J Magazine Winter 2019

Todd Brearley, the Design and Construction Project Manager for the new Regional Transportation Center, leads a tour of the project with CEO Nat Ford.
um to the sparkling new Regional Transportation Center and a health
corridor from Baptist Medical Center straight up Main Street to UF
Health Jacksonville.
Some of that is in the very near future, and you’ll be fascinated to
hear what he see farther out.
But to appreciate the vision of Nat Ford, you have to get there
through three inflection points in his career that brought him to Jacksonville.
Inherent passion
Public transportation always has been an essential part of the life
of Nathaniel P. Ford Sr. He was reared in Queens, N.Y., where his father,
a Mississippi native, worked his way up from the New York subways
track department to chief operating officer for the entire system, with
tens of thousands of employees.
“All of those years,” Nat Ford remembers, “I got a front-row seat
to see what transportation was all about, a system that ran 24 hours a
day, seven days a week, and with his increasing levels of responsibility,
quite often he worked 24 hours, seven days a week. I remember
him answering the phone, and it was the control center for the New
York City subway system, looking for him to deal with management issues,
operational issues, emergencies, things of that nature. And then
off he went to take care of it.”
Throughout his childhood, Nat routinely used the New York public
transportation system himself.
“A lot of young people actually used the subway to get to school
and activities. I used the bus, the city bus, to get to elementary school,
middle school and high school.”
After he graduated early, at 16, after not having had to study much,
Ford’s first year of college “may not have been one of the most successful”
but, as we say, “built a lot of character … So I came back from
school, and Dad was like, OK, well, you’re home, but you’re going to
have to go find a job.”
Ford worked for a while as a commodity market clerk, but after a
few years, he was drawn to a much higher-paying job back at the transit
authority — as a union train conductor.
Over the next 10 years, perhaps inspired by his father’s success,
Ford quickly worked his way up, always taking the Civil Service exam
for the next higher job and winning four or five promotions. “Being
unmarried, no children, that kind of thing, I was able to study a great
deal,” he said. “And I was able to end up in the top 10 out of hundreds,
if not thousands of competitors, for the next position.”
Ultimately he became a superintendent of district operations.
“So at that time, at the young age of my early 30s, I was managing
a few thousand people and had a number of terminals and facilities
and rail yards that were under my watch. A young person with a lot of
responsibility.”
Along the way, Ford found his passion and his first inflection point.
“The real excitement came when I finally reached the level of train
dispatcher, where I was running a terminal. I was actually, for an
eight-hour period, literally processing hundreds of trains using a team
of train operators, signal maintenance, things of that nature. I had the
thrill of — I hate to describe it as such — but really nowadays, you see
WINTER 2019 | J MAGAZINE 21