Seventeen years ago, just before his 18th birthday, Frank Williams had an epiphany that changed his life.
“I wanted to just hang out in the streets with my friends — or I thought they were my friends,” Williams recalls. He had already dropped out of high school. “I had other things I wanted to do at that time, and school was getting in the way of those things."
But he says seeing several friends die and “go in and out of prison” started to steer him toward alternatives. “I realized I was probably going to end up going to jail or the cemetery,” he says.
One night during that period of reflection, a commercial for Job Corps came on TV. Williams hadn’t yet turned 18 so he had to get his mother’s permission, and he remembers her being delighted to accompany him there to sign up.
Teaching young men and women on a college campus is a far cry from the life he was leading in Cleveland when he entered the Cincinnati program as an unemployed high school dropout without even a driver’s license.
“I didn’t even know what carpentry was,” Williams remarks. “I thought it was laying down carpet.”
