One of my more humiliating experiences was applying for unemployment. It was at a seedy government building in a part of Camden, NJ, you would not want to visit after dark.

The newspaper where I had worked had gone out of business. Our family had a mortgage and 4 of us to feed.

I swallowed my pride and went to the unemployment office. The gray-haired bureaucrat behind the window ordered me to step back behind the yellow line and she would call me when she was ready.

After she had established her authority, she handed me pages of employment history to fill out. I dutifully did.

“We’ll let you know,” she said.

A few days later a publisher asked me to fly to California for a few weeks to coach his editors and reporters. That temporarily took care of the food and mortgage.

I THOUGHT ABOUT that when I read Melinda Waldrop’s article about Lou Kennedy in the Columbia Regional Business Report.

Lou has come a long way from the Fulton County government building where she once stood in line to get her water service turned back on, Melinda wrote.

Lou had left Lexington County after college in search of bigger things in Atlanta and Houston, and through difficult life experiences that proved invaluable.

“I had two failed marriages,” Lou said.

“The father of my child was an addict. He did a lot to ruin my credit, to make life hard for me, but I’m forever grateful.

“When you have to live with an addict, you learn a lot about psychology. How not to set them off, how not to cause this to happen, how not to have the house come tumbling down, how to keep the creditors from evicting you.

“THESE ARE SKILLS in my little middle-class upbringing that I never thought I’d have. I swear I benefit. I can see bull from 40 miles off. I can spot a con artist, a liar.

“I got my daughter from that. I’m never regretful because many of the skills that serve me well today came out of those rough 8 to 10 years.”

Lou worked 3 jobs including house painting with daughter Xanna often in tow.

“She’d sit underneath me on a ladder,” Lou said. “I had all these Little Golden Books for her to read to keep her occupied so I could make enough to keep our lights on. I had this little blond mouth to feed.

“You just figure it out.”

VISITING SOUTH Carolina for a girlfriend’s shower, Lou was talked into meeting a friend of her friend’s brother-in-law, who had also gone through a divorce.

After spilling a glass of wine on her, Bill Kennedy told her what he did for a living.

Xanna took one of the respiratory drugs, albuterol, manufactured by Nephron.

Bill told Lou he had only 3 customers.

“Lou asked, ‘Don’t you think you ought to diversify?”

“That’s how this started,” she said.

THE PERSONAL partnership became professional. Lou joined Nephron in 2001.

Now their company has more than 2,000 employees and is building a $215.8 million expansion in Lexington County.

I’ll bet you have had tough times, too.

What did you learn from them?

Next: The caregiver’s story