Bobby Clifton wasn't a great student. He'd been suspended a few times from Oscar F. Smith High School and was a regular in the principal's office.
Then, when he was 16, he took a job with the city - mowing grass, fixing up ball fields, and running sports programs on nights and weekends.
The year was 1961. The pay was a dollar an hour. The city was South Norfolk.
Clifton began working in Chesapeake before there was a Chesapeake.
When he announced his retirement Tuesday, Clifton, 64, was the city's longest-serving employee and its director of parks and recreation. His pay was $110,000. Although he's held the department's top job for only seven years, he had a hand in creating or upg rading virtually every community center and park that has accompanied Chesapeake's growth.
He made the announcement surrounded by some top city officials at the Great Bridge Community Center, the city's first, which he helped design and open in 1975.
"Parks and recreation has been my life," Clifton said with emotion. "It's actually saved my life."
Officials praised Clifton's leadership of a department that now includes eight community centers and 67 parks comprising 2,200 acres. They also acknowledged his dedication to Chesapeake.
"Forty-eight-plus years," City Manager William Harrell said. "Think about that. To say that Bobby Clifton is an institution in Chesapeake is to grossly understate the obvious."
Clifton broke down during the first of two standing ovations. His wife, Linda, held his head as he cried. Many in the crowd of 70 were in tears.
"I wish I could stay forever, but it doesn't work that way," Clifton later told a colleague. "I still love what I do."
Clifton said his own troubled youth factored heavily in his lifelong desire to improve parks, recreation centers and sports programs for the city's children.
He said he had been "heading down the wrong path" when South Norfolk's parks and recreation director gave him the job and helped him straighten out his life.
Clifton wore a tie left to him by his high school principal.
"He had faith in me," he said.
Clifton said his own story is a "lesson why we should never give up on children."
He began working at a time when the city had separate athletic programs for black and white youths, and he saw the programs integrate.
Clifton told the audience that he started working for the city "before a lot of you were even thought about."
He had a front-row seat for Chesapeake's growth, which came along with new demands for parks and recreation centers. Most of Chesapeake's community centers were modeled after the Great Bridge center that Clifton helped design.
Clifton said one of his biggest challenges came in the last year, as the city pursued a rezoning of 30 acres in Northwest River Park so the YMCA could build a swimming pool and summer camp. In the face of neighbors who protested building a camp in the park, Clifton said it was important to give the community a pool that will be open to the public when the camp attendees aren't using it.
His wife said Clifton still gets giddy about parks and park projects and insists on dropping by community centers and parks when they travel.
"No matter where we are, we have got to go visit parks," Linda Clifton said. "It's in his blood. That's why I love him."
Source hamptonroads.com
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