City To Remember, Honor Hayden Wagers Friday
The City of Dalton will honor and remember the late Hayden Lamar Wagers with a ceremony in his honor Friday, May 6th at the Public Works Department. Wagers touched countless lives as a teacher and coach and also worked for the city as a police officer and also a leader with the Public Works Department. As part of the ceremony, the Public Works facilities will be renamed in Wagers’ honor. Friday’s ceremony will take place at 11:00 am at the facilities on Elm Street.
Hayden Wagers passed away February 18th at the age of 86. He served in the US Army as a military policeman and continued his work as a law enforcement officer for six years with the Dalton Police Department while studying and playing college football at the University of Chattanooga (which later became the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga). After college he began his 34-year career as a teacher including the last 15 teaching special education at Dalton High School. Wagers also served as an assistant football coach and as the school’s golf coach. He was also heavily involved in the city’s Public Works Department, leading groups of high school boys both from his football teams and also other teens on a summer mowing crew. After retiring from the school system in 1996, he moved to the Public Works Department and worked full-time there for many years.
“He was kind of affectionately known by a lot of us over at Public Works as ‘coach’ because he was a coach over at the high school for so long,” said city administrator Andrew Parker who worked for Wagers as a teenager on the summer mowing crew. “What always stood out to me with Coach Wagers was always his work ethic. Even at an older age, or a more seasoned age, he outworked a lot of the strong high school boys… and also his attention to detail, his professionalism. He took so much pride and really instilled throughout the Public Works Department what it meant to take pride in keeping the right of way up and doing everything with excellence.”
“He was very passionate about his work, he was a big man with a big heart,” said Alex Rice, the traffic division supervisor at Public Works. “He would do anything for anybody and he was a pleasure to get to work with and be a friend. He took his job seriously and he was a hard worker.”
“Hayden Wagers meant a lot to me, he meant a lot to Dalton, period,” said Mayor David Pennington. “Growing up, I’ve worked around a lot of hard-working people, I’ve never seen anyone work as hard as Hayden Wagers worked.
“I think [naming the facilities after Wagers] is perfect and I think Hayden would really, really enjoy that. We’re going to have a cookout after we do the presentation and Hayden every year after he was retired would pay for a lunch for all of the guys out there.”
