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Chattanooga: '60s, '70s teens had variety of summer jobs

By: Clint Cooper
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David Broome

Three days after he graduated from City High School in 1965, Doug Jones said, his father approached him with something he wasn’t expecting.

“I have great news,” the Nashville resident said he was told, “you have a job.”

“That was interesting,” said Mr. Jones, “since I wasn’t looking for a job.”

However, for his first summer out of high school, he was a rodman for the Tennessee Highway Department on the bridge crew that was building Interstate 24 around the foot of Lookout Mountain.

Mr. Jones, 61, was among the first group of 78 million U.S. baby boomers to reach their teens and seek summer employment.

Staff Photo by John Rawlston -- Pat Hagan worked in the outfield as scoreboard operator for one season at Engel Stadium in the early 1960s, and spent two years working as a batboy.

As a rodman, he said, he held the measuring rod for the survey crew helping build the road.

“For all my labor,” Mr. Jones said, “I made the grand sum of $200 a month.”

For the next three summers during his break from the University of Tennessee, he said, he worked at the TNT plant located in what is today Enterprise South.

David Broome of Signal Mountain said he and four other teenagers spent the summers when he was 14 and 15 living as a sort of cowboy in what is today the sprawling East Brainerd neighborhood of Mountain Shadows. Some 660 acres of the then-farm land was known as Ryall Springs Riding Stables.

Mr. Broome, 56, said he and the other teenagers lived in an open room which comprised the top floor of an old, two-story house. He said they fed horses, shoveled manure, cleared trails, served as guides and trained horses.

“We worked hard,” Mr. Broome said, “but we loved every minute of it. It was a wonderful job for a teenager.”

He said his cowboy life was cut short during his final summer when one of the wilder horses began behaving erratically and rolled over him, breaking his arm and leg.

“After nearly a year of wearing a cast,” Mr. Broome said, “I decided to pursue other summer jobs.”

Pat Hagan said his first job was working the giant scoreboard at Engel Stadium during games of the Chattanooga Lookouts in 1962. He said he and an older boy got their scores from a ticker tape and climbed around the rear superstructure of the board to post numbers in a operation similar to that still used at Boston’s Fenway Park today.

“It was a great job,” he said. “When a baseball hit the scoreboard, it would sound like a gunshot from behind.”

The next year, Mr. Hagan, now 58, was promoted to bat boy, a job at which he worked for two seasons.

“My second year,” he said, “I even got to go on a road trip to Asheville and Charlotte with the team. What a great experience. I remember my favorite player, Ferguson Jenkins, who is now in the (National Baseball) Hall of Fame, giving me a ride home after the game several times.”

Chris Mylek of Chattanooga said his proximity to Valleybrook Golf & Country Club paid off for him when he was barely a teenager.

“I used to put on a football helmet and pick up range (golf) balls with a manual piece of equipment called a ball shagger,” he said.

Walking the driving range, Mr. Mylek, now 45, picked up the balls one by one and placed them in a big basket. He earned about $10 a basket, he said, and accentuated that amount by bringing beverages to the players at the driving range or on the practice greens.

“They would be generous with tips,” he said. “I was bringing home around $80 to $100 a week, which was unheard of back then for someone my age.”

MONEY MAKERS

“I used to get the lawn mower out and put the gas can on top of it and push it around the (Highland Park) neighborhood and mow yards. You would see a yard that needed mowing, just go up to the door — most of these were strangers — and knock and ask if they would like to have their yard mowed. If so, I was happy to cut it. This was in the early to mid-’70’s, and I guess I got $2 to maybe $5 for most yards.”

— Jim Myhan, 46, Hixson

“One of my treasured memories is from the summer of ’62, working with my dad painting a cousin’s house and garage in Highland Park. We spent two weeks on ladders in the blazing sun, scraping through layers of white paint on the horizontal clapboard exterior and hand brushing two coats on that old two-story house and long garage. That was the hardest I’d ever worked, but it was special because I shared that experience with my dad.”

— Darius Keith, Daytona, Fla.

“One summer, I worked in the complaint department of the Chattanooga News-Free Press. It was my job to handle complaints from customers and get the paperboys to deliver replacement papers. I remember complaints about dogs eating the paper, papers being thrown on the roof and wet papers when it rained.”

— Kenton Dickerson, Nashville

“My favorite job was at Harrison Bay State Park. The first summer I worked there, I was in the concession stand, and I loved it because the boys at the pool were always coming up to the stand to get drinks (and) candy, and there was a jukebox that someone was always dropping coins in to hear songs of that era (ZZ Top, Nazareth, Grand Funk Railroad).”

— Lisa Breedlove, 50, Chattanooga

“I started working (at the By-Rite Food King) as a bag boy, and moved on to stocking and running a cash register. It was fun working there, and I made friends that have lasted all my life. But what really surprised me was the customers I got to be friends with. There was a sign in the stock room that said, ‘Be nice to all of the customers, because the customer could be your next employer.’ ”

— Clay Ingle, 50, Chattanooga

“To help pay for my tuition, I joined the work-study program (at the University of Chattanooga), and my first assignment was chemistry lab assistant. Still having nightmares of high school chemistry, I was nervous about it but, as it turned out, the job was quite easy. I was assigned to (teacher Dorothy) Dalby and, for the most part, stood in the hallway during classes reading Ian Fleming paperbacks, and after lab, cleaning up the test tubes and beakers.

— Don Pack, 59, Nashville

“I was 15 in the summer of 1962. I worked for a hearing-impaired couple who owned two shoe repair shops. One was in Brainerd and the other on Hixson Pike in Rivermont. I opened the store at 8 a.m. while they were at the Brainerd store. My job was to give customers their repaired shoes and to take in new jobs. I wrote instructions about what the customer wanted. The thing I liked the best was that they taught me a bit of sign language ... (which) came in handy when I was a senior and I played Annie Sullivan in ‘The Miracle Worker’ at Chattanooga High School.”

— Beth Semmer Massey, Chicago

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