By Bob Arnold
After 10 years, Randy Chance has left Lake Lincoln State Park to begin a new life in retirement.
Chance, who grew up in the Lake Lincoln area and watched the park evolve from the start of its construction in 1979, joined the staff at the facility, which had become part of the state park system in 1996, to help address its maintenance issues in 2014. He leaves the park as Grounds Supervisor Team Leader (“all I have to do is look in a mirror to see my team,” he jokes) responsible for cleaning its physical facilities, general maintenance, electrical and plumbing systems, delimbing and other landscaping, among other needs.
As part of a logging family, Chance’s work life started at a tender age during the summers, but while he was cutting down trees for the family business between 11 and 19 years old, he also found time to play baseball on the field he remembers was on the current location of the Wesson Attendance Center (WAC) gymnasium and earn the Eagle rank in the Wesson Boy Scout Troop guided by then Co-Lin basketball Coach Alton Ricks.
He went to elementary school through the eighth grade in the initial building on the site of what became WAC after the addition of the ninth through twelfth grade facility. He graduated from the high school housed at Co-Lin in 1979.
After high school, Chance stayed around the area for a few years – first as a carpenter for Troy Pitts at the former Timberlane camp grounds and the company doing construction at the new Lake Lincoln Park next door, then as a delivery man for Georgetown Furniture. Soon, however, he was off to the offshore oil fields and living in Leesville, Louisiana, and moving on to do oil exploration as a seismograph operation for Jackson-based GFS from Lafayette, Louisiana. With Goss Fire Protection headquartered in Forest, Mississippi, from 1984-1996, Chance was dispatched throughout the continental United States to install sprinkler fire protection systems in airplane hangars.
In 1996, Chance returned to his boyhood home on Mission Hill Road and started working with his mother, who was the recipient of 20 sewing machines from the retiring owner of T’s Apparel at Crystal Springs, to produce and sell their own line of t-shirts. “We changed the name of the company to Chance Apparel and made specialty t-shirts for organizations and events such as the New Orleans Jazz Festival,” he says. “Mom did the sewing with employees as needed, and I was a cutter, boxer and shipper.”
Chance worked as he was able at the apparel manufacturer, but devoted most of his time to his ailing father from 2006 to 2014, hunting and fishing with him and caring for him as .needed. After his father died, Lake Lincoln State Park hired him.
In his retirement, Chance will continue to live where he grew up -- a house built by his parents, Gerald and Bonnie Chance, on ten acres of 100 acres in which he now shares ownership with his brother Greg Chance, also a retiree, and his sister Pam Stamps, a Brookhaven accountant. At age five, Chance came to the old home on Mission Hill Road next to the Baptist Church, which shares the name of the back country byway. There he is planning a future in which he enjoys his hunting and fishing pastimes and “working on stuff,” including the old house and his truck.
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