Joseph “Joe” Grabowski was virtually penniless when he bid a sweet farewell to Miami in 1980 for an engineering job in Georgia.

With Florida in his rearview — a state he had moved to as a teenager with his father, but never quite took to personally — he was Atlanta-bound with $150 dollars in his pocket. He arrived with enough funds to book one night at a Radisson Hotel, the day before he was expected to start work at EDS Nuclear.

After his first day on the job, a front-desk agent asked where Grabowski was staying. When he said it was a good possibility he would be sleeping in his car until payday, the company wrote him a check on the spot for two weeks advance pay. It would be the last time Grabowski, now 64, would have to ask for money.

“I’ll never forget it,” Grabowski said. “They gave me a check for $651 and looking back, I should have framed it.”

He grew up an only child in a household where support came in many forms, but rarely in dollars or cents. His father, also Joseph, was a World War II veteran and blue-collar worker who had a career as a subway motorman in New York until they moved to Miami. His mother, Pauline, worked at an East Coast law firm for $40 a week.

Grabowski said the dying wish of his mother, who passed away from breast cancer when he was in middle school prior to him and his father relocating to Florida, was that he would use what little she was able to save to pursue a higher education.

“My mom wanted me to be a professional and my dad just wanted me to get a good-paying job. They instilled in me the goal of going to college and looking back, they taught me hard work and diligence,” said Grabowski, who recently retired from North Valley Hospital after serving 25 years as the hospital’s maintenance supervisor.

His job in Atlanta was the first he secured after graduating from college with a degree in civil engineering and a penchant for mathematics. And it was his initial step toward fulfilling the career goals his parents had laid out for him.

He held his position for about six years before he quit and went on a one-year hiatus. At that point in his life, Grabowski was coming into his own and had developed an interest in hiking and climbing and knew he wanted to spend his career break out west.

At the time, a friend of his was connected to someone who owned a residence on Lake Five, fully furnished and ready to rent.

The offer was too good to pass up.

Gabowski spent the next year in the Flathead Valley climbing, hiking and teaching himself to ski until his savings became sparse. Though he had no desire to leave Montana, he again took a job with the company he had worked with in Georgia and spent the next five years working as a project manager, first in Texas and later in Alabama, Tennessee and elsewhere for anywhere from three to nine months at a time.

“I didn’t want to leave Montana, really. But I just said to myself ‘alright this is a job, I need to get back into the swing of things,’” Grabowski said. “I was going to eat some humble pie, make some money and see where this goes.”

IT WASN’T until the mid-1990s when Grabowski started craving more stability in his life, that he quit once again, packed up a moving van, loaded his Jeep onto a trailer and drove until he hit the Flathead Valley — a place he “was always trying to get back to.”

A few days later he came across an intriguing job listing for a maintenance supervisor at North Valley Hospital in Whitefish. He knew nothing about hospital maintenance, but had plenty of project management experience. So he put on his three-piece suit, a trusty staple that has graced his closet for as long as he can remember, and handed his resume to a hospital employee named Denise, who would eventually become his wife seven years later.

He landed the job.

And on March 20, 1995, Grabowski started what would become a 25-year career at the hospital. He describes his time at North Valley, as well as his marriage to Denise, as some of his life’s greatest treasures.

“It felt like I had joined a family at North Valley,” Grabowski recalled. “Ever since I had left Florida I had essentially been a vagabond. Now, I had something and somewhere I could put down roots. It all brought me immense happiness.”

Over the course of his tenure at the hospital, Grabowski had a pulse on all things maintenance-related. That included important tasks such as ensuring the hospital’s backup generator is always in working condition, even on the coldest of winter nights when the power goes out.

But his role as maintenance supervisor eventually expanded to include other responsibilities.

Grabowski often tapped into his engineering and architecture background to oversee major design and expansion undertakings at North Valley. He helped the hospital adopt and develop the Planetree Philosophy, which focuses on patient-centered care and fosters a healing environment by making sure the hospital’s design doesn’t appear institutional.

“I was there when a company pitched the idea to us back in the day,” Grabowski said. “From my perspective, the philosophy was telling us what we already were. We had this patient-centered concept going on already, but it allowed us to put a name to it, brand it and grow it.”

As part of his job, Grabowski was also the emergency preparedness coordinator for North Valley — a role that actually delayed his retirement as he had planned to leave the hospital this past spring, but then COVID hit Montana.

“At the start of the pandemic I told North Valley leadership that I thought I should stick around for a bit longer. I told him this was the big one, this was what we have been preparing for,” Grabowski said. “I’ve said all along, that I’m not taking the easy road out of anything. And if I have to be doing something important until the very last minute, then so be it.”

And that’s just the kind of person Grabowski is, and always has been: someone who gets the job done and makes sure he finds joy in doing so, somewhere along the way.

“I think everyone has a role in society. A lot of us are told to pursue our dreams, but few of us have the opportunity to do that. So often, whatever job we take becomes our passion,” Grabowski said. “You can be a maintenance guy at a hospital, the CEO, a senator or the president. Whatever you do, give it 100% and in that, like everything, you find fulfillment. If we all did a bit of that and treated each other with dignity and respect, we’d all be a lot happier.”

Reporter Kianna Gardner can be reached at 758-4407 or kgardner@dailyinterlake.com.