In 50 years with Ohio company, worker has perfect attendance

Associated Press

ASHLAND, Ohio

It’s uncommon for someone to spend five decades working for the same company and even rarer to accomplish what one Ohio man recently achieved: 50 years of perfect attendance at work.

Ron Kline started at Mansfield Plumbing as a cleanup worker in January 1965, when he was 20. He spent decades inspecting products and driving a truck, and the 70-year-old is still making deliveries for the plumbing fixture manufacturer in Ashland, sometimes leaving his family farm as early as 1 a.m. to head to work.

“I enjoy what I’m doing and I like to stay active and everything,” the father of 11 told the Mansfield News Journal. “These people who retire and die in a year or two, I don’t plan on doing that.”

Co-workers marked Kline’s milestone with a lunch celebration at the warehouse. They call him “Hot Dog,” because that was his preferred meal when teammates on the softball team got together to eat steaks.

Complications during a delivery trip made him a bit late to the milestone party, and he just smiled when a colleague joked that they were starting to think they’d have to come look for him.

He showed up, as he always does.

He was that way as a kid, too. Kline said he would have had perfect attendance in school if not for being counted absent one day in second grade for his grandmother’s funeral.

So what’s his secret to stellar attendance?

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just having fun, I guess.”