Never Give Up –
November 27, 2018 – After years of drug addiction and homelessness, Kenny Sawyer found himself staring at a job application at Hypertherm , a New Hampshire company that makes industrial cutting tools. He was sober at last. He really wanted this job. But the application asked whether he had been convicted of any felonies.
Sawyer hadn’t. But he decided later that the company would want to know he had been jailed for misdemeanor assault after a fight over a crack purchase years earlier. He called to volunteer that information, well aware that a scrape with the law could cost him the opportunity. “When I called back, that could have been the end of the deal,” Sawyer said recently. “But it wasn’t.” Sawyer was hired in 2010 and still works at Hypertherm.
