It is fitting that turning heads and getting someone’s attention is something Andrea Obston learned about from her first few jobs.
Obston, who runs her own marketing and communications firm in Bloomfield, got her first experience publicizing a product at just 14 years old.
When California-based Hobie Cat launched its sailboat product line on the East Coast, Obston was hired as a model to promote the vessels.
If the brightly colored masts of the new watercraft didn’t get a lot of attention, the company counted on teenage models — like Obston — to do the trick.
“I was hired to ride up and down the Gold Coast of Long Island, and I had to make sure that I got wet,” Obston recalled. “My job was to be seen on a sailboat in a wet T-shirt. The Hobie Cat was so bright and shiny, it attracted a lot of attention.”
That wasn’t Obston’s first gig aimed at getting attention. Before she was eligible to get her working papers at the age of 16, Obston worked for her stepfather, an orthodontist, as a dental chair assistant.
He paid her more than minimum wage — $1.75 per hour, she recalls. “A lot of his patients were teenagers, she said, and the teenage boys made less of a fuss if a 14-year-old girl was there.”
It was an effective strategy, Obston said, noting that having a teenage girl in the office kept the male patients from getting out of line.
Obston wore a white uniform and assisted her stepfather by handing him dental instruments, making dental impressions and developing X-rays.
Earning her own money allowed her to achieve an important hallmark of adolescence — her own telephone line.
“It was big deal, a mark of independence,” she said. “My mother allowed me to have my own phone line, but I had to work to pay for it.”
In contrast, today’s teenagers aren’t all that interested in having their own telephone line at home, she said, noting that when she presented her teenage son with his own phone line at 14, it didn’t have the same kind of impact it had on her at that age.
Cell phones are where it’s at with today’s adolescents, Obston said.
