Caddying jobs have their downsides. The task often requires the employee to haul golf clubs around in the heat – usually while bored, as he isn’t the one actually golfing.
But the eavesdropping factor is one often-overlooked upside. For a younger caddy, just hearing golfers’ conversations can be a kind of education. And that was the case for executive director of the Hartford Economic Development Corporation, Sam Hamilton, who caddied in his pre-high school days while growing up in Knoxville, Tenn.
Then in his early teens, Hamilton heard what was on the minds of Knoxville’s doctors, lawyers, businessmen, architects — “The kind of conversations you wouldn’t hear ordinarily” — including business concerns. And many of them, in turn, took an interest in the aspirations and education of the young man carrying their clubs.
Caddying turned into an early networking opportunity for Hamilton, who found himself hired for a number of landscaping crews for the upper-class clientele. He dug and hauled, helping put in bushes and walkways. It was hard work, but hard work was a well-known way of life for Hamilton. His mother had four or five jobs at any given time, often working from 6 a.m. until midnight.
Hamilton himself had a paper route starting around age 10. But unlike most paperboys, he delivered papers in both the mornings and afternoons, working about three hours every day. With his mother working hard to support her family, the paper route was Hamilton’s ticket to stuff like candy, trips to the movies or a bicycle.
Their work ethic must have appealed to a number of people, some of whom helped Hamilton find jobs and even gave financial support. His high school job came from family friends, owners of the Regis Restaurant, who eventually became his benefactors. The restaurant was Knoxville’s premier eatery, the seat of power lunches and fancy dinners for the city’s upper echelon, and Hamilton worked his way up the kitchen ranks, first as a dishwasher, then as a kitchen assistant.
But Hamilton’s primary benefactor was his mother’s boss. She’d spent years cleaning the home of a Knoxville businessman, his wife and three children. Hamilton himself took care of the yard work for his employer, who purposely overpaid for their work.
The man was a role model. In the middle of segregated 1950s and 1960s Tennessee, he genuinely took an interest in helping people, Hamilton said, and that included his black employees. Other white employers were polite and would be happy to give Hamilton work, but this one really cared. He was proof that a successful person could also be generous and take joy in other people’s achievements, Hamilton said.
“At that point, it didn’t matter whether they were black or white,” Hamilton said. “He was probably the biggest influence on me, other than my mother.”
During his college years, consistent with Hamilton’s work ethic, he continued with the long habit of taking on whatever extra work was available. In addition to attending classes, mornings were devoted to doing yard work and afternoons to working at a city playground that offered after-school activities for neighborhood kids from about 2 to 8 p.m.
After graduation, Hamilton worked for Aetna Life and Casualty, and later he worked with a couple of partners in a property investment and management company. Both experiences provided him with a foundation for his work at the development corporation, which provides financial assistance and education for small businesses in Hartford.
