An Army of Normal Folks - He Worked for Free—Then Changed My Life (From The Vault)

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

We're bringing back Shop Talk #3. Because it's been years and it's beautiful! What would make someone work an entire weekend without pay? When Coach Bill Courtney's lumber company was on the brink of collapse after 9/11, one employee refused to go home. For 72 straight hours, Sam Quinn—a former Marine living in a halfway house—worked alongside Bill to save the business, asking for nothing in return. That weekend changed both of their lives. In this deeply personal Shop Talk episode, Bill reflects on the friendship that followed, the leadership lessons Sam taught him, and why the truest measure of success isn't money or titles—it's the lives we help transform.Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/#joinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Shop Talk, episode three of three on our minicast. I'll give you just a 10 to 12 minute thing to listen to. And today we're going to be talking about commitment or dedication or dedication and commitment. But we're going to look at it through the loons of a very special person who entered my life and recently left this earth right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors listen and you're there for heart-wrenching knockouts and breathtaking triumph 2026 FIFA World Cup the knockout stage every match every moment listen on t s nrador join the globe on the road to the july 19th final 2026 FIFA World Cup.

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Hell yeah. This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Munges shit together, and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones, and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us.

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They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive How to Live Forever on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Keith Gianmanca seemed like a mild-mannered suburban dad, but secretly, he became someone else, a master of disguise who went on a crime spree.

At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy. But I felt so desperate that I felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong and what that might look like? No. I didn't want to manifest that. I was trying to manifest success. Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. This is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever because Everything that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue.

Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Mainstream media is full of crude depictions of The Un-Housed, stories that shame and blame and paint the unhoused as a monolith. We The In-House is the podcast that's changing that. I'm Theo Henderson, creator and host. and for years I've created a space where the un-housed and their advocates can tell their own stories. In the last few months alone,

I've interviewed un-house parents, immigrants, mutual aid organizers, veterans, the LGBTQTIA plus community, and the policymakers who make the laws that impact the unhoused existence. Woodyen-Haus is a two-time Webby and Signal Award-winning show with many exciting guests on the horizon.

Tune in this week for my interview with Dr. Jill Whicher a street doctor turned influencer whose work with the unhoused community has made a huge impact online and in her community. Listen to Wey &House on the IHard Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, everybody, welcome to 3A3 Shop Talk.

We're going to talk about commitment or dedication. I can't really decide which word best describes what this show talks about, but we'll call a commitment. And when you think about commitment, you think about, I don't know, being on time, a commitment of marriage, a commitment to work, being dedicated to your word, doing what you're going to do. All of those things are true, but I think there's levels of commitment maybe or depth of dedication. And I think when you run across people who demonstrate a depth of dedication and a deep level of commitment that they are inspiring. One of the most inspiring people I've ever met my life as a guy named Sam Quinn.

Sam was a Marine. And after the Marines, he entered a world in the 60s as a young black guy. looking for opportunity, looking for love, looking for work. Sam didn't find much of that, but what he did find was he found alcohol and he found trouble. I didn't know Sam then. When I met Sam was in 2001, shortly after I started my business, we were on a wing in a prayer.

I didn't have much money and the equipment that I was installing to start this fledgling business was it was war out when I got my hands on it. And literally I drug old pieces of equipment out of the weeds behind large furniture manufacturers and paid $300 cash. And frankly, the people that own those furniture manufacturers just glad to see that stuff go and brought it back to my place here in Memphis and fixed it up and started using it. That's really the genesis of how I started my business. And we started operations in September of 2001. And when you're running lumber in a manufacturing process,

you've got packs of lumber with boards stacked on top each other, but you've got to grade them and you've got to do things to them. So you've got to get them in single fashion. And you don't want to sit there and hand handle every single board. So there's a machine called a tilt hoist, which tilts the pack to a 45 degree angle. then hoists it up in the air so that each level, each layer of the lumber slides out onto moving chains, then take it across the face of an inspector who looks at the lumber and boards and inspects it as they pass them by.

And then once it passes them by, they're then pulled back off the chain and made back into packs. That's kind of how lumber is handled in our industry. And we just started operations. I'd spent all the money I'd had. I was way in debt and we needed to generate sales and we were operating and going. And the reality was I was grading lumber and working outside on the yard every day. And then when three o'clock happened and the shift shut down and hourly guys went home, then I spent the next six hours on the phone calling customers buying lumber.

And it was tenuous. And one Friday, our tilt hoist broke. And that sounds like a bad thing. But when your tail toys breaks and you're already broke and you've got to create revenue the next week by making lumber and shipping lumber and you can't do it, you have to get that thing running. And so my maintenance manager, my yard manager and I knew that this was going to be an all weekend deal. we saw the sun rise and set three times before we ever went home. We had to basically take the entire tilt hoists apart with torches, remove chain, fixed sprockets, rewire a motor,

and put it all back together. And it's very heavy industrial stuff. And about 5.30 that Friday evening, we started working in about 6.15, I looked up. And there's this guy, Sam Quinn, A guy had hired only a month and a half early, earlier to pull lumber, $6.75 an hour guy, just manual labor. And he walks in and he picks up a ballpen hammer and starts heading to the other side. And I said, oh, Sam, what are you doing?

He said, well, we need to get this tilt voice running so we can run Monday and we can make money. And I'm like saying, yeah, you're right, but I can hardly afford to pay you 40 hours. can't pay you to be here and I sure as heck can't afford time and a half. And he looked at me and said, I hadn't been a part of anything since the United States Marine Corps. And I feel a part of this company. I don't want you to pay me, but I ain't going home either. I'm not going to let you guys work and me watch. And he went to work.

We slept on the floor of the deck when I say slept a couple hours, covered in torch soot. hydraulic oil, grease, filth, sawdust, woke up. Lisa brought some biscuits. And we worked all that Saturday. And then we worked all that Sunday. And literally, Monday morning, about 5.30 in the morning, we finished and finally got that stupid thing put back together in operational, 30 minutes before the line crew showed up, start running again Monday.

none of us went home. None of us had a shower. And Sam did all that with us for nothing. And then to my absolute shock, when the line turned on, Sam came out of the bathroom after clean himself up and pulled lumber for eight hours behind that chain to hit his Monday shift before he went home Tuesday night. Over the course of that weekend,

and you got nothing else to do, you learn a lot about one another. And I found out, about Sam's past and I found out he had no major violent issues with the law, but lots of DUIs and things he hadn't paid and really became systemized, institutionalized, like many are that come from where Sam comes from, because you got to have a car to go to work, but if you can't afford to driver's license you get pulled over you don't have a driver's license you get a ticket you can't afford to pay for the ticket if it's between paying the ticket or putting gas in your car and paying the light bill you

don't pay the ticket then you get a warrant then the county starts putting interest on top of your ticket and penalties and what was a $40 ticket becomes a $1,000 ticket and then there's a warrant out for your rest then you're arrested then you got to post bail it's a never ending downward vacuum spiral of misery that people find themselves in. And I'm not excusing it, but it's just the reality of what happens to a lot of, a lot of poor folks. And that was Sam's world. And he told me about it.

And I told him, I said, Sam, you know, you got to take care of your responsibilities. I kind of get why you ended up where you are. But if I help you out and we find a way to get all this cleaned up straight, he looked at me as he said, I'll never go back. He was living at Lighthouse Ministries, which is a daily rent-a-room for eight hours a night thing. He literally was almost homeless. The next two and a half years, we worked with attorneys, we worked with all kinds of people to clear his record, pay his fines, which I loaned. of money for and he paid me back and get himself straight. Then his girlfriend, Regina, he married.

And he adopted her children because he believed if you're going to commit to a woman, you need to commit to the children. And they don't need to be living in the same house. And he actually got a marriage license, got married and adopted the kids as his own. And then I'll never forget the pride on his face when he'd saved himself $3,500 to put a down payment on a home, which he bought for his wife and his children. Over the course of time of the company, he went from that low-level common labor job and ended up being a manager on the yard at my company. There was no prouder human being on the face of the planet than Sam Quinn, because what he found out was this life that he'd screwed completely up. He was able to fix with commitment and dedication.

Commitment to a wife. Commitment to his bills. Commitment to his children. Commitment to his job. Dedication to those things. And it changed his life and it changed the life of his wife and it changed the life of his children. But more importantly, not more importantly, but maybe with greater perspective for me, it changed mine. I watched a formerly homeless, alcoholic, drug-using, person living at Lighthouse Ministries with half a chance to be committed and dedicated to something matter, become my friend. there was never a time that this company was dealing with difficulties that Sam wasn't the first in line to volunteer to help.

There was never a time that I didn't have a need that Sam wasn't the first to volunteer to help. He was so ultimately committed as a friend and an employee and a father and a manager that he inspired everybody at this company and me. about two years ago, Sam got diagnosed with a really terrible form of cancer. And when he told me about it, he looked me dead in eyes and he said, I don't think I can beat it. I'm going to try to extend my life as long as I can.

And he said, I'm paying for some of the things I did when I was young. And he told me there were times he sniffed paint. and there were times that he drank rubbing alcohol. And there were things he did to his body that his body was now no longer to fight off and he was paying for. But he wasn't a victim to it. He just, he didn't even gripe about it. He kind of said, I'm a man.

I made those decisions and now I'm paying for him. And he just looked me dead in eyes and he said, Bill, just know. I want to work. I don't want to miss a day. And I'm like, Sam, you got cancer. I mean, come on. And he's just with this steely look in his face, said, I'm going to deal with it. But don't not let me run my line.

Don't let me work. It was his dedication and commitment to work and the dedication and commitment of the business and the people in the business to him that changed his life. And that was what he cared about most, even when he was dying of cancer. or this man would schedule his treatments early in the morning and would show up in the dead of summer working on a production line in a lumberyard with dust and noise and loud stuff and be at work 30 minutes after treatment treatment that most people would go home and lay in bed for two or three days and this guy would come and stand on his feet for eight hours in the hot sun or the cold

brutal winners in this unforgiving atmosphere that is a lumber mill and manages people. I cannot tell you the depth of the inspiration that people had knowing that that's what Sam was doing. See, it was not just his commitment and dedication to the company that mattered, but it was, it was the commitment and dedication that we showed to him, it changed lives. It changed perceptions and it changed me. About five months ago, I was pulling onto the yard and I saw Sam coming across the yard with some of his materials and, oh my God, he could barely walk.

Sam was not a tall or big man, but he was a chiseled guy. And by this time, his clothes were hanging off of them. You could see all the bones and veins in his neck and his clavicle through his t-shirt. And he was in pain. And I said, Sam, how you doing? I'm good, boss. Sam, how you doing? Look to me, dead and as he said, I'm hurting.

and I said, Sam, there has been no more committed, dedicated human being that I've ever seen to anything in my entire life. Why don't you give yourself a break and take a rest? And he said, I'll be fine. He died three days later. His dying days were walking around a lumberyard because he was dedicated and committed to what was dedicated and committed to him and changed his life. And in doing so, he changed the lives of everybody around him. He remains an inspiration. He's been gone now for months, but people still call the line that he worked on, Sam's line.

Problems come up around the yard, and some of the other managers and other employees will immediately say, well, what would Sam have done? Sam Quinn has an everlasting legacy on my company, on my children, on my employees, and on me because of what a depth of commitment and dedication meant in his life and what it meant to the lives of those around them who experienced that depth of commitment and dedication. So when you think about committing to something in the future, I hope you might think about Sam Quinn. It's more than being on time. It's more than

saying, yes, I will. It's more than just being a person of your word. True commitment and true dedication inspires. And it changes the perceptions of people around you. And ultimately, will change your own life. So when you commit or dedicate something, do it like Sam would do. I'm Bill Courtney. I'll see you next week.

150 years ago, they were hunting us down to kill us, and now they're hunting down immigrants to deport them. This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be, and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Chuck from Stuff You Should Know, and we're submitting our most science-y episodes for your peer review with our new stuff

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Turn down the gas on your Bunsen burner and slip into your most comfortable lab coat and listen to the stuff you should know doing science playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Munges Chitigler, and I'm back with a new season of my podcast, Skyline Drive. This time I talk to scientists, biopunks, kermudgins, blues owners, super seniors, and Goa's top cryotherapy lab to try to understand this obsession with living forever and what it means for all of us. And I get into a bit of trouble along the way.

I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. To make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever. on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. Is everyone lying to me about who they are? I felt such desperation. I felt it was what I had to do. Listen to deep cover the family man

on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. For years, the Un-House has been presented as a monolith in mainstream media. Weedian House is a podcast that's changing the narrative. I'm Theo Henderson, and I created this show why I was Un-Housed on the streets of Los Angeles. We've grown into a two-time Webby Award-winning podcast, the only podcast that shares Un-House stories and news from the Un-House perspective. Listen to Weythian House on the I.

hard radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.