Patches of black tar in the roadways always bring back memories for Arthur Renner.
Just not necessarily good ones.
The executive director of the Connecticut Society of Certified Public Accountants spent a summer laying boiling tar in cracked highways around his home state of Indiana. It was the summer after his freshman year in college, and Renner can sum up the experience rather quickly: “It was hot. Best tan I ever had.”
Renner had grown up with a couple prior jobs, starting as a paperboy around age 11. He’d also worked as a shopkeeper at a local golf course in his early teens, selling golf balls and getting customers started on their golf rounds.
“That was extremely boring,” he said. “It wasn’t very challenging.”
But for his first adult job, Renner remembers that initial summer on the highways. He would show up at a state highway regional center by 7:30 a.m., then make the drive out to wherever his newest assignment was. It was sometimes 9 a.m. by the time he and the rest of the crew got to work – but an earlier arrival wouldn’t have made any difference, anyway, since the 115-degree tar already guaranteed the work would be warm, to say the least.
Of the three-man crew, one person would spray the tar from the back of a tank, another would use a broom-like contraption to push the tar into the cracks in the road. The most boring – and dangerous – job was to stand by the side of the road with a “slow” sign to warn passing motorists. Renner recalled one time when a driver thought it would be cute to act like he was going to run over the crewmember. The driver swerved his car at the crewman, but the scared worker reacted by chucking his metal sign at the car, cracking its windshield.
The driver was a little sheepish after that, Renner said.
The next summer’s job was much better: Renner assisted state surveyors as they hit the highways with their instruments. Much easier, he said.
But when it came time to pick a career, Renner came off the highway and got a finance degree, with his first post-graduate job as a securities analyst for an insurance company in Indianapolis. He noticed there that his favorite parts of the work involved accounting-style numbers crunching.
He’d always thought he’d probably go back to get a graduate degree, so he decided to study accounting the next time around. Renner passed the accountancy exam, got public accounting experience and eventually became the vice president of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in New York.
He now heads up a statewide organization of accountants, where he works far away from his original job on southern Indiana’s highways. Laying tar and surveying the land were starter jobs for plenty of kids like him, and most have probably found much different work in the years since.
“Most everybody doing that at the time were college kids, and God only knows where they are now,” Renner said.
