FLORISSANT — To many of us, Thanksgiving weekend is about family. About people coming from near and far to spend time together, to reminisce.

And that's what happened Friday afternoon, with a family of a different sort.

Several hundred veterans of the shuttered Ford plant in Hazelwood got together for a reunion at Mattingly's, a bar just up Lindbergh Boulevard from where the huge old factory once stood. They filled the parking lot with their Tauruses and F-150s. And they filled a banquet room with hugs and handshakes over bottles of Budweiser.

In one sense, it was like any gathering of old co-workers, full of "How ya been?" and "You look great," and trying to put names to familiar faces. But in another way it was a statement about today's auto industry, in which people who'd come to see their job as something more than that, as something like a family, have been scattered to the winds. With auto plants closing all over the Midwest these last few years, gatherings like this may become more common.

Early this decade, when it pumped out Ford Explorers day and night, Ford's Hazelwood plant employed about 2,600 people. By the time it closed in 2006, many of them had retired or taken a buyout. But some chose to stay with Ford. And that meant moving.

Today about 500 Hazelwood veterans work at the company's plant near Kansas City, said Mike Hester, a retiree who helped organize the reunion. Another 200 each are in Chicago and Detroit. Others work in Indianapolis, Memphis, Florida and Phoenix.

Ernie Gettings and his wife moved to Connecticut, where they spent three years at a parts depot before landing a transfer to Kansas City. Now they're just a four-hour drive from home. It'd be nice to be here in St. Louis, Gettings said, but at least he's got a job. After all, the plant he called home is gone now, just piles of dirt.

"It's a little sad," he said. "It was always there. It was a fixture."

And it was a fixture in the lives of the people who worked there. Parents helped their children get jobs. Uncles and nephews worked together on the line. Ford liked it that way, said Janice Hooks, the bonds of family made the plant feel more like one.

Hooks would know. Her husband worked at Ford. So did she. And her daughter, her son, a nephew.

"The whole family," she said.

Standing by Hooks in the bar was her daughter, Tanisha Hutton, who worked four years at Hazelwood. It wasn't like most jobs, she said.

"There are people here who knew me when I was born," Hutton said. "It was like having 4,000 members of your family around, instead of just going to work."

She transferred to Chicago when Hazelwood closed. It's a nice place to visit, she said, but tough to work there. The bonds aren't as tight. She still feels like an outsider. Hutton just turned 30, and isn't sure she wants to stay in the auto industry. She's glad to have a job, but it's not what it was. Pharmacy school sounds appealing.

Plenty of others have moved on.

After ten years, Danielle Gilbert quit in 2005 to be a stay-at-home mom. The plant closed a year later, and her husband started his own business instead of taking his chances on a transfer. But Hazelwood left a deep mark on them.

They'd both started there when they were 20, working 58-hour weeks and night shifts, it wasn't long before their lives revolved around the plant, Gilbert said. They met there, got married, made good friends, had a baby.

"It was hard to leave," she said. "It was kind of your own little world, Ford was."

And for a few hours Friday afternoon, that little world came together again.