James A. Amann has been juggling politics and private life since the fifth grade, when he balanced his duties as fifth grade class president with his paper route for the New Haven Register.
The job was wonderful, Amann recalled — save for the heavy Sunday papers he had to chuck onto lawn after lawn and the occasional ornery dog. He even managed to score a brand new 10-speed from his parents for Christmas.
“I loved being a paper boy,” said Amann, Speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives. “It’s very impersonal now. It was very personal then.”
The position as class president afforded Amann a pint-sized taste of politics, and he continued to dabble in student government throughout high school. But it wasn’t until after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, after college, and after entrepreneurial success, that he ventured into politics full-throttle. Now, he’s contemplating a run for governor come 2010.
Amann, a Democrat from Milford, spent about two years delivering papers for the New Haven Register. Thanks to the mother of his girlfriend at the time, he landed his next job doing maintenance and camp counseling at Eisenhower Park in Milford.
It got him outside in the summer, and it was wonderful, he recalled.
From there, he landed an internship at the old Milford Rivet, where his father worked. He worked at Big Buy, a predecessor to modern discount stores, and at the convenience store chain Wawa.
‘Worst Job’
But the “worst job in the world,” Amann said, was working at a car wash. He hated it, but he had to keep it up to pay for the damage he did to his dad’s shiny, new Plymouth Satellite when he took it out for a drive one night.
Jethro Tull was on the stereo, Amann recalled, and “I was going a little bit faster than I should’ve been.”
He hit a patch of leaves and then slammed into a tree.
“My father said, ‘You’re going to pay for it,’” Amann said.
He did pay his debt to his father, but the car wash job was horrible, Amann recalled.
“It was a very motivating experience,” he said. After spending time with the other employees there, who were in their 20s and 30s and had made the car wash a career, he decided that he wanted something more for himself.
So when he was 25 years old, he graduated from car wash employee to rock ‘n’ roll bar owner. Amann, who was in a band from eighth grade until 1992, was a music fanatic. So he converted a rough-and-tumble motorcycle joint right on the beach into a hot destination for the college crowd. Amann brought in big-name performers to juice things up — names like James Cotton Blues Band and the Simms Brothers, who went on to play with David Bowie. The drinking age was 18, and business was good.
But into every life a little rain must fall. For Amann, that rain was a public official by the name of Bill Howard, a “real nasty guy,” Amann recalled. He was a stickler for making restaurants obey the law, regardless of how silly or obscure that law might be.
“He was doing it just to be a buster,” Amann said.
Promise To Listen
Rather than roll over and acquiesce, Amann fought back. He joined the food and liquor association and went to Milford’s Board of Aldermen to voice his concerns. But the officials just sat there, hearing but not listening. One even read the newspaper as Amann spoke.
“It was intimidating,” Amann recalled. “I felt very little when I was done speaking.”
That didn’t sit right with Amann — that public officials could just ignore the citizens they serve. So he decided to run for the Board of Aldermen, declaring along the campaign trail: “I will always listen to you.”
“I promised that if anybody came to city hall, I wouldn’t ignore them,” Amann added.
The promise worked, and Amann served on that board from 1983 to 1990. Although they were able to put their differences aside, Bill Howard was fired a year after Amann was elected.
In 1990, he was elected to the state legislature, and his political star began to rise.