Johnny Wayne Kelso

Johnny Wayne Kelso started working at Lodge in November of 1975, when he was 18 years old. He remembers the day he was hired, walking to Lodge and spotting a man he used to work for. The man asked him if he was looking for work. "I said 'yeah,' and he said 'just wait right here,'" Kelso recalls. "He went in there and talked to them, then came out and said 'If you're going to work in here, you'd better change clothes.'" And just like that, he was hired.

Kelso's first job in the foundry was loading the cupola furnace (Lodge now uses induction furnaces). "I used a pitchfork to shovel the iron and steel," he recalls. "It was a job. Most people wouldn't do it. Then they got the action arm, where you pick up all the materials with a magnet. That took a lot of work off all the men. I enjoyed that." An avid cook, Kelso's go-to piece of cast iron is the 10 inch skillet. "There's nothing I can't cook," he says. "I cook everything."

Kelso has worked at Lodge for 38 years and walks to work every day, rain or shine. He lives just a few blocks away. "I'm glad they're still going good," he says. "They treat you nice. If you get in a bind, they help you out any way they can. I really like that."

Thanks for your 38 years of hard work, Johnny!