Who is Levon Taft from Taft and what is their importance?

Levon Taft is the patriarch of the Coalfield Taft family. He appears in the novel in imagined incidents from the past. He works at a carpet factory by day and as a security guard at a lumberyard at night. He is in the process of building a deck on the house with his son Carl. Only Carl knows that Taft is having chest pains, which he refuses to have checked out by a doctor.