Oral History Program Karen Fairbanks Interviewed by Lorrie Rands & Kandice Harris 4 April 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Karen Fairbanks Interviewed by Lorrie Rands & Kandice Harris 4 April 2019 Copyright © 2022 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Beyond Suffrage Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Fairbanks, Karen, an oral history by Lorrie Rands & Kandice Harris, 4 April 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Karen Fairbanks 4 April 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Karen Fairbanks, conducted on April 4, 2019, in the Stewart Library Archives Conference Room, by Lorrie Rands and Kandice Harris. Karen discusses her life, her memories at Weber State University, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. LR: Today is April 4, 2019, we are in the Stewart Library Archives Conference Room with Karen White Fairbanks for the Women 2020 Project. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting the interview and Kandice Harris is with me as well. It’s about 11:15 in the morning. Okay. Thank you so much for your willingness to sit and do this, I really appreciate it. Let’s just start with when and where were you born? KF: I was born here in Ogden in 1950, which makes it easy to remember my birthdate. It is round a number for a birth year, and I was born at the old Dee Hospital. LR: Okay, and the day? KF: July 12th. That makes me sixty-eight, almost sixty-nine. LR: Thank you, I really am terrible at math. So you were born in Ogden, were you raised here in Ogden? KF: I was raised here. My mother started out her life in Logan but moved to Ogden when she was a child and my dad was always raised here, so second generation I would say. LR: What were your parents’ names? KF: Bob White, or W. Robert White, and Georgia Anderson White. LR: Where exactly did you grow up in Ogden? 2 KF: I grew up on the East Bench. My first home, when I can remember very much, was on Marilyn Drive, which is just above Harrison 27th street area. Then when I was nine, my parents built a home on Oakridge Drive, which was between 35th and 36th above Harrison also. LR: Okay, what did your dad do for a living? KF: He worked for a family business, and I did too later on. My grandfather William Rulon White started the business in the 1940’s. He had gone boom and bust a few times before he figured out what would make a good living for him and his family. The name of the company was W.R. White Company, and the company manufactured concrete pipe. My father worked for that company, and then my husband and my brothers did, and then I eventually did. We sold that company to Oldcastle, which is a conglomerate in manufacturing materials around the world. That was in 2000. LR: Okay, I’m going to kind of stay back when you were younger. KF: Okay. LR: How many siblings did you have? KF: I was the oldest of six, all born in nine years, so we’re very close in age. There were four girls and two boys. LR: What was one of your earliest memories of living in Ogden? KF: Probably just being surrounded by a lot of family. My grandparents, both sets of grandparents, were social friends as well. When we had family parties or get-togethers, both sets of grandparents were always there. I thought that was very normal. It was a really lovely, wonderful existence to grow up in, and then as I 3 mentioned, my mother kept having children and it was just like puppies everywhere. I was the oldest puppy. It was really fun, but it my mother was very organized and somewhat regimented, but warm. It sounds like it was chaotic, but there was a lot of order there and she kept us all in line. My father was always at work, that’s what dads do or did. It was a very warm, wonderful childhood. My parents bought my grandparents’ house on Marilyn Drive and that was the house my mother had grown up in. We knew all the neighbors. Lot of playing outside with neighbors, unsupervised play, which seems rare now, and outside until all hours and lots of friends in the neighborhood, older kids, younger kids and parents that you saw once in a while. So good memories, happy childhood. Let me just put in one interesting thing that I don’t think happens anymore. Marilyn Drive is on a hill, and when I was little the city would block off the hill for sleigh riding. So between Beverly Drive and Polk, (I don’t actually know how those people got out of their driveways) you could not drive up it because it was reserved for children and their sleds on a winter day. LR: Wow, that’s really cool. KF: I know, I don’t think that happens anymore. LR: No, I don’t think it does. KF: There would just be all sorts of liability issues now. But that was fun. LR: Wow, did you take advantage of that when you were young? KF: Of course, that was really fun. LR: It sounds like it. Where did you go to school? 4 KF: My first school was Polk School. It was the school where my parents had gone to actually, and they were in the same year and I have pictures of them in their class pictures together in second grade. Then when my parents built their new house on Oakridge Drive, I was transferred to Wasatch Elementary, then Mount Ogden Junior High, then Ogden High and then I went to the University of Utah. LR: Okay, let’s back up a little bit. So I’m curious as you were growing up as a young girl, what women did you look up to? KF: Probably my mom. She was very strong. I think I kind of developed my love of volunteerism from her. Like I mentioned, she had all these children but she still found time, by choice, to be active in the community. I think it was her “out.” She didn’t work outside the home, but these associations with other women, volunteering together, they became her friends, and it became something different and interesting besides raising her children and her family. But she maintained a beautiful home, cooked all the meals, took care of the kids, but still figured out how to do something outside of the home that was interesting to her and meaningful. LR: Do you know what types of things she volunteered for? KF: Well she was very involved in the Junior League. She was president of the Junior League one year. She was also very involved in the Ogden Symphony Ballet Association, which has just recently changed their name to Ogden On Stage, I believe, and was instrumental in helping that association bring the symphony and the ballet to Ogden for their performances in the 1950’s and 1960’s. She didn’t volunteer in the schools I think, but those other places in the community, those 5 were her loves. She loved classical music, loved other women and it was really interesting to watch her figure out what was important to her besides all of us. We never felt like we weren’t important to her. LR: Do you have any other memories of going to school that you’d like to share that are just coming to mind? KF: Well, not really. I got along fine in school, I was smart enough that school wasn’t hard for me. I do remember that girls were pegged into one path and boys were pegged into another. But I never challenged that. I think girls eventually said, “Hey why can’t we play sports? Why can’t we do this and that?” But I was pretty happy in that track. I took sewing and I eventually majored in Home Economics and taught school for a while. When I was at the University, it seemed like the tracks available to women were Nursing, and Teaching. You could major in whatever you wanted as long as it ended up in a teaching career in school. So that’s what we did, but I’ve always been so delighted that things are wide open now. LR: Were you encouraged to pursue an education? KF: Not only encouraged, but it was just absolutely expected. I have to go back to my mother, because she and my dad wanted to get married and my grandfather said, “Not until you graduate from the University.” So this wedding was put off for a year or until she graduated and she was married two weeks later. We grew up thinking college was not a choice, it was just the next step after high school, and our parents made that possible. Of course, it wasn’t nearly as expensive as it is today. The other part of that was even though Weber State was here—it wasn’t 6 Weber State then, it was Weber College—and it was a fabulous school, but part of our education, it was understood, was going away to school and living on our own, which was real eye-opening for me. I had grown up in this family full of children and two parents and I had some summer camp away, but never lived on my own. Going to the University and living in the dorms, then in a sorority house, I figured things out. It was part of the education. KH: What clubs and sororities were you a part of in high school and college? KF: Oh I was in the Pep club because that’s what you did, and in the Honors Society. That’s probably about it. I had a really nice group of girlfriends that I enjoyed, I didn’t date very much but the girls I hung around with are still my friends, lovely girls from my neighborhood. Can I tell you a little bit about Ogden High? LR: Oh please! KF: How interesting this was, and I don’t know if this is PC or not, but Ogden High still takes a swath of the city from the far east to down in the west of the city so we went to school with kids of all kinds of social and economic backgrounds, and we didn’t mix very well. I went to Mount Ogden, and I didn’t go to school with anybody brown or black until I went to Ogden High, because it was a pretty segregated city at the time. I don’t think it is so much anymore. In 1965 or 1966 when racial tensions were running quite high, the year that Bobby Kennedy was killed and Martin Luther King was killed, it was very tense although I was pretty cocooned, as some of us from the East Bench were. But one year when I was in high school, one of the gym teachers had an intramural game and put the black kids against the white kids on two teams, and that didn’t end well. There was a 7 fight and then they took their fight after school up to Mount Ogden Park with chains and pipes and stuff like that. That was pretty eye-opening. When I was a sophomore at the University that was the year of the Kent State…what would you call it? Riots? Murders? Rampage? I don’t know, protests? LR: Yeah, kind of all of it. KF: I was in a sorority but the sorority life was kind of on the way out. As I think back on it, I was kind of in a throwback type of situation. Things were changing very quickly. But I wasn’t part of a family or a demographic that protested, so it was interesting watching it all from a distance, but there was a lot happening when I was in high school and college socially. LR: What sorority were you involved in? KF: Chi Omega, it was one of the Greek life sororities. KH: What was the theme or motto of your sorority? Do you remember? Because I know some are based on friendship, some are on service. Was there kind of a focus for your sorority? KF: No, it was part of the national Greek Panhellenic group. There were like nine sororities at the University of Utah and probably about that many fraternities. It was all about “rushing,” getting in and being sponsored, and they had to like you and vote you in. It was pretty archaic. When I was first in the Junior League, you had to have a sponsor or more than one sponsor to become a member of the Junior League. LR: Okay, I didn’t know that. 8 KF: I’m not sure about this, but I believe that there are still some areas in the South and in the East that you have to be sponsored to join. I love our group here now, they’re so inclusive and there are women working within the Junior League organization from all walks of life and all different backgrounds and it’s so enriching. LR: I know that you do a lot of community service, when did you start getting involved with community service? KF: Well we were living in Salt Lake and my aunt asked if I would like to be in the Junior League, and she’d sponsor me if I’d like to. I didn’t know how I could do this, because I had two little boys that were a year a part and they were toddlers, and I didn’t have a babysitter, and we didn’t have money to pay a babysitter. But my mom said, “You need to do that, you need to get out. You need to make some friends among some women that you can establish friendships with, and this is the best way to do it because you will volunteer together and do stuff together and laugh together.” So I joined the Junior League. Pretty soon we moved to Ogden and I transferred my membership up here. But my first real taste of volunteerism was with the Junior League. I have maintained my membership as a sustainer because I think it’s such an important organization for women and I really embrace the theme of sustaining the organization so that other women have a chance to meet, work together, figure out some good works for the community, learn about Ogden, and make their mark if they so choose. So that was kind of my first taste of that. 9 LR: Okay, so I’m just going to go back a little bit. As you were obtaining your degree at the University, what were some of the challenges that you faced? KF: Oh I’m very uncoordinated, and so when it was icy I fell on campus. We had to wear dresses always, I didn’t wear slacks anywhere until maybe the early 1970’s after I’d graduated because it was expected that you would wear dresses or skirts to class at a university. We always dressed up for school. So that was a challenge. I remember that I had to take two classes that I was very worried about and so I saved up my pass/fail credits. I don’t even know whether they do this anymore; you could take several hours of pass/fail rather than get a grade and you could still count them or something like that. So I saved those up for physics and chemistry, and ended up getting a real high grade but I had already elected pass/fail, and realized that I really like this stuff and I could do it. I don’t think I had a lot of confidence in my ability to learn the sciences or those concepts. So that was interesting to me. I learned something about myself, that I could work hard and learn something that was unfamiliar. And just learning how to meet people and be a part of a bigger social scene down there and, while that isn’t part of your education, in a way, it is, meeting all kinds of people from all different walks of life and being gregarious enough to feel like you’re part of a bigger organization rather than just being lonely and going back to your dorm room. That was a challenge for me. LR: You mentioned that part of your education experience was going away, how do you think that experience helped you? I’m sitting here thinking about growing up 10 in a sheltered environment with your parents and your family and then here you go! You’re on your own. KF: It was scary, it was really scary for me. First of all, I didn’t have a car. When I was a senior, my sister was at Westminster and I was at the U and our dad bought us a car that we could share. KH: How did that go? KF: Not well, but we made it work because that’s what we could do. But you know for my whole college career I hitched rides, or somebody would take me home on the weekend, or we’d take the bus downtown Salt Lake, or we walked everywhere. It’s a little bit of a lonely feeling because you’re used to having a family car that you can drive around town in Ogden but all of a sudden I had to figure out all kinds of things about my new world, and one of them was getting around. But I’m so glad I did. I’m so glad that my parents had that value, “Time to go, you need to be independent,” because I know quite a few people that have never lived outside of Ogden or, in my age range, there are women that went from the homes of their parents to the homes of their husband that they created together and never really had a taste of independence. My husband and I determined that we would ensure that our own children did that, and it back fired, because now they all live out of the state. They went away and stayed, but that’s okay they have great lives and communication being what it is now, we see them plenty. But it was just really good to be pushed out by the mother hen. LR: Yeah, that’s cool. KH: What did you graduate with from the University of Utah? 11 KF: Home Economics Education, and I taught for a year and I detested it. I thought, “When I need to go back to work I’m not doing that.” So my career path is quite circuitous. KH: What grade did you teach? KF: Oh junior high, that’s probably part of the problem. LR: That might have been, yes. KF: Those were the jobs that were open, junior high, and there’s a reason for that. Some people just love that age group, but I think it’s really hard and getting harder these days. LR: I agree. Okay so when in this did you meet your husband? KF: We were lined up on a blind-date when I was in my junior year and he had just come home from an LDS mission. He had a year of school but was back in school, and we were married within a year. LR: Okay, and his name? KF: Rick Fairbanks. LR: I know you’ve said Home Economics is not really anything that you wanted, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, you weren’t excited by it? KF: Well, I really liked the classes but when it came to doing something with it…well my husband said my degree didn’t take. I like to cook, and I like to do things around the house and stuff like that, but I did not enjoy teaching school. LR: Okay. So it sounds like you taught for a little bit and then started having children? KF: Yes, I had my kids and then I thought, “I’ve got to help with the income here, the kids are getting expensive.” So I taught piano lessons in our home, afterschool, 12 for maybe five years. Then my sister worked for a company in Salt Lake, doing commercial leasing and she said, “We need somebody in Ogden.” So I got hired by a company named Wallace Associate and I had to go get my real estate license and so I did commercial real estate and leasing for a few years. Well maybe ten years I guess, and then our family company had grown big enough at that point where my brother and my husband said, “Hey we need some HR help.” So I went and took some classes in HR and got certified, (you could do that then through a professional organization) and then went to work for our family company until we sold it. Then my husband and I started another company, and that’s what we do now. We manage a purchasing company in the underground pipe industry, a national cooperative. We still do that. LR: Okay, and I’ll get there in a second. So you’re talking about human resources, was that the first time that you did anything with human resources? KF: Yes. We had about a hundred and twenty-five employees and the laws were changing quickly and benefit packages were changing, costs were escalating, half of our workforce were unionized so we had collective bargaining. My brother was the finance, my husband was the CEO over operations and sales, nobody had any skill or knowledge about the area of human resources so somebody had to get smart on that kind of quick. I said, “I’d like to do that, I need a change.” So anyway that’s what I did for a while too. It was very interesting and challenging. LR: What were some of the challenges? KF: Hard decisions that affected people’s lives. These coworkers were friends as well as coworkers, but yet I was part of the employer team as well. So the 13 relationships were layered. Maintaining good relationships, maintaining a stable workforce. People that had worked there their whole working lives, you know it’s not news that people used to go and stay at a job forever. We had a lot of employees that had been there since my grandfather had started the company, so you know, longtime employees. But yet we had to obey certain laws and they were starting to get layered. One of the most tragic things is that we had a truck driver killed and that brought a pall over the whole company. It didn’t have anything to do with our negligence, he had not tied down his load correctly and it shifted. But still we were liable; we were the employer and that was our truck and he was our friend and our coworker, and it was just a real challenge to work with a company through that. We got some counselors in there pretty fast and tried to do the right thing. Nothing felt right, actually. But it was a really good experience for me to work with, and it was mostly men. Probably ninety-percent male employees in that group. LR: What was that experience like, working in a male dominated company? KF: You know, I liked it, and besides that, we are still in a male dominated industry. We’re still in pipe industry, we run this purchasing cooperative. Ninety-percent of people we work with, whether they’re suppliers or associate members, are male. What I like about most of them is that they’re pretty straightforward and you know what you’re dealing with and I can work with that. LR: Okay, makes sense. 14 KF: I’m the detail person in almost every situation, which I like but on the other hand drives me crazy because other people aren’t detail people so you’re cleaning up messes a lot and that kind of thing, like being a mom. But that’s the role I choose and that’s the role I am comfortable with and that’s the role I like. LR: Okay, I actually love that response. KF: Do you? LR: I do. It’s what you choose, it’s a choice. KH: What were some of the challenges you faced in your career? Do you feel like you ever faced opposition from anybody? KF: Not really, I felt very fortunate to have a lot of choices and then a lot of opportunities to just step into stuff. Every time I’ve gone into something, I’ve always had to talk myself into believing I can do it, because it’s been a shift in what I consider my skill level and my knowledge. But I have to back up and give an experience that I’ve had with a committee that I’d been on at the University of Utah. It’s a development committee for the college I graduated from, which is part of a larger college called the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. They have an advisory group and one of the first times I went to a meeting, we went around the group, and it was a large group, I mean maybe twenty people from all different aspects of the college that had graduated from, and everywhere from a school within that college. There were very few people that were working in the field that they had gained their education in, I mean with a specific focus on that thing that they thought they were going to do for the rest of their life. Almost everyone had 15 talked about how they had done this and then because they knew this person or they learned that thing, they had this opportunity which led to this opportunity, and then finally they were working at something that was unrelated to what they graduated in. It was all because of their willingness to learn and change, and the people they had rubbed shoulders with through the years, so opportunities had come their way. That’s kind of my own situation, it’s like, “You wanna do that?” “Well sure, I think I can do that. I’ll try,” but it sure wasn’t what I went to school to set out to do. I didn’t set out to do all these things, it would be hard to invent that career path. But listening to other people, it sounded like I wasn’t unusual. Anyway, it’s kind of an interesting study to listen to all the people in the room talk about their different opportunities. LR: I’m curious how you balanced your work-life with your home-life. KF: Well first of all, my husband was really supportive. He was involved in the community, and that was just a value that we had together, that you don’t just take care of kids and just be in your home. The broader outreach is good for everybody, including the kids. So I had support, and I think the children grew up knowing that this is what we do in our family. He was involved in the Boy Scouts and some service clubs around Ogden and I was involved with the girls and the ladies in Ogden, you know we just balanced it. I had really good kids and everybody pitched in. I wasn’t a very laissez-faire mom, everybody had their roles. We just made it work because it was a value that we did that. It wasn’t optional to drop one thing or another, you just figured out how to do it all. I’m not saying that it was easy or that we didn’t have tension or have to back off things 16 once in a while to make it work, but it was something that was important to us to be involved and we wanted our children involved as well. KH: How did you become involved with Weber State? KF: You know that’s interesting because I got a call from Chuck White. I don’t know who nominated me, but they needed somebody for the Board of Trustees. He had just become president, and I’d met him once or twice and we had supported Weber State somewhat financially and then had supported the athletics and so forth, but neither my husband or I had gone here as students. So when he called and asked if I’d be willing to serve on the Board of Trustees I said, “Well yeah, but I didn’t graduate from here because I thought that was a requirement,” he said, “Well neither did I, and it’s not a requirement.” So I said, “Well yeah, I’d be honored to do that.” But it’s been like learning a new industry, just like learning a new job. You have to learn all about higher education, what the politics are, what the challenges are, what the limitations are and the views of the people in the community and how important they are. The students and what the students think about the school, and you just are learning a lot all the time, and the challenges that the faculty face and the funding. It’s huge and people major in it and go into it. I’m just on the job learning some of that stuff, which has been very interesting to me. Another board that I served on is in the healthcare industry, that’s a new field for me too so I’ve had to learn a lot about that industry which is changing by the second, but I found that really interesting as well. Just got the opportunity so I took it. KH: What are the duties of the Board of Trustees? 17 KF: We have meetings, of course, and we approve some of the changes that bubble up through the University. Our bosses are the Board of Regents, so they make sure that it all runs according to the system. But the changes that come up within the University, the Board of Trustees has to approve. But by the time we see them, they have gone through many looks and many approvals by this committee or that committee. It all moves very slowly. You don’t know about that do you, the University moves very slowly in decisions or changes? So anyway, that has been a very interesting thing for me to learn because it’s not terribly nimble, but the changes are very carefully made I think for the improvements and the direction that the University takes. In the six years I’ve been on the Board of Trustees, we are shifting quickly over to “What do employers need from our students?” We didn’t have these conversations six years ago like we are now and I think the faculty are involved in this. We need to prepare students to be employable with what’s in this area. What do our employers need from us? Because we can’t turn out graduates that can’t find work because they don’t have employable skills, so I think there’s a lot of talk about that, which I’m finding really fascinating. It doesn’t move quickly, if a faculty group decides to change how they approach a subject or what they add to it, it takes a lot of thought, a lot of talk, a lot of decision-making and approvals to make it so it is more useful to the students. That’s been interesting to me to see that change. KH: Is there a term limit to being on the Board of Trustees? KF: You can have two four-year terms, but I think I took the last part of somebody’s unexpired term so I might have a year or two beyond eight years, if I’m 18 reappointed. The Governor actually appoints you. I think it works this way: the Chair of the Board and the President suggest a name, I think the Regents have to take a look at the name, but the Governor actually is the one that appoints you and he is very much about term limits in all of the governor-appointed committees of the state. Healthy, very healthy. LR: Right, I didn’t realize it was an appointment. KF: Yeah, it is. LR: That’s interesting. While we’re talking about community service, you also served on the McKay-Dee Hospital and Intermountain Healthcare. Did you do those simultaneously? Or were they two separate boards? KF: So Intermountain Healthcare’s the parent company of McKay, so when I was board chair of the McKay-Dee board I was asked to serve on the Intermountain Corporate Board, where I serve today. So I did both for a couple of years, but I had termed out on the McKay-Dee board at that time so I just stayed on the Intermountain board. Intermountain owns, I can’t remember how many hospitals, health plans, employees, physicians, but that’s the parent company of that hospital. That’s been a very interesting journey too, just another industry I’ve had to keep up to speed on. LR: Now with Intermountain, were you appointed to that or was is just something you volunteered to do? KF: Appointed by the nominating committee of the board. I’m about done there too, I think I will be done in a couple of years. There are three of us from Ogden and the Ogden area that are on that board. They have people from all over the state 19 and all over the country actually, we’ve got some real experts on that board. I feel somewhat intimidated by it, because there are a lot of very smart people that know a lot about the industry on that board. I just always go and assume I’m going to learn a lot and so I do. I’m not sure what I contribute to that but I enjoy it, and it’s all volunteer, a good non-profit corporation with volunteer leaders. LR: Okay, is there any other community work that you do? Besides those two appointments, and then of course you said you’re still involved in the Junior League. KF: One thing I did, which was another appointment by the governor was I was on the Weber Basin Water Board for a few years and it was interesting. That was another industry to learn about, the water industry, the delivery of water throughout this whole area. I termed out there too so I moved on, but that was very interesting as well. I’ve had a really interesting ride learning about different industries, but at the same time I’ve learned so much from the people I’ve served with because most of the people on a volunteer board come from a different part of life, different business, none of us are experts in the business of the board which would be healthcare or water delivery or whatever it is. I guess the assumption is that we’ve got good minds and we can make good decisions together if we learn about this stuff and we bring our collective backgrounds together to help make decisions in the interest of the organization. I’ve learned as much from others that I’ve sat at board tables with, I feel like I’ve gained more than I’ve ever given volunteer-wise just by rubbing shoulders with a lot of these really smart, dedicated people who are volunteers. People are all employed, all 20 busy, all have families, doing a million things but giving their time and their expertise for another organization and that can’t help but influence who you are if you’re sitting with all these dedicated people. It’s really been a privilege. LR: What do you think has been your most rewarding community service that you’ve been involved in? Or the most meaningful for you? KF: Well, I guess of all the things I’ve done, most of my life-long friends have come from the Junior League. We didn’t know much about anything but we made friends and we figured out things together and we sat in committees and tried to figure out stuff about stuff that we didn’t know anything about. Wonderful people working together, and you just make these associations that you call on later in life, or you’ll call them your friend or you say, “I know that person, I’ve worked with her or him somewhere else. I can call them and ask them.” So you’ve got a base of resources that go with you your whole life. When I’ve sat on committees they’ll say, “We don’t know how to do this,” and I think, “I don’t know how to do it either but I know several people who do, and I know I can make a call that can give us some guidance.” So just to have those connections, they’re really life-long connections that you can use. I don’t want to say that you use people, but you just think, “I have not gained a skill but I have gained a resource friend.” A friend and a resource. People use me that way too. They think, “Oh she knows how to do that, let’s call her and see what she thinks about that.” That’s very enriching to have that in your life, to just know people that know stuff. LR: What exactly is the Junior League? 21 KF: So it’s an organization of women that goes back to the early 1900’s, and they were formed to better their community. I think their earliest projects had to do with poor children. But they figure out where there’s a need in a community and they develop projects around that need that they’ve identified. The goal is not to keep those projects forever, the goal is to turn them over to another organization who will run them. In the meantime, the women who are figuring it out gain all these strengths of organization while they’re serving, and education; they just learn by doing. It’s kind of OTJ [on the job training]. Some of the other opportunities I’ve had later in life to serve on other committees have been because I knew how to be on a committee, which some people don’t enjoy. You know they don’t like group think, and they don’t like consensus, and they don’t like hard conversations or whatever it is. They say, “Just give it to me and I’ll do it, you guys get out of the way.” But I like group decision making and I think you get a richer, better decision most the time if you can get a lot of different opinions and buy in. LR: I might be mistaken, but wasn’t the Junior League the Martha Society at one time? KF: Yes, there was the Welfare League and the Martha Society. One of them, let’s see I think it was the Martha Society, needed to go out of business because they ran an orphanage and they needed to get out of that business because the state, the government, was saying “nehhh...” So they gave their money to the Welfare League and I think some of the volunteers came with it. This was in the 1940’s, 22 and then they applied and finally were able to become the Junior League, part of the national organization in 1953. So it’s been in Ogden since 1953. LR: Okay, you’ve mentioned that you and your husband owned a business. What led you down that path of starting a business with your husband? KF: An organization, well it’s a legal cooperative that’s owned by the members, my husband helped start it before we sold our company. It has to do with distribution of water work products, and all the companies that own this cooperative are in the distribution business. They don’t manufacture things like fire-hydrants or plastic pipe or anything like that but they sell them, so they deal with manufacturers that actually make them and then they sell them to contractors or sell them to cities or whatever. They’re all across the country, these distributors, and my husband was part of putting this organization together. Then we sold our company. The group that they had managing the cooperative was not doing a good job and we said, “We could do that,” so another one of those things we said, “We could do that maybe.” So we formed our own little company, Fairbanks Inc., and have a management contract with this organization. Our little company Fairbanks Inc. runs this other company. It’s all about relationships with manufacturers and negotiations for rebates. The people that are members, that own the cooperative, receive rebates based on what they buy from the manufacturers. But the rebates flow through the cooperative, so they come into us, we send the money back out to the distributors. So it’s just money. We say the worldwide headquarters are in our basement; it’s all computer, phone, some travel, and it’s association-driven. 23 LR: Has it been challenging to have a company with your husband? Or has it been the opposite? KF: We have very different strengths. LR: Okay. KF: Like I’m the detail person, he’s a mess. But he likes relationships, he talks to everybody. We do have very different strengths, but we’ve made it work, we’ve done it for eighteen years. We’re getting ready to be done, I think we’ve got another couple of years in our management contract, but I think we’ll be finished after that. It’s been an interesting ride. LR: Yeah, sounds like it. KF: Somedays I’ll say, “I’m going to the grocery store,” “You want me to go with ya?” “No.” LR: So one of my interns likes to ask the women, when have you felt empowered as a woman? KF: Let me think. So power for me has been—I’m more comfortable working behind the scenes than I am out in front, so I feel empowered when I just get things done; when things that I’ve worked on or thought were important I could actually accomplish. I’m not at all comfortable being out in front, or verbally gathering people, or pushing an idea. I guess I wouldn’t use the term power to say this, satisfaction in my actions were working behind the scenes and seeing things I accomplished I think are important and having a hand in that. Power to me has never been important, an important thing to chase after. So it’s never been high on my list of considering that to be important to my self-worth. 24 KH: With all the careers that you’ve had, what advice would you give to the women starting out in the workforce? KF: Take any opportunity you get to do something new and interesting. Just meet people and look for opportunity because, like I mentioned in my story, I don’t think anybody starts out in the endgame of their career. If you do a good job in what you do, you’ll have opportunities come your way, you’ll get noticed. But I think it’s hard for women starting out to often believe that, that they will get noticed, but I have seen in my time (I hate that term, that sounds really old) just more opportunities for women out there. When I was in school, teaching or nursing seemed to be the track for most of us, if you were really brave somebody said you should go to law school, but not very many women did or became doctors or anything like that. I think that’s much more wide open now, so the opportunities are there. KH: I have a final question. How do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? KF: Well that’s power, isn’t it? I was going to try to weave that into another group that I’m a member of which is purely social, but you house the collection of its history here. It’s called a Ladies Literary Club. LR: Okay, yeah. KF: Sarah helped us put it here, and that is an organization of never more than twenty-five women, but has been going since 1896. My grandmothers were in it, my mom was in it, I’m in it. You know they’re twenty-five of the smartest, strongest women in this community of all ages, which has been really fun for me 25 to see. I think most of our friends are around our ages but some of my friends are eighty-five and some are thirty-five but they’re really smart and they have opportunities and they take them and they speak their mind. I guess that comes around to the right to vote, that they’re empowered to be part of their community and part of the decision-making part of their community. Every one of them has been involved in the Ogden community one way or the other, whether by just voting or being empowered to be part of change and growth within the community. They all have different interests and economic means but they’re all strong women, and if they didn’t have the right to vote in an election I’m not sure it would be the same. I don’t think we believe the same, we’re different religions, we’re different political parties, different interests, but to come together with other strong women has been really a blessing for me. When this group started out it was literary, but then in the early part of the 1900’s their direction went more towards political and I think it must have coincided with a lot of the fervor about voting rights, and women’s strength and empowerment. They studied different political issues at the time for quite a few years and then they went back to literary stuff, and then during the wars I think they disbanded for a year or two and then they met but they were very austere meetings (they didn’t have refreshments for a few years). So this group has been able to meet together and stay as a group for all these years because they’ve had permission to be strong women I guess. So it’s been a really interesting thing being part of that, it’s very enriching. I’m not sure I answered that question but it’s 26 been my privilege to know a lot of strong women and I’m sure the vote has been part of it. So anyway did that answer your question or what else can I say? LR: Yes, it does. Is there any more stories or a memory that you’d like to share? I think this is very similar to her question, but if there was one piece of advice that you could give women coming up today on how to be, what would that be? KF: You know, I guess I’m thinking of my granddaughters. I’ve got a couple of little granddaughters, well I’ve got probably half and half. Half are comfortable in their own skin and doing their own thing, you know they’re little but they’re strong and they’re pretty sure of who they are. Then half of them are timid, and I want to take those timid ones, ‘cause I think I was a timid one, and say, “Don’t do that. Just go for it.” I don’t say that because I did, because I had to learn how to do that, ‘cause I wasn’t comfortable doing that. I was the one that fell back and waited to be invited and all that kind of stuff, but I just want them to figure out early what they like and then just do it, rather than being afraid of judgment or social mores or whatever it is. I just look at these little ones that are so comfortable expressing their opinion and being their own person, I think, “You’ll get it. You’ve got it, you’re going places.” The other ones I want to say, “Do what she’s doing. Just do it and enjoy it.” Anyway, it’s fun to see these little generations coming up, they have a lot more challenges than I think we did. I grew up in a very safe place, not sure it’s so safe anymore. LR: It’s definitely different. Well, I want to thank you for your time and your willingness to sit and talk with us. KF: I’m not sure I gave you anything but it’s been very interesting. 27 LR: You don’t need to worry about that, you did. KF: Thank you.