Dalton Keeling doesn’t quit. Period. End of story. Several times in his life, the 20-year-old faced instances where other people would quit – but not Dalton. If anything, the adversity pushed him to excel well beyond his years.
When the pandemic shuttered his senior year at Marshall County High School in March 2020, Dalton worked three jobs six to seven days a week while he finished high school through online classes. Prior to the shutdown, Dalton had signed up for job shadowing programs to help him decide what he wanted to do after graduation. He knew that he wanted to do something that involved working with his hands and not sitting behind a desk.
He picked up some welding knowledge by helping his father, Justin Keeling, perform auto body repair, but he knew he didn’t just want to do repair work. He took an agriculture class and then an introduction to electrical welding class at Marshall County High School. That’s where he fell in love with welding.
“And it just came naturally to me,” Dalton recalled. “Everything else seemed like I had to work a little bit harder to understand it. But welding had just come naturally to me.”
Those job shadowing days used his welding skills and showed him what all he could do with the certifications he had earned. Named a student of the week by the Associated General Contractors for the 2019-20 school year, he now works full-time for Metal Works in Calvert City. His current assignment finds him working daily on historical grating at Kentucky Dam’s new lock and dam.
Justin said he was proud of Dalton for landing a job at the dam working alongside the Army Corps of Engineers. “And you know, he’s not even 21 years old yet, and (I tell him) ‘You’re way ahead of where you should be.’”
Earning the student of the week honor showed Keeling that he had talent, but he has supplied his own drive, grit, and determination.
“It was probably a lot of him,” Dalton said, gesturing to his father. “He has challenges every day with every car that he works on, and I’ve never seen him lay down. And he is very, very, very successful at what he does. He’s very talented at what he does. And I’ve never, ever seen him just completely give up. You know, even when it’s beaten him to his lowest level. You still gotta climb that ladder back to the top.
“And I guess that’s where I got a lot of that. Just because you fall to the bottom of the barrel, there’s a ladder that you have to climb to get back up out of the barrel.”
Justin credited Dalton with being willing to do the work it took to succeed, whether in his work or on the football field. Dalton worked his way into a starting position on the Marshall County High School football team.
But the hardest work came in the days after Jan. 23, 2018.
“I was shot right here in the chest, an inch away from my heart,” he said, pointing to the spot where the bullet entered. “It broke three ribs. I had internal bleeding in my pelvis, and it (the bullet) came out somewhere along this area (his back). The scars are there. It’s just a matter of finding it.”
