t always know much about the trades. The West Side native dreamt of becoming an attorney and a federal agent, and he knew that meant he would have to go to college.
After graduating from Lincoln Park High School, he went on to Triton College. Of his parents’ three sons, Calhoun says he caused the least amount of trouble, but he admits that he didn’t always apply himself in high school. At Triton, he was able to turn things around and surprised everyone when he made the Dean’s List in his first year. He took his good grades to Southern Illinois University in search of a typical college campus experience, but all of the freedom in Carbondale caused his grades to take a dip. “I went to SIU and had a ball,” he said. He went back again the following year and got the same result. So Calhoun made the difficult decision to come home and get a job. Back in Chicago, Calhoun spent five years in retail sales at Foot Action before heading to California to work with his cousin, an HVAC technician for a company that produced water chillers for the printing press industry. It was Calhoun’s first exposure to the trades, so he worked closely with his cousin. “It was like an apprenticeship because he taught me on the job,” he says. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was doing non-union pipefitting.” One year later, Calhoun was laid-off, and he made his way back to Chicago one more time.
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