Thomas Ware can draw direct parallels between his careers with the U.S. Navy, Bryan Foods and Starkville Utilities.
Measurement is key in working with spices, as he did at Bryan Foods, and with pipes, as he did on the U.S.S. Sierra and currently does at the Starkville Wastewater Plant. He enjoys working with his hands, and his time in the military taught him to value teamwork and leadership, he said.
“One constant for me was pride and professionalism,” Ware said. “You want to do the job right and do it right the first time, and that’s something the Navy taught you regardless of what you were doing.”
Ware is a Starkville native from a military family, though he is the only one of his relatives to have served in the Navy, and he retired as a petty officer second class, he said. He spent three years on active duty and 18 and a half on active reserve. He enlisted in 1979 when he was still in high school and went off to boot camp in Orlando, Florida the following year. He spent his first 15 months of active duty on the U.S.S. Orion stationed at La Maddalena, an island off the west coast of Italy, and the remainder on the Sierra off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina.
Both ships were meant to repair other ships, not to engage in combat, and Ware’s job on the Orion was to remove and reinstall the engine rigging.
“I’m six feet tall, and to walk through a hatch on a submarine, you’ve got to duck and lift your legs at the same time, so it was really, really tight,” he said.
He realized he preferred to work in hub maintenance, a more hands-on role that involved welding and pipe fitting, so that was his job on the Sierra and in the Navy Reserve.
But while he enjoyed his second job more, his first one gave him the opportunity to travel around the Mediterranean. The Navy would take the 500 men on the Orion to ports of call in Athens, Greece; Malaga, Spain; Tunis, Tunisia and several Italian cities.
“The military in general is good at trying to create an atmosphere for the bachelors, people who don’t have a family, to give them something to do so they won’t be just stuck on the ship or in the barracks all the time,” Ware said.
His favorite location was Genoa, Italy, because the locals were so friendly to him and his fellow servicemen, he said.
“We couldn’t speak Italian, but they were trying to communicate with us, and the people were so nice,” Ware said. “We went out and got us some vino and some ham and some panini bread and went to the park and had a really good time.”
He was able to visit a few places in Europe again during his time stationed in South Carolina, he said, and the Sierra was sent on a mission to the middle of the Indian Ocean to support another ship going through the area.
World traveler or not, Ware said his service taught him how to be part of something bigger than himself.
“If you stay in long enough, you can hone in on your leadership skills,” he said. “The military has a unique way of teaching that. All those things correlate into how I carry myself now as a leader on my job.”
He was a crew leader at the Bryan Foods plant in West Point, where he worked for 20 years until it closed in 2007, and he is chief wastewater operator at Starkville Utilities now. He believes in treating everyone on a team the same way and always having someone qualified available to step up when necessary, he said.
“If somebody’s out, the wheel doesn’t quit turning,” Ware said.
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