Lum Wright Jr. smiled and laughed as walked around his new workplace Wednesday afternoon, surrounded by cars instead of athletes and coaches as he embarked on his second career.

After 40 years in the world of high school athletics, the longtime athletic director of the Vicksburg Warren School District will spend the next few in the business world.

Wright, who was the VWSD’s athletic director since 1997, retired in December at the end of the fall semester to take a job as the business development manager at Atwood Chevrolet. The 62-year-old said a combination of his age and being vested in the Mississippi state employees retirement plan led him to a point where it was time to try something new.

“I knew I had my years in and my age was good,” Wright said. “Last January my wife (Mary Pat Wright) and I started weighing options and I started checking on jobs in our community. Mr. Alan Atwood had something and it all fell into place.”

Bill Elkins is Wright’s temporary replacement as VWSD’s interim athletic director. The 58-year-old came out of retirement as a favor to VWSD superintendent Chad Shealy, who he previously worked with in the Hinds County School District, and signed a 90-day contract.

The contract covers 90 school days and will go through the end of the school year. Elkins said he had no plans to pursue the job on a full-time basis.

“I’m retired from public schools, so I can only do 90 days. If they find somebody that can come in and take over (before then), I’ll step aside. It’s just until they can find somebody,” said Elkins, who had been retired for five years. “When I stepped away from it, I stepped away from it. When this came up I said hey, for 90 days I can go get back in it and have a little fun with it. I appreciate Mr. Shealy for giving me that opportunity.”

Elkins previously worked as an administrator at Byram and said Wright was a big help in dealing with the Little Six Conference, a junior high league that includes a number of Jackson-area schools as well as Vicksburg and Warren Central Junior Highs.

“Lum helped me tremendously, because I had no clue what it was. That part of it, I owe him a lot for helping me out in the Little Six,” Elkins said.

Wright moved from Texas to Vicksburg in 1971 when his father, Lum Wright Sr., became the head football coach at Warren Central. The younger Wright was a star football player at WC and then at Memphis State, where he began his coaching career in 1976.

Wright Jr. had coaching stints at several Mississippi high schools — including Magee, where he won the Class 3A football championship in 1989 — before coming back to his adopted hometown in the mid-1990s. He became the VWSD’s athletic director in March 1997 and held the position for nearly two decades.

Like any long-tenured employee, Wright had his share of successes and regrets. He said he regretted not being able to do more to upgrade the school district’s aging athletic facilities.

While school districts in Clinton, Madison and Rankin County — all frequent opponents of both Vicksburg and Warren Central — installed artificial turf and jumbotrons, tight budgets in Warren County have made it a challenge simply to maintain what’s already in place.

“I always wished we had the money to have the facilities that the community and kids needed,” Wright said. “It always hurt me not to have facilities like the other schools have.”

As for his successes, Wright said he was proud of keeping the school district’s athletic department on a relatively even keel over the years. It wasn’t always easy to do with two schools that share an intense rivalry both on the athletic field and in the community, he said.

“When you deal with two schools, and two communities, you have to walk a fine line to make sure you treat both of them fairly and help develop their growth and help both of them be successful,” he said. “I hope I was able to do that. I also had the pleasure of working with a number of young coaches, and I hope I was able to help some of them become successful.”