When Mike Nolan graduated from high school, his classmates voted him least likely to succeed. “The fact that they even had a thing like that back then is astounding,” said his daughter, Erin Swingler. She knows what was behind it. “He talks about how he was an unpopular kid because he liked to work with his hands.”

In 1970, Mike and his wife bought Y-Yard Auto and Truck. More than half a century later, he is 84 and still comes to work every day. The business has grown to nearly 50 employees, and it is led by the next generation: Kelly Roepke serves as president, Erin is vice president over the buyers and production team, and another sister works there too. Their parents, Kelly noted, “proceeded to have four girls and operate a male dominated business.” Scott Blackwell manages production.

People sometimes describe businesses like theirs with what Kelly calls “the four letter J word.” The family prefers something more accurate: a state-of-the-art recycling facility. Y-Yard buys wrecked vehicles and total losses, dismantles them, and ships the parts to individuals, dealerships, repair shops, collision centers and recyclers across the country. Even returned parts are recycled again as cores, and what finally remains is crushed for scrap. Keeping that cycle moving takes far more than mechanics. There are four buyers searching for enough vehicles, an accounting department, marketing and sales teams, and six delivery trucks that each cover about 300 miles a day. “They may think we’re small,” Scott said. “We’re no small business.”

Kelly originally went to college to become an elementary teacher, and education never left her. After joining the family business, she kept running into the same problem: the skilled trades rarely get the recognition they deserve. “The sooner we can get to these students and introduce our business and our business model,” she said, “the more likely we are to interest them in pursuing this type of career.”

That is the heart of Y-Yard’s partnership with Teutopolis High School’s Diversified Occupations program, coordinated by Amanda Hazlett. Students arrive around 12:30, and from the first day they are employees, not visitors. They are paid. They go through the same two- to three-hour orientation as every new hire, earn any required forklift certification, and learn the company’s abbreviations and systems. “We do treat our D.O. students like they are an employee here,” Erin said. “They are held by the same expectations.” If they are sick, they call in.

Then Scott takes over. Students start with entry-level work: using hand tools, draining oil from returned engines and sorting the cores, breaking down tires, shredding cardboard, moving pallets wherever they are needed. Some move fast. “Some of these kids come in here and they can really blow your socks off with their ambition and their ability and wanting to work,” Erin said. One student mastered his first tasks, began helping the dismantling team, and now jumps on a forklift to pull parts from the warehouse.

“You test their knowledge, and if they keep grasping it, you want to keep giving them more, you know, adding fuel to their fire a little bit,” Scott said. “Watching them grow is, it’s kind of awesome when they grow into their own.” He has seen it up close, too. His own son came through the program and still works at Y-Yard. “We’ve had so many,” Scott said. “We need them in our business.”

Not every student stays, and the family counts that as success, too. “We’ve had a lot of really great kids that liked it and said, it’s not for me. I love my time here,” Erin said. “But that’s part of life, and we’re glad to be part of the stepping stone and then figuring out what they want to do in life.”

For Kelly, the larger question reaches beyond one business. “How do you educate your youth to know what they have here in their own community or what they have worth returning to?” she asked. A student dreaming of accounting or computer programming might never guess a recycling yard needs both. Perception is still the hardest obstacle, she admits; some families simply don’t yet see the depth of the industry. But she believes deeply in what this region already gives its young people. “We can’t teach work ethic,” she said. “And so if the families can teach that, we can teach the rest.”

Scott sees the same thing passed down through generations of Teutopolis families, and Erin, a St. Anthony graduate who “crossed the creek” and now has a child at every level in the district, sees it whenever the community rallies. On the night of the tornado, her husband and children were out until 2 in the morning. “People show up and they help,” she said. “There is a true sense of community and pride and a sense of family that I just think you can’t find just anywhere.”

That is the kind of place where a boy who liked to work with his hands could build something lasting, and where his daughters now hold the door open for the next one. “Our business or any business has the best learning classroom,” Kelly said. “You can’t build it at T-Town. But I’m going to open my doors and I’m going to bring you to mine.”