The end of an era

It was January 18, 1984.

A gallon of gas cost just over a dollar, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” was the number one song on the radio, and a gallon of milk would cost you $1.16. It was also Kelvin Garmon’s first day on the job as a 19-year-old at the City of Cedartown. It was supposed to be a temporary thing.

Jump forward nearly four decades to January 2022. A new number one was on the charts, milk climbed to $3 per gallon and folks shelled out around $2 more for gas. But one thing didn’t change -- Kelvin Garmon continued working for the City of Cedartown.

Kelvin retired on Jan. 31, 2022 with 38 years of dedicated service to the city and its residents. Just like the price of milk, Kelvin’s duties have changed over the decades. He started out reading meters and working as part of the repair crew. After that, he moved to backhoe and machinery operations, then to water maintenance supervisor, finally being named as the city’s public works director, the title he retired with.

Born and raised in Cedartown, he’s spent most of his life here with the exception of a stint in Florida as a teen. Kelvin fudged a little on his age at the time and ended up working on the shrimp docks with his dad. Eventually, though, he made his way back to Cedartown and accepted a job that would see so many changes.

“The technology is what’s changed really,” Kelvin said. “It’s better and faster.” A prime example of that would be the addition of a pneumatic jackhammer -- something most residents don’t really think about, but can mean the difference between water and no water when you turn on your faucet. “It used to be that accessing a water main or line under Main Street would end up being 4 to 5 hours. Digging through with a regular jackhammer would take so much time and switching off of manpower. Nowadays digging through the same amount of asphalt takes one and a half hours, 2 hours at most. Of course I’ve seen a lot of personnel changes. I’ve seen the whole administration turn over a few times,” he chuckled. But what remained the same was work ethic and loyalty.

“The city has always been so good to me, and I did my best to be good to them. A superintendent is only as good as the people they manage, and I’ve managed some of the best and hardest workers during my career here.”

Kelvin’s role and the dedication of his crew often go unnoticed by the public. They are up and out before the sun rises and work long into the late hours of the evening, especially if there is an emergency.

“I remember the first year I was here, we had an ice and snow storm. One of the huge water mains burst.

We worked around the clock to fix it, slept and ate at the water plant until it was finished. It was up to us to make sure residents had water.”

The job of a public works director is an important one. So much rides on the day to day maintenance and operation of the systems that keep our city going. From controlling the flood gates and preventing major disaster to scheduled upkeep of the city’s 3.5 million gallons of water in storage tanks that rise high above the town. “I didn’t learn all of it in a day, that’s for sure,” Kelvin explains.

A lot of it’s intuition and anticipating potential problems before they become actual problems. We work for the city, and by city I mean our residents. We do what we can with what we have in order to keep things running the right way.”

By the end of the day on January 31, Kelvin was thinking less about water infrastructure and upkeep and more about grandkids and family.

“I am a family guy. I have a son and two daughters and six grandkids that I plan on spending time with now,” he said with a firm conviction.

“How do you replace someone like Kelvin?,”said City Manager Edward Guzman.