About ten years ago, a preschooler at Joppa Elementary decided Charles Stubblefield looked like Mr. Potato Head. She thinks it was the hat — he's usually the only person in the building wearing one. The nickname stuck. That girl graduated from eighth grade this year. Stubblefield has been Taterhead for a decade.

He doesn't mind.

Stubblefield is the lead custodian at Joppa Schools, a position he's held for fourteen years. When asked what the job involves, he didn't start with floors or light bulbs.

"I do a lot of everything in the hallways," he said. "Making sure the kids are smiling and happy and joking with them, playing with them. Down to cleaning the cafeteria and saving food for them."

He led with joy. Then cleaning. In that order.

Freshman Ava Anderson, sitting beside him, wasn't surprised.

"I feel like every school needs a Mr. Charlie," she said.

She's known him since she was little. But the connection runs deeper than that — and the moment it surfaced was the best scene in the conversation.

Stubblefield started telling a story about a kindergartner years ago whose grandfather used to walk her into the building each morning. The girl wouldn't go to class with anyone else. Every day, Stubblefield took her hand and walked her down the hallway himself.

"She would not go to anybody but me," he said. "And I would walk her to class every morning, hold her hand."

That girl was Audrey — Ava's older sister. She graduated last year. She's in nursing school now.

Ava sat there hearing her own family's story told back to her. That's what fourteen years in one building produces.

Stubblefield graduated from Joppa himself, Class of 1992. After high school, he moved to O'Fallon, Illinois, and managed a Sonic restaurant for five or six years. He missed home. He came back to Southern Illinois and took a job at the Dyno Nobel powder plant in Wolf Lake. When they laid him off, they offered him a position in Laredo, Texas.

"I didn't like St. Louis," he said. "I knew I didn't like Laredo, Texas."

Bills were coming in. He started working at the Pizza Hut in Metropolis. About a year later, somebody told him Joppa Schools needed help.

"I'm gonna give that a shot," he thought. He applied, they hired him, and he's been there since 2012.

Now his own four children are enrolled — a freshman, a seventh grader, a sixth grader, and a third grader. His oldest daughter is about to turn 30. A twenty-year gap between the first and the last.

"Moved back down here and started over," he said. "And it's been a blessing."

What makes Stubblefield unusual isn't the maintenance work. It's the way students talk to him — and about him. Kids stop him in hallways for hugs. They come to him when they can't figure out who else to talk to. He's not a teacher or a counselor, and that's part of why it works.

"Sometimes it's hard to go to a teacher and talk to them," he said. "And sometimes that crazy old janitor — I'll just go talk to him."

He makes them laugh. If it's serious, he connects them to the right people. But most of the time, the need is simpler than that.

"Most of them just need a hug," he said.

In the cafeteria, there's a share table for unopened food that kids don't eat. Stubblefield keeps an eye on it.

"There are always a few certain ones that I know need that little extra," he said. "I make sure they get it."

Ava's description of him was immediate: "I've always seen him as like a school father. He's always been there. He's always gotten me anything I needed. I've never seen Mr. Charlie get upset with any of the kids or get mean or anything. It's always been nice."

What the kids give back, Stubblefield says, is just as real. On the hard days — and adults have them — their energy pulls him out of it.

"Their infectious smile will just enlighten you to the point where it doesn't matter how bad your day was," he said.

He knows every student in the building. He knows their parents. He knows their grandparents. He knows the goodness that runs through the families because he grew up alongside them.

"Hearts grow together," he said, about what happens in a small school like this.

He paused.

"There's not a child in this school that I couldn't walk up to and have a conversation with."

Fourteen years. One building. A Taterhead nickname. A hand held in a kindergarten hallway that led all the way to nursing school. And a custodian who started every morning with the same job description he wrote for himself: make sure the kids are smiling.