What are the best jobs in the Midlands?
There is an old adage that if you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life.
Most people aren’t fortunate enough to achieve that goal. They toil in anonymity to make the money to match the month’s bills.
But for those fortunate few who love their jobs, life is a blissful journey, more about engagement, satisfaction, fun and growth rather than time clocks, evaluations and paychecks.
The jobs usually aren’t the world’s highest paying, nor do they have the highest profiles or the most power.
That’s not the point.
The jobs that make people the happiest stir the creative soul and engage the brain with interesting places, situations or people. Most times, no two days are the same.
For this Labor Day, we searched for five of the coolest, most engaging and most fun jobs in Columbia and the Midlands. Here is what we found.
Park Ranger
Name: Jon Manchester
Age: 32
Employer: Congaree National Park
When Jon Manchester graduated from college in Ohio, he didn’t want to spend his life poring through dusty databanks looking for lost nuggets of fact or historical understanding. And he didn’t want to spend his days in a classroom teaching history to students who may or may not be interested in the subject.
Manchester wanted to be a park ranger.
“I wanted to be out in the field,” he said. “I wanted to teach about an historical event at the place where it happened. I wanted to make people have a personal one-on-one connection with the event right there. People get more out of it when they do that.”
Oddly enough, there is no college course to be a park ranger. You start as a volunteer or low-level employee at a park and work your way in. “A lot of us take different tracks to do it,” he said.
Manchester, now 32, applied to just about every park he could find. “Anywhere and everywhere.”
In 2009, he was hired by Fort Raleigh on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. From there he moved to the National Mall in Washington, Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and Appomattox Courthouse, Va.
Today, Manchester is a ranger at Congaree National Park – formerly the Congaree Swamp National Monument. His days are spent teaching visitors another aspect of the park besides tall trees.
“People come out expecting a forest, a wilderness, and they see that,” he said. “But there have been a lot of humans involved with the Congaree.”
Indians hunted in it. Hernando de Soto explored it. Farmers and plantation owners tried to tame it. Slaves escaped into it. Loggers harvested it.
“I come from a family of teachers,” Manchester said.
He also conducts canoe tours of the swamp, where people can get some close, personal contact with otters, beavers, snakes, the occasional alligator and lots and lots of snakes.
“People are used to seeing snakes at zoos behind glass,” he said. “This is very different. I love seeing them learn that the snakes are more afraid of them than they are of the snakes.”
Puppeteer
Name: John Scollon
Age: 50
Employer: Columbia Marionette Theatre
For John Scollon, marionettes run in the family.
His mother, Allie, has been a puppeteer since the 1950s. And in 1989 the two founded the Columbia Marionette Theatre, which has been educating and entertaining children and adults alike through the art of puppetry since before the Vista was the Vista.
The theater first opened in an old warehouse on Huger Street – a building that now houses Fulton Studios near the Publix grocery. In 1995, the theater moved to an 8,400-square-foot, custom-made building – a big, castle-like structure just west of Huger Street near the city water plant. It leases the land from the city for $1 a year. The theater was built with $180,000 in donations.
The theater has shows on Saturdays for $5 a ticket. And Scollon and his wife, Karri, travel to another 300 performances a year in South Carolina, mostly schools and libraries, sometimes doing four shows a day.
“I believe I have the best job in the world,” he said. “It’s never the same. It never gets old. Once you get done with one project, you move on to the next. And I get to travel and perform with my wife.”
Scollon said that creating the shows, building the puppets and putting together a new production can be challenging. But the performances can be joyful.
“The reaction of the kids is what makes it worth it,” he said. “I love to see the smiles on the kinds faces. And grown ups , too.”
Zoo Keeper
Name: Alyson Goodwyn
Age: 27
Employer: Riverbanks Zoo
Alyson Goodwyn spends her days in the company of giraffes, tapirs and babirusas, which are wild boars from Indonesia.
And for the past four months, she has been training a 496-pound sea lion named Baja.
Baja came from the San Diego Zoo, which didn’t have enough room for all of its animals. He is part of the new sea lion exhibit that opened four months ago at Riverbanks Zoo.
Each day at 10:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., Alyson and other keepers put the four sea lions and one harbor seal through their paces. They feed them and check their overall health through a series of exercises, much to the delight of the large crowds that gather to watch. It’s called “enrichment” for the animals, and serves to keep them alert and active.
Goodwyn, of Temperance, Mich., worked part-time at the Toledo Zoo in Ohio and interned at the Dublin Zoo in Ireland before coming to Riverbanks six years ago. Some days she works with Baja, and some days she feeds and enriches her other animals.
“I have the best job in Columbia because I get to work with animals on a daily basis, which is awesome,” she said. “And no two days are ever the same.”
Fireworks technician
Name: Brian Pruett
Age: 58
Employer: Pyrotecnico
On many Friday and Saturday nights this summer, Brian Pruett was parked on a large, man-made hill of dirt outside the centerfield fence at Spirit Communications Park, home of the Columbia Fireflies minor league baseball team.
Pruett, of Newberry, used to teach auto body repair at Newberry High School. But when his son, Justin, became a fireworks technician with the national fireworks company Pyrotecnico, Brian would go along to help. “I had a commercial driver’s license, so I started going on trips with him,” said Brian, as he prepared to set off the fireworks after Saturday’s game.
When Brian retired from his teaching job, he got a license from the State Fire Marshal and began setting up shows himself. In addition to the Fireflies games, Brian travels all over South Carolina doing shows, such as Sunday’s Southern 500 NASCAR race at Darlington.
It takes about three or four hours to set up the fireworks. And Pruett gets to enjoy at least a little bit of the event for free. “I like to travel,” he said. “I like to be out and about. And getting into things free is a bonus.”
Sometimes Pruett uses a hand flare to set off the fireworks – “You just walk up and light them.” But most of the time they are set off using electric current. “It’s much safer that way,” he said.
In addition to Fourth of July and New Year’s celebrations and sporting events, Pruett also sets off shows at weddings and private gatherings, often at beautiful locations like Charleston’s Middleton Place plantation. “Sometimes I go with my wife,” Belinda, he said. “And we make it into a little mini-vacation.”
Choir director
Name: Darryl Izzard
Age: 45
Employer: Benedict College
Darryl Izzard grew up in Kershaw County and learned to play the piano as a child by placing his hand on his grandmother’s fingers.
His grandmother, Beola Jones, was director of music at Camden’s Ebenezer AME Zion Church and his grandfather, Ed Jones, was the pastor.
Izzard went to the University of South Carolina on a music scholarship, where he became proficient on five instruments and voice. He then discovered that while classical and jazz music was rewarding, his true calling went to his roots: gospel. “Gospel music is different because it carries a message of hope,” he said.
Izzard later transferred to Benedict College “because they had a heckuva gospel choir.” Today, Izzard is director of that choir, which has won best collegiate gospel choir nationally for 13 of the past 15 years. He credits that achievement to the choir members, and a deep foundation in faith.
“To have a championship choir you have to have champions in the choir,” he said.
Izzard said he has the best job in Columbia “because I get to make a difference every day.
“I used to worry about making a living,” he said. “But my grandmother said ‘do what you love and the money will follow.’ That’s true. Today, I feel like I’m getting paid for eating ice cream. I learn as much as I teach, and it grows me.”
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This story was originally published September 4, 2016 at 5:00 PM.