Dana Temple, the son of Ed and Betsy Temple, was born in 1969 with Spina Bifida. He was brought up in his family’s farm a few miles north of Putney Center. He still lives there with his 91 year old father Ed in the house his grandfather built in the early 1940’s. The dairy (and now cattle) farm his grandfather started in the early 1940’s was and is on 62 acres he bought. Dana still helps his father tend their herd of thirteen beef cows – Herefords and Angus - by riding his four-wheel drive ATV into the meadows. He or his dad also runs the tractor and mower, baler and rake to bring in the hay. They heat their house with a wood furnace they just installed a couple years ago; before that they burned wood which they cut and split.
When Dana was enrolled at BUHS as a student in the Occupational Therapy in the early and mid-80’s, he was fitted with leg braces so he could walk. He worked specifically with Frank Markey, the coordinator of the Occupational program at BUHS, and graduated in 1987. It was Markey who launched Dana’s working life off the farm. (When this writer was teaching English at BUHS in the early 1980’s, he wrote around 30 profiles similar to this one of students, teachers, janitors and staff for The Bratttleboro Reformer. Dana was one of them.) After high school, Dana started working at Connective Technology and then took a couple other jobs until 2004 when Home Depot surfaced in his life. He started working in their newly opened Brattleboro store in the plumbing department until the store closed in 2008. He transferred to the Home Depot Store in Keene and has been there ever since.
“They’re big on computer training. I started learning the plumbing department, I got along just fine with it and have stick with it ever since.” I asked Dana if Dale and Brad Temple, his cousins, who today run their late father Francis’s Temple Plumbing in Putney, provided him with any training He said no, he learned the subject on his own.
Dana is up at 7:00 five days a week, makes himself breakfast, packs a lunch and then heads to Keene for the day. He rolls up to the side of his double-cab 2005 Ford Ranger, gets out of his wheelchair, stores his Sunrise Quickee Manual Wheelchair in the back section of the cab and then gets into the front seat. With automatic transmission and a lever-action throttle and brake, off he goes. He arrives for work before 9:00 and stays until 6:00 five days a week.
He’s what they call an Associate Manager of the Bath and Plumbing Department. He trains new employees hired for his department. He provides advice and services of all kinds for customers in his six 12’ high aisles each 110’ long for 8,000 sq. ft. Seen another way, Dana oversees and is conversant with a wall of plumbing parts 8’ and 1,000 feet long: copper fittings, PVC pipe of all sizes and shapes, heating or plumbing fittings, drainage pipe, iron pipe and fittings, furnace pipe… “ I probably make 30 trips an hour – both short and long …maybe a mile or more a day.”
I asked Dana for examples of problems he had to solve or any odd requests he’s gotten from customers, “My favorite – and it happens more than you would think – people come in with some bit of busted plastic or rusted metal and want to know what it is and what it fits to. Or they ask what other parts they need to buy to fit with this bit or that but then they lose track of how they all fit together. And lots of people buy way too much of one thing or not enough of another so I’m always sorting out returned parts. One person asked me if we sold bidets. That was a new one on me!”
Josh Sirois, the manager of the HUGE Home Depot store, told me “Dana’s ability to communicate about plumbing supplies is well ahead of his peers and that includes me. And Dana is well known in the community. Customers sometimes call ahead to be sure Dana is on hand. Some even call asking for “Destination Dana because he is such an expert in his field.”
Doing the right thing and building strong relationships are two of HD’s values. Managers are encouraged to empower their stores and their leaders at all levels to hire people who will serve customers best and reflect the community in which they serve which is diverse in all ways.
Sirois also told me, “We take care of our employees. If any associate needs help in any way, their fellow employees can start a fund-raising effort and when they’ve collected money, The Home Depot Foundation will chip in two for one. (Raise $200 and Home Depot will add $400 for a $600 total.)
On three occasions since 2004, HD and their Keene employees have replaced Dana’s wheelchair three times, updating to a better wheelchair each time. “Now he flies around the store.” And when he’s not working, he flies around the meadows on his family’s 62 acre farm on his four-wheel drive all-terrain vehicle.
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.