Three Generations. One Standard.

Howard was born in Wellston in 1922, one of thirteen. The Depression took the family to Petit Jean Mountain in Arkansas, where his father helped build a state park with the Civilian Conservation Corps. An explosion put his father in the hospital for a year, and the family came back to Missouri with nothing. By eleven Howard was on his own. Then the van, and Earl Nolan's table, and six years in Quincy.

He enlisted at Jefferson Barracks a month after his eighteenth birthday and served five years with the 31st Field Artillery of the 7th Infantry Division: Kiska, Kwajalein, Leyte and Okinawa, where a bomb blew him out of a foxhole. Three of his brothers served too. One, Roy, went missing in action in Korea a month before his eighteenth birthday.

He came home in the fall of 1945, married Doris Waller in St. Charles the next spring, and drove trucks for thirty-eight years, a Teamster on long hauls across the country. The family was in O'Fallon by 1968. When Earl Nolan passed that winter, Howard was on a haul somewhere in the South. The state police found his truck and stopped it at the Mississippi line so he could get home to bury the man who had taken him in.

Butch learned electrical work in the Navy, as an aviation electrician's mate on Sea King helicopters at Imperial Beach, California. He married Lynn while he was still in the service, and she spent a year in California with him. Then they came home to O'Fallon, and he went to work as a signal maintainer for the Terminal Railroad Association in downtown St. Louis, the switching road that ties the city's railroads together. He joined the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen. In 1979 he got his St. Charles County electrical license for one job: wiring his brother Bennie's house.

He rose in the union and became the man who read the contract. He spent years showing other members what theirs said, and when a better one was on the table he pushed for it. The night it came time to stand up at the meeting, he suspected he would be standing alone, and hoped he was wrong. He stood anyway. The men he was fighting for stayed seated. In the summer of 1990 the railroad charged him over the length of his lunch breaks and dismissed him. The union took his case to the National Railroad Adjustment Board.

He did not wait for the Board. He and Lynn started Cave Springs Produce, fresh fruit and vegetables, and ran it for the three years the case took. In 1992, the year Zach was born, he opened Kirk's Electric out of the house. In 1993 the Board ordered the railroad to give him his job back, without pay for the three years he had been gone. The Brotherhood had carried that case for him and won it. But three years is a long time, and by then Kirk's Electric was feeding his family and other families besides. He never went back. He never stopped believing in what a union is for. What he had built in the waiting was his, and he kept building it.

Zach grew up at Butch's side. When school was out he was wherever his grandfather was, and that usually meant the Kirk's Electric office: fifteen crews, and the bids, the schedules, the paperwork and the phone calls that kept them working. He watched a trades company run from the inside before he was old enough to drive. At fifteen he started spending his summers on the crews. Then came 2008, and the losses that closed Kirk's Electric. Zach left for a biochemistry degree with medicine in mind, picking up business studies at Lindenwood and UMSL along the way.

By 2017 the company was good at electrical work and falling behind at everything else. It ran on paper, and the people who sold it websites and software took the money and left pages that did nothing. Zach came back for good that year, at twenty-five, and took on everything that is not the wiring, the side of the company he had first watched over Butch's shoulder: the money and the plan for it, the marketing, the customers, the licensing and the insurance, every job tracked from the first call to the final inspection, and the permit offices, inspectors and utility companies behind each one. Within two years he was running the company day to day, without Butch's hand in it. Butch, who had started over before and knew what it cost, let him.

Sam joined in 2013 and learned the trade the old way, on the job beside his great-uncle Bennie, with Butch close by. Bennie started him on the basics and kept him on them until they were habit, which Sam says now is the only way to learn them. Long before he drove to a job alone he was the one at the door, talking with the customer about what they wanted, while Bennie looked the job over, explained what it would take, and set the price. When the day came, the first job alone was one bad switch at a charity's building in town, and the only part that made him nervous was driving the van. By the end of those years the hard finds were his: the wire fished through a finished wall, the lost neutral nobody else had found, found because he had learned how electricity behaves and not just where the wires run.

Sam graduated from Ranken in 2020, cum laude. When Zach took the company off paper, Sam was the first in the field to see the point of it: the price set before the work, the job on a screen instead of a clipboard. Today he carries a job from the estimate to the last connection, and customers ask for him by name.

The year Butch passed, Sam earned his master electrician license. It is the one this company works under now. For the first time, the company Butch built twice is run by the two grandsons he raised.

Brody Dunsworth is Butch's grandson too. He was eighteen and sleeping on Lynn's couch that same year when Zach offered him a job. His first day was a wire pull with Sam, and he could not move the line, so he decided that day that he would, and within a month he was wiring receptacles on his own. Sam still checks his work before they leave a job, and will until Brody holds his journeyman card.

He had not known how easily the trade can kill you. He learned it the day he and Sam were called to a property where the equipment had failed hard: gear rated for the voltage it carried, installed wrong by someone before them, with the damage the current had done to the metal on its way out plain to see. Nobody had to spell out what it would have done to a person standing there. What he remembers just as well is what came next: Sam working through the damage slowly, testing before touching, finding every place the fault had reached, and making it safe again before anyone else was allowed near it.

Most of what he knows came off the pool jobs, and he will tell you so. He is happiest on a basement finish, in a chair with a long run of receptacles ahead of him, and he is still making his peace with the lost neutral and the two hours of poking through a house that come with it. Customers, usually the older ones, ask whether he just got out of high school. He tells them yes. In five years he wants his own truck. Ask him whether starting the year Butch passed changed what the job means to him, and he takes a minute. "He started all this," he says, "and he'll never get to see what I become in it." He sits with that a moment longer. "Kind of cool."