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