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For many bay area executives, working a summer job as a youth laid the groundwork and provided some learning opportunities.
By KRIS HUNDLEY
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 27, 2001
One executive dodged shotgun blasts and mad dogs during his summer job. Another rebuilt an airplane. The head of the biggest bank in Florida worked the deep fryer at McDonald's.
Tampa Bay area executives said they took away important lessons from the summer jobs of their youth, along with the minimum wage earnings.
Lesson No. 1 seemed to be: I never want to do that again.
As today's teenagers prepare for summer break, local executives recalled the sweat, low pay and long-lasting impact of their most memorable summer jobs.
Timothy Main, president and chief executive Jabil Circuit Inc., St. Petersburg
Tim Main was pedaling his bike frantically down a Kentucky road, dodging shotgun pellets, when he realized there was an easier way to make a living than selling Bibles and other books door to door.
"It occurred to me that I should probably buckle down at school," said Main, who eventually graduated from Michigan State University with a major in economics and East Asian Studies. "I could see what life without education would be like."
Despite being peppered with gunshot and bitten by dogs, Main, 43, doesn't regret the summer in 1978 when he carried a blue sample box on the back of his bike through the hills of Tennessee, Kentucky and southern Illinois.
Sharing an apartment with three fellow book-hawkers, Main knocked on doors six days a week, 12 hours a day. A reference dictionary was $45.90; a layman's Bible, $24.95; a series of five children's book was a tough sell at $107.
In his best week, Main sold $1,500 worth of books. By the end of summer, he had earned $1,000 despite frequent rejection.
"The plan was you had to do 30 calls to get three sales, and that's pretty much the way it worked out," he said. "The hit rate is a little higher here at Jabil."
Cathy Bessant, Florida president Bank of America Corp.
Don't dis McDonald's around Cathy Bessant. She got her first real job at one in Jackson, Mich., at age 16, worked there on and off through college, and still loves to eat at McDonald's.
"I did everything from the window to french fries to making shakes and tartar sauce," said Bessant, now 40. "And I dated the guy behind the grill."
Her pay in 1976 was $2.10 an hour, but Bessant took away much more: the importance of efficiency, consistent customer service and keeping good people. She even learned about upgrading your sales approach when she processed orders for burgers while pushing the shake of the month.
"I learned you could expand the range of what customers thought they needed," said Bessant, a champion seller of Shamrock shakes.
And if her subordinates at the bank think she's a non-stop whirlwind, they have McDonald's to thank.
"My boss there was always saying, "If there's time to lean, there's time to clean,' and I quote that all the time," she said. "I'm nuts about the notion that something can always be done in retail. And we ought to be doing it."
Tony DiBenedetto, chief executive Tribridge, Tampa
Tony DiBenedetto, 36, waited tables full time through high school and college. Pay was $2.01 per hour. With tips he could pull in as much as $100 per night on weekends.
"It taught me how to communicate with people, understand what their desires are, then prioritize a number of tasks very quickly," said DiBenedetto, adding that he uses the same skills today as a business consultant. "You always had to be on, always professional."
Not that he always succeeded. DiBenedetto remembers spilling wine on a couple -- not once, but twice.
"I figured these folks would never tip me," he said. "But the guy said he was giving me a big tip so I could go to school and get a different job. He thought I should get out of the waiter business."
Kurt Long, president OpenNetwork Technologies Inc., Clearwater
As a teen, Kurt Long held a series of drudge jobs: detailing cars, working behind the counter at Chick-Fil-A, picking up golf balls on a driving range. The closest he came to fun was a job as junior tennis pro at the Royal Racquet Club in Clearwater.
But along with the thrill of rubbing elbows with occasional visitors such as Vitas Gerulaitis and John McEnroe, Long had to show up at 6 a.m. to sweep the courts. "I'd clean till 9 a.m. then put down the broom, pick up my racquet and start teaching," he said. "I learned a good deal of responsibility."
But it was a summer job teaching as a graduate assistant that had the greatest long-term impact on Long, now 38. "They gave me a college algebra book and the syllabus and told me to go teach," he said of the experience at University of South Florida. "On the first day, I remember talking to the kids before class so my voice wouldn't crack. I was so nervous."
In that classroom Long learned that confidence comes from having your material down cold. And there will always be one smart kid in the class who can spot your weakness. "He'll ask the tough questions," he said. "So you'd better be prepared."
Ami Utji, president and chief executive Pilgrim Software Inc., Tampa
From the time Ami Utji was 8 years old, she worked in her mom's clothing shop in Jakarta. So when she came to the States for college, it was only natural that she started a boutique in her dorm room stocked with Indonesian clothes.
Utji, who attended the University of South Florida, remembers the sales pitch she gave at Tupperware-style parties: The clothes were high quality, one of a kind and wrinkle-free.
"My tagline was: There's only one of these in all of Tampa," she said. "I generated enough money to pay my expenses through school and it was a lot of fun."
But Utji, 37, also learned the difficulties of starting a retail operation.
"I didn't have a brand name or the capital to build a brand name, and when I looked at the cost of renting a store, hiring people and doing the advertising, I realized it was a business that would not have survived," she said.
Instead, Utji decided to go into technology, where she could create unique software to differentiate her business from the competition.
"With technology," she said, "I could build a brand."
Gerry Chastelet, president and chief executive Digital Lightwave Inc., Clearwater
Raised on a farm in Niagara Falls, Canada, Gerry Chastelet has a hard time remembering a summer when he didn't work, tending the cows, baling hay, helping with the harvest. But at 16, he went to work for his first real paycheck at a big flour mill and exporter.
Chastelet, 54, remembers standing in the hulls of ships, grabbing and stacking 60- to 100-pound bags of flour as they rolled off a conveyor belt. It was hot and heavy work, but the money was good: $85 a week in 1963.
The following summer, Chastelet found another factory job, this time in a nickel refinery. "It was just as hot," he recalls. "And since I worked in the area where they did the electrolysis, it was very acidic. But the money was better than the flour mill."
Though he remembers bosses who thought tough factory work would make kids grateful for the easy life at school, Chastelet said it wasn't that bad. "It was easier than farm work," he said.
Steve Raymund, chief executive Tech Data Corp., Clearwater
Steve Raymund, 45, worked in the wholesale nursery business for only a couple of weeks as a teenager. But that was long enough to convince him that manual labor wasn't for him.
"I was with a crew of guys up in the woods in the Ocala area, digging out laurel oaks," said Raymund, who remembers the drill: Dig a circular, 8-inch-wide trench around the roots with a short, sharp shovel. Pull the tree out of the ground using the boom on a truck. Ball the roots in burlap, then hoist the tree onto the truck bed.
"We'd be up there two or three days at a time, staying in fleabag motels," Raymund said. "Then we'd bring the trees down here to sell to nurseries. The pay was pretty good, about $6 an hour, but it was akin to convict labor. I made two or three trips and I was done."
Raymund's fallback job was far from glamorous but at least it didn't involve mosquitoes and heavy lifting. After schools and in summers, he worked as a janitor in the local public schools, earning $3.50 an hour.
"It was pretty easy," he recalls. "It was a government job and the workload was probably a little light for the number of hours you got paid."
Wanda Dearth, president and chief operating officer Cryo-Cell International
Wanda Dearth spent the summer of 1970 digging tips out of the bottom of sticky root beer mugs. And had a great time doing it.
As a 16-year-old carhop at the A&W Root Beer stand in her southern Ohio hometown, Dearth said she got lots of tips, as well as attention from young males on the prowl.
"I was probably kind of shy when I started there," said Dearth, now 48. "So you could say the job helped me develop my social skills."
Pay was just 65 cents an hour, but with tips (and her mother's help), Dearth saved enough to buy a used 1966 Mustang.
"It taught me a lot about making customers happy," she said. "But in the Midwest, we had a good work ethic. We worked hard and showed up every day. And that's 80 percent of the battle."
Marty Traber, chairman of corporate practice Foley & Lardner, Tampa
At 15, Marty Traber was driving an old truck around the farmlands of Indiana, digging wells and wielding a pipe wrench.
He earned 50 cents an hour, but there were fringe benefits: Fitting pipes with two, 36-inch pipe wrenches in the summer sun left him tanned and fit. And though Traber remembers that the boss sat in the shade all day drinking coffee, the boss wasn't all bad.
"I'd show up every morning at his house at 5:30 and his wife would feed us breakfast and pack us a lunch," said Traber, 55, who remembers the boss as being ancient. "I thought the old man was old enough for a home. Now I are him." From well-digging, Traber moved the next summer into a job at a steel mill in Gary, Ind. He wore an asbestos suit, worked with hot molten ore and was paid $2 an hour.
"After that, I decided I didn't want to work for a living. I wanted to be a lawyer," Traber said. "This is like coming to a country club every day."
Pam Davis, chief executive Pride Enterprises, St. Petersburg
As a young teen, Pam Davis made money to buy 45-rpm records by sorting through O-rings at her dad's factory in Miami. While his competitors were selling the commercial seals as a commodity in bulk, Davis' dad prided himself on quality. His O-rings were individually inspected by workers such as Pam and her friends.
"We'd get 25 cents per hundred," Davis said. "I'd pack 400 and buy an Elvis record."
The big money came when she was in her mid-teens, however, and a family friend gave her $500 to help rebuild his plane. Davis had the job of rewrapping the wings with fabric, then slathering on the compound that shrank and hardened the covering.
"It was a dirty, messy, stinky, awful job," said Davis, who is in her 50s. "But I learned that mindless work is not all that bad. It's really nice to be able to step back and see the result of your work."
Even better, the plane flew perfectly when she was done.
C.H. "Tripp" Heist, chairman Ablest Inc., Clearwater
Tripp Heist spent the summer of 1969 slapping red lead paint across every available surface of a newly built gas plant in Reader, W.Va.
Base pay was $5.01 an hour, but you got more for spray painting or working off the ground. So Heist was often swinging in a bosun's chair from a 100-foot-high tower or handling a spray gun with no more protection than a painter's mask.
"If my mother had known that, she would have had a heart attack," said Heist, who was between terms at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.
As hired crew, Heist, now 50, remembers feeling that workers and management were on different wavelengths.
"My boss was an old guy who had come up through the trades and he was just interested in production: Just paint as quick as you can," Heist said. "I think today management goes out of its way to find out what the workers' views are, but there wasn't really much of that on this job."
Heist has one regret about that summer: One weekend he faced the choice of working on the spray crew, making "really big money," or taking a road trip with his buddies.
He opted for the work, at $6.55 an hour, and missed Woodstock.
- Kris Hundley can be reached at hundley@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2996.