Not your average 9 to 5.

These individuals have found professional and personal fulfillment in jobs most people only dream about

WHEN IT COMES TO CARVING OUT A career, African Americans have never had the luxury of floating around for years in an attempt to find themselves. And yet, knowing what you truly want and love to do is crucial to finding a place in the working world that brings you real fulfillment.

These days especially, with stiffer-than-ever competition and steeper-than-ever students loans to repay, the search for a career that's perfectly in synch with your talents, skills and--if you're really lucky--dreams is often checked by the need to snag steady paycheck you can get.

But there are still those who are determined enough, crafty enough or just plain lucky enough to find that just-right vocation. Here are four individuals with unique careers that suit them to a tee and afford them the lifestyles they want. In forging a career, what more could you hope for?

Robb Armstrong, Syndicated Cartoonist

Robb Armstrong has an enviable life, and he knows it. At 34, he is married to his college sweetheart, has an adorable three-year-old daughter, a comfortable home and the career he has dreamed of--and striven toward--since childhood.

Armstrong is the creator of JumpStart, a comic strip that appears seven days a week in about 250 newspapers nationwide, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago SUH Times, New York Daily News and, Armstrong's hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is now an author as well, with three books of a five-book contract with HarperCollins already under his belt.

The youngest of five children raised in Philly by a devoted and supportive mother, Armstrong began drawing cartoons as a preschooler. What he may have lacked in drawing ability as a child, he more than made up for in enthusiasm and confidence. "My mother really thought I had extraordinary ability," he says, laughing. "I did not."

His mother's steadfast belief in his talents sustained him, even after she died during his freshman year at Syracuse University. Armstrong majored in advertising design, but spent much of his time as art director of the college's newspaper, the Daily Orange, which also ran his first strip, Hector. Featuring a black college student with heavy attitude, Hector was a campus hit that Armstrong was sure would take off in the real world.

After graduation, Armstrong started pitching Hector to syndicates that he found listed in a trade book, while working days as an $18,000-a year art director at an ad agency. He thrived in his day job, moving from agency to agency, gaining in experience, industry acclaim and income. Meanwhile, Hector met with nothing but rejection. But Armstrong persisted.

"It was tough, but my wife kept telling me, `You have a gift. Don't give up,'" he recalls. He didn't give up but he did change his strategy. "It finally hit me to get off of Hector, who was clearly not going to be the next Garfield, and find work as a cartoonist."

Armstrong began drawing cartoons on commission, for $100 here, $50 there. He also developed a new strip about two policemen, one black, one white. Then came a breakthrough. In 1988, United Feature Syndicate took an interest in his cops strip and offered him a development contract. For $2,500, he would work on the strip exclusively with United Feature, giving them the right of first refusal once the strip was fully fleshed out.

Infusing the characters with more of his own real-life experiences proved the key to Armstrong's success.

Unlike Hector, his new characters' speech is rarely peppered with slang. Nor do these characters make a habit of attacking race-based issues head-on--something he has been criticized for by some black readers. However, their lives do regularly amplify the uniquely black experience, often in subtle and unpredictable ways.

For those who wish JumpStart was a bit more in-your-face, Armstrong shrugs, and responds: "It's painful to be misunderstood, but it's less important for me to be understood than to work at understanding others. Doing that is the only way I can portray my characters in a real way."

By all accounts, Armstrong's efforts are paying off big. JumpStart has gone from syndication in about 40 papers in 1989, (each paying between $10 and $100 a week, depending on their circulation) to its current 250 newspapers. Armstrong now commands six figures for his strip, up from $30,000 in the early days. But it wasn't until last year, when he inked a book deal with HarperCollins for another "six figures" that he finally quit his day job as an art director. A year ago, JumpStart: A Love Story was published. His third book, an illustrated children's story called Drew and the Homeboy Question (the second in a series of children's books), will arrive in bookstores later this month. But Armstrong still has plenty of fresh ideas for JumpStart. The strip is now being shopped around for television possibilities, and Armstrong uses its popularity as a platform for speaking and teaching engagements.

Of this latest turn in his career, Armstrong says, "It's really important to me to let kids know that this is a possibility for them. There was no one to tell me that, and yet I am living my dreams. I want them to believe that they can too."

Zana Billue

Recipe Development Specialist

TV dinners and powdered potatoes were not to be found in Zana Billue's house when she was a child. Nor were frozen fries, pizza or pudding. "My mother was an excellent cook," says the 33-year-old Brooklyn native. "Her attitude was always, `Why buy that stuff? I can make it better.'"

In fact, she could--and so could her daughter, as Billue recalls. "By the time I was 10, I would compete with my mom in the kitchen. Imagine the nerve! But I loved working with food, and it came easily to me. I knew then that that's what I wanted to do," she says.

That was then. These days, Billue (pronounced bil-loo) consumes more prepackaged food in a day than many people eat in a week, and she loves it. Or, rather, she loves her job as a recipe development specialist for Nestle Frozen Food Co. in Cleveland.

After three years of rejected applications, Billue was hired by Nestle last March to work in its test kitchens, refining and improving recipes in the company's Stouffer's, Stouffer's Lean Cuisine, Red Box and Contadina product lines. Four days a week, Billue, along with several food scientists and other culinary experts, runs taste tests. dissecting Nestle products ingredient by ingredient, making sure they meet consumers' standards for quality and taste. How do they do this? Mainly by eating.

"I can't tell you how much Salisbury steak and macaroni and cheese I've eaten," says Billue. "Those are our No. 1 sellers around the world, so we're constantly refining them or trying to come up with variations that work, like broccoli, macaroni and cheese, or beef, macaroni and cheese."

How tough could this job be? It either tastes good or not, right? Not quite. There's a bit more to it. "You know if the cheese is too salty or tOO grainy," Billue explains. "Or if the meat--I don't even eat red meat at home--is too tough or too mealy. One thing we're always sensitive to is that mass-produced taste, that boxed-food taste. You want to avoid that at all cost.

Billue has also tried to avoid whatever bores and depresses her. Her criminal justice major at Temple University did just that, so she decided not to pursue the legal career she once planned. Instead, after graduating in 1986, she worked a few standard post-college office jobs before applying to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, in 1991. She was accepted and received a two-year scholarship.

"When I went to college, I didn't even know there were cooking schools," says Billue. "And the only careers I heard about in cooking were totally unappealing to me." The most obvious--restaurant work--involved long hours, meager benefits, low pay and little security, she says. Her postgraduate job, managing the dining rooms at Coopers & Lybrand's world headquarters in New York, also proved disappointing. So, after two years, she quit and went to Cleveland, home of Nestle and several relatives, hoping both would take her in.

"I had applied to Nesde when I was still in school, but they were looking for food scientists, not people with a culinary background like me," says Billue. "I thought being in Cleveland might give me an edge." It didn't. She applied, and was rejected again. She took a job as a food writer for a local black newspaper, which she liked. But Billue still longed to work with food and for Nestle. Finally, a woman she met at a Christmas party in 1995, who worked for Nestle, provided the breakthrough she needed.

"I know this sounds like a ridiculous plug, because it's like the company slogan, but Nesde really is the very best," she says, laughing. "They're the biggest, and they cover almost the entire gamut of foods--entrees, candy, ice cream, cookies. They hit every taste bud."

Taste buds are an essential commodity in Billue's business and, although she's gotten good reviews for her work, she concedes that she has a lot to learn. As a relative beginner, she makes in the range of $30,000 a year. "Most of the people I work with have been there for years," she explains. "They can tell you every ingredient m a meal, lust by tasting it. They know when there's too much basil and not enough thyme. They know when you tried to sneak in a pinch too much salt or vinegar or cilantro. I'm not there yet."

But she's getting there. Around the holidays, Billue and her colleagues had to develop new ways to prepare some old standards. Her Topsy-Turvy Apple Bread Pudding, which uses rum, raisins, brown sugar and vanilla to transform a rather unappealing-looking frozen bread pudding into a tantalizing confection. was featured in one of the product line's brochures. As for her own homemade meals--take lasagna, for example--how does Stouffer's frozen version stack up? Billue grins broadly: "Let's just say, no comment."

Melissa Johnson

Industrial Hygienist

Although, officially, Melissa Johnson's hours are fairly normal--8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., five days a week--they are anything but routine. In fact, a single day might find her at a local Bergen County firehouse at 4:30 a.m., educating firemen just coming off the graveyard shift about new standards in protection against toxic chemicals. Then it's on to a local manufacturing plant to interview employees about a rash of illnesses going around, taking samples to investigate what on-the-job conditions may be contributing to them. And, if she's on call that night, her pager may beckon her in the wee hours to the site of a train wreck involving hazardous chemical emissions.

What sounds fairly exotic to most people is plain, simple and, sometimes, even mundane to Melissa Johnson, who really doesn't see her job as unique at all. But make no mistake, she loves what she does. She sees it as extremely important and interesting, and the fact that it encompasses such a broad variety of sciences (biology, toxicology, epidemiology, statistics, engineering--the list goes on) keeps it challenging. So, what exactly does Johnson do?

For starters, as an industrial hygienist for Bergen County, New Jersey, she assesses employee health hazards in industry, responding to complaints and initiating investigations. These hazards can range from the potential for injury related to working with certain equipment, to the possibility of lethal contamination following a chemical spill. Also a member of the Bergen County Hazardous Materials Response Team, she goes into contaminated sites to take samples and analyze the extent of any damage, exposure and ongoing hazard.

"Yes," Johnson, 31, admits reluctantly, "I'm one of those people who suits up like an astronaut to go into contaminated sites." But more often, the six-year county veteran is doing less visible, less dangerous, but no less important work, like teaching police officers how to protect themselves when handling blood at crime scenes where HIV contamination is always a possibility.

She also teaches them to be aware of everyday hazards. For example, there are chemicals in fingerprint ink and dusting powder that can be carcinogenic, Johnson notes. It's her job to keep up with the constant stream of new chemicals and products being used in industry, their risks and federal, state and local regulations governing their use. The list of agencies whose rules she must enforce is virtually endless, encompassing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Department of Environmental Protection, the Department of Labor and the Department of Community Affairs--to name just a few.

Johnson learned the basics of her profession at Ciba-Geigy, where she was hired as an industrial hygiene technician in 1988, straight out of Cook College, Rutgers University. "Like everybody else, I was premed," Johnson recalls. "When I realized I didn't want to continue with medicine and be in school forever, my advisor, who headed the environmental studies department, steered me toward industrial hygiene."

It quickly proved the right move for her. "I liked it," she says. "It was a new, interesting and multidisciplinary field, so there are broad and wide opportunities out there for it." She went on to get her master's degree in environmental and occupational health sciences from New York's Hunter College.

Ultimately, Johnson plans to become certified in a number of specialties within her field, en route to owning an environmental and occupational consulting firm. (She already does some consulting work in her off-hours.) In a field with few African Americans or women. certification will be particularly important for her, she notes. But once certified, says the $55,000-a-year county employee, she should easily double her current salary. "Getting certified is difficult. But it's the top a the line. The need for our services is so great that once you're certified, the sky's the limit income," she says. In the meantime, though, Johnson enjoys work and relishes the fact there s no such thing as al age day."

Cheryl "C.J."Johnson

Gossip Columnist

Like any seasoned journalist, Cheryl Johnson has a list of stringent ground rules to lay down before agreeing to be interviewed:

You can use my full name just one time, " she commands, "After that you have to call me C.J." Why? She answers indignantly, as if that's the dumbest question ever waged: "I don't like my name. I keep it because it's important to my mother. But it's dull." Okay. Next?

"Call me 'black.' I'm not 'African American.' It takes up too much ink, and I've never been to Africa." Got it.

There are a few other guidelines (like personally approving her photo for the article).

They are concrete and nonnegotiable. For instance, when it comes to her age, C.J. will say only, "I'm in my forties." Why the ambiguity? "A woman who would tell you her age would tell you anything.

It's an ironic line, especially coming from Minneapolis' most notorious gossip columnist, a woman who makes her living skewering celebrities and politicians on the very public pages of the Star Tribune. One of her most frequent targets is the Twin Cities' brightest star, the musician still most commonly called Prince, whom C.J. gleefully refers to as "Symbolina." Yet, despite her seemingly incessant sniping at "The Paisley One," C.J. kept to herself the tips she received last fall about the health problems of his newborn son, letting Enquirer break the story. Asked why, she says simply, "I have boundaries."

C.J., who in recent years has garnered almost as much media attention as some of her own celebrity targets, is routinely described as "A Mouth"--sassy, irreverent and fearless. And, in fact, within two minutes of listening to her--or even her answering machine--that is exactly the impression given. But one senses there is more to this bold, funny woman, and that she guards her more complex sides well. "I will say things other people will not, but..." she hesitates. "Here it is again: I do have boundaries."

While her job of the last eight years may be perfectly suited to her personality, it's not exactly what she set out to do. A native of Oklahoma City, who moved with her family throughout the South as a child, C.J. majored in photography and journalism at Bennett College, a black women's school in Greensboro, North Carolina. She then received a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where she earned a master's in journalism. After stints covering the courts for papers in Flint and Grand Rapids, Michigan, she was recruited to cover the same beat for the Star Tribune in 1984. For the first time, she did not do well.

In typical flip C.T. style, she recalls, "I had a personality clash with an editor who I didn't know had a personality, and was banished to the suburban beat." She may be laughing now, but in a rare serious flash, she concedes that it painful, jarring time in her in C.J. stuck it out, though, and was invited back into the fold in 1989 to start a new column with her colleague Eric "Eskola.

The column hit a nerve, and Eskola bailed out after four months. "He was a white guy," C.J. observes. "He'd never ruffled a feather in his life. I come from a race of people who can be hated on sight because of the color of their skin. I do not worry about what people think of me."

It's a good thing, because C.J.'s TIPS line is frequently jammed with hateful, racist phone messages. She shrugs them off. "I grew up in the South, so I've heard all the really creative racial slurs there are," she quips.

With a salary hovering somewhere around $70,000 (needless to say, she won't specify), C.J., who is single and has no children, says she is "doing better than 90% of the women in Minnesota." However, she adds, "I think I should make as much as the high-profile white men at this paper, and I don't." Perhaps, but she gets at least as much attention (she's been featured in USA Today and the New York Times magazine, in addition to a few local magazines), a fact that has interfered with the way she goes about her job. "All my life I've made a job of observing people," she explains. "It's hard to observe people when they're busy looking back at you." But, she adds, it doesn't make it any less fun.