At the end of 2014, Clifton Gregg – NCSSM-Durham’s humble, affable plumber – waved goodbye to the school after 33 years of service and headed home as a brand-new retiree to work on his vintage Mustang.
He wasn’t gone long. Gregg’s knowledge of the school’s utilities infrastructure was so vast that the maintenance department begged him back on a part-time basis as soon as they could. Gregg returned for a while, then waved goodbye again.
And again, he was asked if he might consider another part-time return.
NCSSM, it seems, just couldn’t let him go.
But this time, they’ll have to. Sometime this summer, once he feels like his replacement is ready, Gregg will once and for all wrap up his time at NCSSM.
As before, his presence on campus will certainly be missed, says Garry Covington, who, as NCSSM-Durham’s former Director of Plant Facilities, worked with Gregg for over 21 years before retiring at the end of 2024. “Losing Gregg is like losing three employees at once,” he said. “And we’re losing a lot of the school’s history, too.”
Gregg never planned on being a plumber. Electrical work was what he’d intended to do. But the contractor he worked for prior to coming to NCSSM in 1981 didn’t have an electrical position open at the time he was hired there, so they brought him on as a plumber. So started a career that would earn Gregg the admiration of all who worked alongside him.
If Gregg hadn’t envisioned a career in plumbing, he certainly never imagined working at the same place for 44 years.
“Here’s what happened: I was only expecting to be here maybe five years,” Gregg says. “I was still sort of finding myself when I applied for this job, you know. But then five years became 10 years, 10 years became 15. The supervisors I’d had down through the years all seemed to value my opinion, so I stuck around. After a while I figured I’d been here this long I might as well stay.”
Covington, the retired Director of Plant Facilities, certainly valued him. So, too, has Robert Allen, NCSSM’s Vice Chancellor for Finance and Operations, who provides oversight of NCSSM-Durham’s maintenance department. Allen has known Gregg for over 12 years. Whenever the school had to look for underground utilities, he says, they always consulted Gregg first.
“We’ve had designers and engineers that would come here that would say, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s this electrical wire here or this plumbing connection that’s on the grounds about here.’ And Gregg would say, ‘No, actually it’s over there.’ And he has never been wrong.”
Covington recalls a project a few years ago involving the school’s fire sprinkler system that had been installed many years before. “I said, ‘Gregg, who did the sprinkler system?’ Off the top of his head he told me who the designer was, who the contractor was, and who the superintendent of the job was. He said, ‘I got the drawings right over here somewhere, let me find them.’ And he showed them to me and everything he’d said was right. He doesn’t forget anything.”
“He’s one of a kind,” Covington continues. “He takes pride in his work. When he does something, he literally puts his name on it. If you walk around this campus, you’ll see pumps and stuff that have a date and a CG on it. You see that, you can know that it’s done right.”
Such a long career deserves an appreciative and joyful sendoff. But that’s not Clifton Gregg’s way. He’s a stand to the side with his hands in his pockets kind of guy, happy to see you, happy to talk with you, always ready with a gentle laugh, but he’s not one to ever stand in the middle of a circle. “I want to leave,” he says, “the same way I came in.”
