Oral History Program Jo Packham Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 28 March 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jo Packham Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 28 March 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: Packham, Jo, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 28 March 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Jo Packham Circa 2019 Jo Packham 28 March 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jo Packham, conducted on March 28, 2019, at Urban Studio in Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Jo discusses her life, her memories of Ogden, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Alyssa Dove, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: Today is March 28, 2019 we are at Urban Studio on 25th Street in Ogden with Jo Packham for the Women 2020 Exhibit for Weber State University. My name is Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview, and Alyssa Dove is with me. Jo thank you so much for your willingness to sit and do this with us, I’m greatly appreciative. JP: The honor is mine. LR: So let’s just start at the beginning, where and when were you born? JP: I was born in Ogden, Utah. I lived on Hislop Drive off of 9th Street almost my whole life and now I live up behind the University, and, of course, we moved away when we went to college. My husband worked on his Master’s degree in Boulder, Colorado and his Law degree in California, but as soon as we could we came home. I love this town, I can’t imagine living anywhere else. LR: Okay, so you told me where. When were you born? JP: 1950. LR: Okay, so which of the hospitals were you born at? JP: It was the old Dee Hospital on Harrison and 24th. LR: Alright, and you grew up here in Ogden? JP: Born and raised. I’m a homegrown girl. 2 LR: What are some of your favorite memories of growing up here? JP: You know my mother was always really worried about me, because I can’t remember anything about my childhood and I loved my childhood. I had a wonderful childhood. We lived in a great neighborhood. I still have the same friends that I went to kindergarten with. They’re not my everyday friends but we travel together two or three times a year. We skied—we didn’t go to church because we weren’t part of the Mormon faith—but we had family gatherings and went skiing on Sundays as a group and spent our Sundays together. I worked my entire youth, I always had some kind of a business project going on. I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life, so whatever I could do from picking peonies to selling buffalo nickels on my front porch was something that I did. But I had terrific parents, and life was easy and good and uneventful, just fun. LR: What were your parents’ names? JP: Beulah Marie Packham and Henry Harland Packham. LR: Are they both from the Ogden area? JP: Born and raised. Homegrown girl. LR: Okay, so you said you still have a lot of friends from kindergarten, where did you go to elementary school? JP: I went to Horace Mann on 9th Street, and then I went to Highland Junior High, and then I went to Ben Lomond. I have to say one of the funniest experiences of my entire life is that I am on the Wall of Fame at Ben Lomond High School, which is ridiculous really. They gave me the award the same day as Dr. Robert Jarvik, he received his award for inventing the artificial heart and I got my award for I’m 3 not sure what. All I could think was, “Oh this is so embarrassing.” He was so nice but he was a year younger than I was and he went to Ben Lomond, so they put us on the Wall of Fame together. I’m not sure why I’m there, but I am there and I am truly honored to be there because I don’t think I was a great high school student. LR: Why do you think you weren’t a great high school student? JP: Well, my very best friend in the world to this day, we met when we were in kindergarten and we’re still very best friends. She was like the superstar right? She was the cheerleader, and the student body officer, went to Girls State, and was a fabulous artist. I grew up in her shadow, but we were happy, we were great friends, I never wanted any more. We just did what we did. She was so outgoing and gregarious and I was content to go everywhere with her. She was a worker bee so it wasn’t like she was more important than I was, we both worked together. She had great ideas and I loved helping her implement them. I was the helper behind the scenes and I was very happy with that. Then I got an idea and we actually went into business together. Never go into business with your best friend number one point of all time, but that ended amicably. She went on and did what she did and then I came into my own, and was more comfortable with what I was capable of doing on my own without Linda. That’s when I started the publishing company, and started buying buildings on 25th Street, and those kinds of things. 4 LR: Alright, you talked about that you’ve always been an entrepreneur, you’ve always wanted to be in business, so what are some of your earlier memories of creating? JP: My whole life. I mean my whole life. I think it started when I was twelve but I might have been ten, I’m not very good with years, but I had picked peonies all summer to sell and made money, so I had this money and I said to my mom, because she was really creative too, “Mom I’d really like to paint my room.” She said, “Oh I’ll help you,” and I’m like, “No way, I can paint this room all by myself.” I got on the bus and I went downtown to get the paint, and I went to JC Penny and I bought a pink bedspread, like cotton candy pink, and pink drapes that matched and they had white eyelet, I’ll never forget them. Then I went to the bathroom department and bought a fuzzy white rug, because I thought it would be much nicer to get out of bed on a fuzzy white rug than on a regular rug. I painted my walls chartreuse green, it was my favorite color in the whole world. So you open the door to my room and there were these vibrant glow-in-the- dark chartreuse walls, ceiling, and everything, and then there was this bright pink everything. My mom had to close the door when I was at school because she couldn’t stand what I’d done to her house. But she was so wise for her years, because she knew how important it was to me and how much I truly loved it and how happy I was there. I didn’t change it for years, probably until I was in high school. I was just the happiest little person in the whole world in my happy place. That’s when it all started, and she taught me how to sew, and she taught me how 5 to paint. My mom had a very wicked childhood and because of that I think I was her total focus. My sister’s quite a bit older than I am, and was gone by the time I was old enough to remember. My mom and dad didn’t have a lot of money to give me but they gave me all of their time, and all of their support, and all of their encouragement. It makes me cry every time I talk about it, because they were truly, truly wonderful people. So it started early on with chartreuse walls. LR: That’s fantastic. You mentioned you were almost raised as an only child, how many siblings do you have? JP: Just one sister and she is eight years older than I am. She’s a brainiac and I was never a brainiac. I was the wild child, I was the creative one who had a million ideas, that was going a hundred miles an hour all the time and couldn’t focus, and got kicked out of the sixth grade. I am who I am, I mean it is what it is. My children are very successful in spite of me and it’s all good. LR: Kicked out of the sixth grade? JP: It’s a funny story now, it was not funny at the time. I had a sixth grade teacher, and I will never forget him. He was not a nice man and in those days students and children had absolutely no rights. There was a young man in our class, I’m pretty sure today he would be a member of the LGBT community but in those days it was never talked about. One day the teacher said something very, very inappropriate and very mean to him and it was wrong. It was just wrong, and it embarrassed him in front of the entire class and he was crying and he ran out of the room. I said to the teacher, “You can’t say that.” He said, “I can do whatever I 6 want.” I said, this little sixth grader right, “No you can’t, you’ve hurt his feelings.” Well he took me to the principal and the principal said, “You have to apologize.” I said, “I’m not going to apologize, it was wrong. It just was wrong,” so they sent me home and my mother and father sat me down and they said, “You just have to apologize.” I said,“I’m not going to apologize. It was wrong,” so I sat home and my mother tried to homeschool me, which no one had ever heard of in those days, for the rest of the school year so that I could start seventh grade without a history. My daughter says to me, “Mom you’re just way too outspoken,” but I’ve just always been vocal and an advocate for rights. I’ve always felt, not that I was the underdog, but I wasn’t the most important person on the list, so I felt like somebody should always stick up for everybody who doesn’t have the opportunities that everyone else has. Especially in today’s society with all this mean-girl stuff and everything that goes on, I’m horrified by all of that. My magazines are a way for me to stand up for those who don’t have a voice otherwise. LR: That was a great story. What women did you look up to as a young girl? JP: Well, my grandmother. She had a horrific life. She literally got married when she was like fourteen or something to a really horrible man and they lived up on the Causey Dam, it’s up near Park City, literally in a tar paper shack. My mother was raised in a tar paper shack with a dirt floor until she was in high school, no running water, no electricity. She used to have to climb under the trains to get to school, and she was always terrified that the train would start and she would be 7 crushed. My grandmother couldn’t read or write, so my mother was determined that she was going to graduate from high school and learn how to read and write, it didn’t matter what it cost her. I can remember when my grandmother turned fifty, I was three or four and I can remember my mom taking me down there and she had this giant bulldozer out in front of her house. My grandfather, whom I never met, had passed away, and she had bought a little house down in the ghetto on the west side of Ogden and she had this great, big bulldozer. I said, “Grammy, what are we going to do with this bulldozer?” She goes, “We’re going to build a new bathroom. I want a new bathroom.” She took that bulldozer, bulldozed out the side of the house, read how to do the plumbing, fixed it all up, built her bathroom, and to a three year old, it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life. She had so much grit, and so much determination, and she never backed down from anything. My mother inherited that from her. She worked really hard, she was a waitress at the Canton in Ogden. She graduated from high school and to her that was the highest achievement she could ever hope to achieve. For me, her wish for my achievement wasn’t that I would get a college degree, but that I would get a really good job with security and benefits. In those days, it was working for the government at one of the bases, because they couldn’t fire you after you had seniority. You got full retirement, you got paid vacations, you got full benefits and to her to not have to worry about getting sick or what you’re going to live on when you retire, was her goal for me. When I got kicked out of the sixth grade she started to worry about her goals for me and how achievable they actually were, 8 but we worked it out. I would have to say those two women, my mom and my grandmother. I had a very protected childhood. We never traveled, we didn’t have any money, and I can remember going to Salt Lake for the first time; I thought I had gone to the ends of the Earth. We went to see “The Sound of Music,” and I thought we’d traveled forever. So it was very protected and it wasn’t perfect but it was lovely, safe and happy. Just normal, or what you think of as “normal,” and then I went away to college and I realized what normal really is, and that it wasn’t everybody taking care of me. LR: Were you encouraged to pursue an education? JP: No. My mom and dad, it’s not that they discouraged me, they just wanted to make sure I was taken care of and that I didn’t have to worry about eating the way they did. I mean they literally had to worry about putting food on the table, and they did not want me to have to worry about that. To them college was so big that they couldn’t wrap their head around it, especially in those days with the common expectations of women. Women only went to college to get married. I had a high school sweetheart, so I didn’t have to go to college to get married, so I could get a really good job that would take care of me the rest of my life, but they were very supportive. When I followed my high school sweetheart to college they were very supportive and helped me all they could and it was a total waste of my time and their money. I think after two years I had like six credits because I just wasn’t mature enough. It’s one of those situations where not everyone should go 9 to college after high school, people should grow up sometimes and get a little life under them. I did go back and I did graduate with Honors from the University of California at Sacramento. I am very proud of the fact that I have a five year degree and earned it in two years. My husband was in law school and I didn’t have anything to do so I went to the Dean at the University and said, “I need to get this done by the time he graduates.” So I took about thirty to forty hours a semester. When Scott went to law school in the morning, I would go to school at like six o’clock because we had one car and we lived way off campus. He’d drop me off at six am and I had nothing to do, so I took classes all day and at night I’d study and get all of my homework done. He’d pick me up, and then we’d start again. We had no money for any kind of entertainment and he was determined to get through law school so I thought, “Well I can do this.” So I did, I just had to be ready to do it and I was. I think you need to know in your heart when you’re ready to do something because then you’ll do it well, regardless of what that may be. LR: Right, right. You mentioned your high school sweetheart, is this the same person? JP: Yes, we got married and we have two children. We divorced a long time ago, I’ve been single almost my entire adult life. We got married too young. He is a wonderful man and a wonderful father, and we still celebrate our holidays together and take all of our vacations together; the children are the most important thing in our lives, and the grandchildren. His second wife is amazing. We call ourselves sister-wives and we’re really good friends. The grandkids can’t 10 figure out why it works like it does, they still say things to me like, “Grammy, you still really like Papa right?” I’m like, “Yep, I love Papa. He’s the greatest.” They say, “And you’re okay with him being married to Grandma Kelly?” I’m like, “Yep, I’m okay.” We just were too different, and we got married too young. He really wanted somebody like his mother, who was the perfect cook, the perfect housewife, and the perfect everything. I am so everything but that. I’ve always got a new idea and I’m off in some new direction. So when we were mature enough to realize that we still meant the world to each other and it wasn’t anything about that, it was as amicable as divorces could be. I understand you always fight over something, you fight when you’re married, it wasn’t like let’s just shake hands and “See ya later,” but it’s been amazing and he is always there for me. I’m not very good at the guy thing, that’s why I feature women in my magazines, I just understand women better. I don’t understand men very well, I just can’t wrap my head around the way they think. LR: You’ve talked about how you’ve always wanted to be in business and you’ve always had ideas, but have you always wanted to own your own business? JP: Yes, because I cannot take direction from anyone. I had sixteen jobs before I was eighteen, and I lasted about a week or two at each job because my bosses would always look at you like you’re a stupid kid. I was working behind soda fountains and in drive-ins and all those kind of places, and they always thought they had a better way to do it than I did. I’m like, “I’m the one on the floor. I know what’s going on, I get this. I can cut the costs, I can do all these kinds of things.” But no one listens to a fifteen year old ever. So I lasted two or three weeks at 11 each job and would move on to the next, never had trouble getting one, just moved onto the next one. So when I was in college I decided that I probably couldn’t ever work for anyone, that I probably better start my own company doing something because I’m the only one I’ll listen to. LR: Now you mentioned that you did college, you had six credits in two years, when did you decide to go back? JP: Well, when I went to college those first two years we weren’t married, I followed him to the University of Utah. It’s not that I partied or anything, I just wasn’t interested. Then we got married, and he worked on his Graduate degree in Boulder and I worked. Then he went to law school in California and he was gone so much trying to get through law school. It wasn’t like Graduate school where we could go to a movie on a Friday night or have a life. We had no life, so I figured if we had no life that I might as well be accomplishing something rather than just waiting for it to be over. I discovered, and I don’t even know if it’s still true, but in those days you could go to a California state university for free, so I enrolled at SAC State and everything was paid for, and I brought my lunch to school and it was the perfect scenario. I took advantage of the opportunities that were given to me, because there you could get a four year degree for free. It didn’t matter if it took you six years or two years you had a certain number of hours that you were given for free, and so I just did mine in two years. LR: Wow, what was your degree in? JP: Well it started off in early-childhood development. I love children and I wanted to own my own preschool, and that lasted what would have been the equivalent of 12 three years, because I’m who I am, I could not work with the parents. I started with the Head Start program in California when they first kicked it off. When I saw that the condition of the children the parents brought to preschool was so horrendous I cried non-stop. My advisor said, “This obviously isn’t working,” so they put me in the very private exclusive preschool at the state capitol in Sacramento. Everybody was a senator’s child or grandchild and that was worse, because in their own way they’re more abused. I got fired from that job because these little girls and boys would come to preschool in these hundred dollar little white starched linen dresses and dress shoes. They looked like they were going to church. We had regulations: they can’t paint because they can’t get paint on their clothes, they can’t dig in the sandbox because they can’t get dirty. They can’t do this, they can’t do that, and that was forty-five years ago. Well after two weeks of reading to them, I’m like, “This is crazy.” So I went and bought play-clothes for all the kids. As soon as their parents left, I would put them in their play-clothes and then we got them dressed back in their good clothes before their parents came to pick them up. I was so naive, it never occurred to me they’d tell their mother, “Oh we painted all day!” There were many complaints from the parents that I was changing the children’s clothing and allowing them to paint and play in the sandbox, so I was removed from that job. My advisor thought I should go into research and do research on early-childhood development, and because I can’t sit and read that long ever, for any reason, I got a second degree in art so that I could be in the art classes and do what I love. 13 I have to say working with artists and having an early-childhood development degree is the best degree in the world, because artists are distracted, going a hundred miles an hour. They really do act like about seven to eleven year olds, so I have a really good foundation for all of this because I too am that person who cannot focus. You are who you are. I used to be really embarrassed about who I was. In fact my family is all very structured, very intelligent, and very athletic, it is like I was adopted. It bothered me for years and years and years, and then one day I woke up and thought, “What the hell. I just am who I am. I am the wild child, so you’re either gonna have to survive in spite of me and get along with me or I’m just gonna go find new family and friends.” I drive them crazy but they do okay. LR: You’ve got your art degree, did your husband finish at roughly the same time? JP: Yup, graduated from law school and I graduated from SAC State with a double degree in Art and Early Childhood Development. LR: So when did you start thinking about creating your own brand, doing your own business? JP: We were driving home from his celebration for graduating from law school, we were going from San Francisco to Sacramento, and I got an idea about opening a retail store that catered to the college’s art departments because SAC State didn’t have a great store that catered to the Art Department. When we came back to Ogden there was no store period that catered to the Weber State’s Art Department, so my best friend Linda and I started a store called Apple Arts up 14 next to the University, it wasn’t a university in those days, but up by the University. That’s how it all started. LR: Did you experience any resistance or discouragement as you were starting out? JP: Not in the store so much, but when I got the idea to become a publisher that wasn’t a “cute little hobby” for women. A retail store was a “cute little hobby,” so nobody was too excited about it but nobody was up in arms. When I decided to become a publisher it was a whole other ballgame, working with the banks, working with getting places to rent. My husband had to sign on everything. No one would give me credit, no one would rent me a building, no one would let me sign a contract, nothing. He had to sign for everything. LR: What year was this, do you remember? JP: It was forty-four years ago. LR: So this was in the early 1970’s. JP: Yes, because I graduated in 1968. LR: So even then in the early 1970’s? JP: Well and especially in a small town, I’m not sure it would’ve been like that in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, but in Ogden, Utah, I mean, Scott and my friends would literally be very condescending and ridicule me, in their own upper class way, because I wasn’t a stay-at-home mom. How did I dare leave the kids? Those kinds of things. We were, in their own quiet way, very much ostracized and then there are the stories with the bankers which are hilarious and horrendous. However they weren’t hilarious at the time, they were horrendous at the time! But now they’re hilarious because when you think that went on, it’s just 15 unbelievable to me. To this day, I have a very close group of friends in Ogden but I’m the only one who’s ever worked, I’m the only one who’s divorced, I’m the only one that doesn’t have a really wealthy husband to take care of me. I’m all those things. I’m the one. I’m their token one. But my BFFs, my very best friends are people in the art community and we live all over the world actually. We get together a lot because we all do the same events and we’re all involved in the same industry, and now with travel as easy as it is, it’s easy to be together. It was tough in the early days. LR: You mentioned some of those stories were horrendous, are you comfortable sharing some of those stories? JP: Sure, but I’m not going to tell you which bank, right, we won’t talk about that. When we very first started the publishing company we had a line of credit with the bank, and because in publishing you only get paid quarterly you have to run off of it, and especially when you start. You don’t get paid for a year so you have to work for an entire year and then you get paid quarterly. Your start-ups are pretty expensive and you need cash flow like every entrepreneur does. So we had a line of credit with a local bank and we had it forever and we were always paying on time. Scott and I were married in those days, he was a lawyer and my partner’s husband was a CPA, so we had the whole package. We were good, and we had a banker who I loved with all my heart, and then he had a heart attack so he retired, and the bank brought in a young new banker wanting to make his mark on the bank. The bank called me one day after I had written a series of checks, I’ll never forget it, and said, “We’ve closed your account. We’ve 16 frozen your line of credit.” I said, “Well that doesn’t work for me.” They said, “Well that’s what we’ve done.” So we made an appointment and they said, “Yep, we’ve closed your line of credit. We don’t think you’re a viable candidate for it anymore.” We had a perfect credit score and payment history, but we were just two women. About a week later we had the husbands, Scott and Rocky, come with us to a meeting in the bank. The bankers took us upstairs to a private room so that we wouldn’t be in the main lobby of the bank when we had the meeting. The two bankers were on this side, the new guy and his boss. My partner and I were on the other side and our husbands were in the back of the room. The new young guy leans over the table, points his finger and he says, “You little girls just don’t know when to quit.” Well my partner, who is about four foot nine and weighed about seventy pounds, literally stood up on the chair and leaned over the table and grabbed his necktie and was just yelling at him. The husbands came up from behind and picked her up by each arm and carried her out of the door. It was hilarious, but not at the moment. They set the business back so far we couldn’t recover. I mean the ripple effect of what happened, we closed the company, all because somebody decided after many years of good credit two women were no longer qualified for a line of credit. Now when I look back on it I think, “Oh I wish I would have been the person that day that I am today,” it would’ve ended a little differently. I wouldn’t have slithered out the door crying, I would have at least said what I wanted to say. I have lots of stories like this one. 17 All of the corporate heads in our industry, even though it was arts and needlework, were men and nobody thought in those days that anybody outside of New York, L.A., and Chicago was worth talking to. I wanted to work with some of the big companies and I couldn’t get in, I couldn’t get in the door and I couldn’t figure out why. Finally one of the salesman said, “It’s because you’re from Utah.” So I had a really good friend in Los Angeles, we set up a post office box and all of our mail went back and forth to the post office box in L.A., and as soon as they thought I was from Los Angeles there were no problems. We were in! LR: Okay. JP: So we have lots of those kinds of stories, I mean you hit brick walls every single day. In fact, some of them you didn’t even realize were brick walls because they were what everyone faced. But we’re still here, and we’re doing great. LR: The first publishing company that you started, what was it called? JP: The Vanessa-Ann Collection. LR: Okay, you said you had to close it but that obviously didn’t stop you. JP: No, but the closing day was one of the most traumatic days of my life. In those days we were selling millions of titles, we had a big warehouse with lots of help, I mean we were a machine, and we were printing new books every six weeks. It was big, then everything happened, and I remember the day that ZCMI backed their trucks up. The bank had sold all our inventory to the ZCMI stores for a nickel a magazine, it was rather traumatic. What does one do when the end has come? I had made a lot of friends going to trade shows and events and I had made a lot of friends in the publishing 18 industry and the craft industry, so I called one of my friends who was the Editor-in- Chief of Better Homes and Gardens, and I said to her, “I’ve got a really good idea and I would like to meet the president of Meredith.” She says to me, “No one meets the president of Meredith.” Well, when you’re from a small town and so naive it’s like, “Yep, I can meet the president of Meredith, I want to meet the president of Meredith.” She says, “Jo, it’s impossible.” I said, “Nothing’s impossible,” so she puts together this big meeting with the president of Meredith. I go by myself to New York City to this big boardroom at Meredith, which is like you see in the movies, and I open the door and there are all these men sitting at this boardroom. I excuse myself and went to the bathroom and threw up I was so scared. I walk back in, and in those days if you did craft books what happened was if you crocheted afghans you went into Meredith and dropped them on an editor’s desk, they wrote them, photographed them, published the book, paid you a royalty, and you never got to have any contact or input with the book at all. Because we’d been so successful with all of our craft booklets I said, “I can do what you do, only instead of taking two years, I can do it in six months and I can do it for half the price.” He said, “No you can’t,” and I said, “Yep, actually I can.” He said, “No,” and I said, “Why not?” He said, “Because we don’t do it that way, that’s not the way we do it.” I said, “But you should do it,” he said, “We’re not going to do it that way.” I needed rent money, so I said, “Okay, I’ll make you a deal. You pick the category, we’ll produce the book, I’ll lay it out, photograph it, I’ll get it here in six months. You pick a number that you consider a bestseller and when I hit that number, you reimburse me for all of my costs and I 19 get a three year contract and triple the royalty.” He’s like, “Yeah, sure. Why not?” because he was so convinced that I was totally out to lunch. So we shake hands and we sign the agreement. I came back to Utah with no team, because we had to close everything down, so all the girls worked together to get the first book to press. It was cross-stitch, “365 Five-minute Designs.” His number was ten thousand, figured if we could sell ten thousand books that it was considered a runaway. We sold 1.2 million. and that set me off on my publishing hardbound book career and that part of my career lasted seventeen years. I had a good run, a really, really good run. We had many million bestsellers, but you never hear about them, they’re never on the New York Times Bestsellers’ List because they were cross-stitch books. It is what it is, but it’s a much larger category than people know. It’s focused, but it’s passionate and there are so many people. We did cross-stitch, quilting, master woodworking, cooking, and home decorating, anything that you needed instructions to do. That was my category and we were the best. That lasted for seventeen years. I was working for Sterling Publishing at the time, almost solely, and they were privately owned. I really liked them and then the president of Sterling sold to Barnes and Noble, and then life changed. Life always changes with a big corporation. Corporations work, it’s not wrong it’s just different, and Lincoln was gone, Lincoln and I had a fabulous relationship. By then Sara had the three stores, we were partnering, I had two big buildings, and we were publishing a hundred hardbound books a year. They sold to Barnes and Noble and my mom had a stroke, and Sara had twins, and life got in my way. I 20 got in a contract dispute and it stopped, everything just stopped, and it was over. I went from top to bottom in about one telephone call. We sold the building across the street, closed all of the stores, I kept this one and I helped Sara take care of the twins a little bit, but my mom had had a stroke so I was mostly taking care of her, and my dad got cancer. So it was done, for three years I sat in a dark room and took care of sick people and tried to decide what to do with my life. I was at the bottom, but then I got an idea and I created a new opportunity, and I was given the opportunity to start the magazines. That was thirteen years ago, and a month ago we won ‘Best Magazine’ in the country for 2018. You are born an entrepreneur, you are not made an entrepreneur, and you cannot learn to be an entrepreneur. I think the easiest way for people to understand is restaurant owners. A restaurant owner who’s a true entrepreneur will open numerous restaurants but they’re all different. One’s a Thai restaurant, one’s a Mexican Restaurant, one’s a dressy restaurant, or one’s a bar, because they want to try out all their ideas. If you’re a businessman and you open a restaurant, you own the chain, a chain of all the same restaurants, because you can figure out the economy of scale, you can make money at it, you’ve got a business plan, it makes sense. An entrepreneur doesn’t care, I mean he doesn’t care about economy of scale. He can sale meat from the Mexican restaurant to the fancy restaurant, but that’s all, it’s just different. You’re just born an entrepreneur. You really can’t control your ideas. The entrepreneur says to himself, “It’s such a great idea. Somebody’s got to do this and it should be me.” 21 LR: I love that definition between the two that’s fantastic. So you said you did this publishing for seventeen years, what was the name of that one? JP: Chapelle Limited. We published over a thousand books in my career. LR: Who was your partner with that? Or was it just you? JP: Just me. LR: Okay, because you mentioned a partner… JP: I did have a partner, her name’s Terrece Woodruff, and we partnered in the early days and then we split. She got married again, divorced and remarried, and moved to Ohio I think, and so she went one direction and I went another. LR: Okay, now during all this time you’re living here in Ogden, so this question is uniquely tied to where you lived. So as you’re building, you’re working, you’re being an outside of the home woman, how were you able to balance home-life with work-life especially given the environment you lived in. JP: Well I created a situation that worked for me; my children are the most important things to me in the world and my grandchildren, I love being with them, and because I was in publishing, I could create my own hours. It wasn’t like going to an office nine to five, I didn’t have classes, and we always owned a building that had a place for the kids. We used to own that big building that was the Children’s Justice Center. I owned that years ago, and half of the building was Tece’s and my offices, and then half the building was for the kids. They had their own bedrooms, they had their own kitchen, they had their own backyard to play in. I took them to market with me, they’ve traveled all over the world with me. Not that they thought that was so great, because they had to work and set up the booths 22 and sell cross-stitch books. But I took them with me everywhere, we were always together and I could work at home. I traveled sometimes without them, but after I got divorced, this sounds really horrible, but it worked even better then because we lived very close together and they would just go from house to house; Scott had them for two weeks and I had them for two weeks. So for two weeks I was single, could do anything I wanted as long as I was here for their games and school activities and stuff like that but no parental responsibility. Then they would come and live with me and then he was single for two weeks. So I’ve always worked it out, even now, the grandkids come down here, I bring the dog. I work as hard as anyone I know as far as hour per hour, but I will not sacrifice that which is important to me, and that is the children, and so I make time and I work later and longer but I can do that. LR: Right, awesome. So you said thirteen years ago you came up with this idea for Where Women Create magazine, where did that idea come from? JP: So my life is full of crazy stories, I mean the way we started the publishing company in the beginning is the craziest story. Before the magazine I hit bottom, I mean I lost everything, my house, my car, and the business. My dad was paying for my dinner, it was crazy. My son lived in Santa Barbara, going to photography school, I had a really good friend who lived in Laguna Beach, and then I had another friend who I had published all of her books. So when I hit bottom, all of my friends said, “We’re going to help find you a job.” Well I had actually applied for a job at Starbucks. I thought, “What I need is a nine to five with no responsibility and I think I can figure out how to make their coffee.” So I 23 actually got hired, I never went to training, but I did actually get hired. So anyway, my friend Sandra, whose books we had published who lived in Austin said, “You need to go to work for Stampington and Company,” but I didn’t know them. They were a big magazine publisher, and I didn’t know anything about magazines. I said, “Nope, I’m going to go work at Starbucks.” She said, “No, I want you to call Stampington,” and I said, “What do you guys not get about Starbucks?” Then Justin was moving, he finished photography school, and he was going down to Laguna. He said, “Ma, come down and spend a week and we’ll have a great time.” I said, “No thank you, I’m gonna start at Starbucks.” Then my really good friend who lives in Laguna who was already in the industry said, “Jo, come down and we’ll go to the trade show and we’ll find you a job.” We have a big trade show called CHA, the Craft and Hobby Association Trade Show, and I said, “You guys, I’m going to go work at Starbucks. I am really comfortable with this.” So Sandy said one more time: “Come down and we’ll go to the CHA show.” So I decided to go down, and Justin, my son, picked me up at the airport. However, before I left I wrote Stampington an email, I did my homework and the only person I could find at Stampington, her name was Jenny Doh, so I wrote her a note. “Hi, I’m Jo… this is what I do. We’ve never met but Sandra says we should.” She writes me back and says, “We don’t do books,” because I was best known for books. I thought, “Wrong answer,” and so I wrote her back and said, “I don’t want to do books with you.” She wrote back and said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I don’t know, Sandra thinks we should talk, maybe we can work 24 together.” She says, “Okay, CHA starts Friday, we have forty-five minutes on Thursday, we’ll meet with you.” My son picks me up at the airport, and I make him drop me off on the corner like when you’re in junior high school and you don’t want your mom to drop you off, that’s the way I felt not having my own car. When you don’t have any money, you have absolutely no confidence. Now if somebody drove me I would think nothing of it, but in those days it was a big deal. Anyway, he drops me off, I go into Stampington. I introduce myself, and Jenny Doh comes out. She says, “Do you care if Kellene goes to lunch with us?” I say, “No,” I’m watching my watch, forty-five minutes, and I’m terrified they’re going to ask me to pay for lunch, because I didn’t have lunch money. So we go to lunch and we’re sitting there talking and I said, “Who owns Stampington?” Kellene, who was quiet, conservative, very meek, said, “I do.” So I went to introduce myself and she said, “I know who you are and I know your books,” and before my contract dispute I had just published a book Where Women Create. She said, “Would you like to do it in a magazine?” I said, “Yes,” and so we talked about it, kind of planned it, forty-five minutes turned into four hours, and she said, “I’ll own it and I’ll pay you a royalty.” Well when life fell apart and I got involved in the lawsuit, I lost everything; except we had about a hundred thirty-five imprints and one of them was Where Women Create. I stood in the lawyer’s office in New York like I knew exactly what I was saying and said, “I’m not going to give this up. If I have to give this up we’re going to the mat, I’m going to fight you guys until the very end,” and they’re 25 looking at me like, “Yeah, whatever.” So I walked away from the lawsuit with the imprint Where Women Create, I had it trademarked, I owned it, so it was the only thing I owned in my world; which meant nothing, it was worth nothing. So Kellene said, “Okay, I’ll own it,” and I said, “No,” because I couldn’t give up the only thing I owned. She said, “Okay, we’ll split it. You own it, you produce the magazine. I’ll publish it, print it, sell it, and we’ll be partners.” So we shook hands, we went back to her offices, by now it’s about 4:30, we produce six-foot posters, and went to CHA in the morning and introduced Where Women Create the magazine. I didn’t know that in the magazine industry that you don’t get paid for a year, I thought I only had to produce one magazine. So my friends, you call all your friends, and I went to my friends and said, “Guys, I’m going to do this magazine and it’s going to be Where Women Create and it’s going to be these stories of these women and the photographs of their business and their studio and I don’t have any money.” They said, “No problem, we’ll write our own stories and we’ll take our own pictures,” and then I had an employee who said, “Jo, we’ll put it together for you and lay it out, and you can pay us when you get the money.” So we get the first one done, life is grand, it goes to press. I call Kellene and ask her where my check is, and she said, “When you’re a magazine publisher you don’t get paid for a year.” So then we had to produce three more issues, so we did, and you know it’s amazing what a group of women who are passionate about the same subject can do, and it’s fun. It’s not like doing accounting, you can get your hands dirty and it’s something that you love; they 26 were all in it and that was the beginning. We started with one and now I have four, and we started with four issues a year and now I have twenty. So it’s just believing in yourself, and not all of the women I work with are my friends either, I don’t want anyone to misunderstand, I do not believe in all women. I think you have to watch your back, because I think women can be brutal. You don’t just open your arms and say, “Oh we’re all women, let’s just all do this together.” You have to be very selective and work with people that you trust and that have your back and that you can do the same for them. It’s a sad world but you cannot trust everyone. But I truly believe that one of the reasons that we have such a great community is that people who work with their hands do it from their heart and not for the money, because there’s no money in it. They’re passionate about it, their artwork is their children. They believe it, they love it, and they live it. When you ask them for help, working non-stop on something that is creative, they’re all in a hundred percent. It’s different than a hardcore business world, which is why I will not work with a big corporation. Every company I have worked with has been privately owned, because I feel like they still have the same passion and the same compassion; they know what it’s like to be working your way up the ladder and what it means to you, it’s not just about your paycheck. LR: Okay, so what advice would you give to those wanting to try their hand at their own business? JP: Do your homework, know everything that you can learn about what it is you want to do, because you don’t want to make somebody else’s mistakes. If the 27 mistakes have been made or if something is succeeding, you want to start there. Let’s not reinvent the wheel here. That’s the number one thing I always say is, “Do your homework.” Take the time to do your homework and then truly believe in yourself, because if you don’t believe in what you’re doing you can’t convince anybody else to believe in it either. As an entrepreneur that’s what you’re selling is yourself all day long because people are investing in you not in what you do. If you go away there is no product, unlike a business person who’s producing mass amounts of goods, whatever that is, but repetitively over and over and over again. Once they get a template they can go forever, they make a few modifications, they change it for the styles. But if you want somebody who’s going to come up with some entirely different concept, you have to have the person behind the business or it won’t work. LR: This question is kind of out of left field, but you were mentioning when you and your daughter owned quite a few buildings here on 25th Street. What was that like going into business with your daughter? JP: It was my dream come true. I’m not sure that she would say the same thing, because when she came to work with me, I had the two buildings and we were doing a lot of books, and I had a big team. She graduated from college, went to work for a big tech company that was in Salt Lake. One really stormy night when she was commuting back and forth I made the forty-fifth offer for her to come and work with me. She took over parts of the company that I had nothing to do with, like she introduced us to computers, that’s how long ago that was. After a couple of years, she realized she didn’t like publishing. She’s not a maker, she’s a 28 brilliant business woman and dealing with makers is very frustrating because we write our own rules, we don’t follow anybody else’s rules, we don’t like that. So we were having a discussion and we decided we’d open retail stores, because we were trying to build 25th Street with Mayor Godfrey and we were trying to make a difference, so we started the 25th Street Association. We started working together, and when you’re doing a hundred books a year and you’re doing a hundred photographs a book, you need a tremendous amount of photography props so part of our budget would be to buy the props to do the photography. We had a big warehouse and then once a year we’d have this big garage sale and everybody would come in, and then we’d junk the rest and it was a nightmare. So when Sara decided to open the stores, it was perfect because all of the inventory in the stores we could use for props for the photoshoots, so it saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on the budget for the publishing company and it helped build 25th Street. Sara loves retail, she loves people, and so what she did is she opened Ruby and Begonia, which was a high-end retail store, then she opened Olive and Dahlia, which was a garden decor store and florist that targeted the new bride, and then she opened the White Fig. So the new bride would come in, she’d buy all of her gifts and register at Ruby and Begonia, she’d have her flowers made at Olive and Dahlia, and then the White Fig was a gift basket store where we made gift baskets for many of the corporations in Ogden. We’d take all the inventory from the two stores that didn’t sell and put it in the gift baskets so every one of the gift baskets was unique. They were beautiful, because if we got wholesale 29 out of them we were really happy with that, which means the customer got a four hundred dollar gift basket for a hundred and fifty dollars. Everybody won, it was a perfect scenario all the way around, and that’s why she’s brilliant. She runs Visit Ogden which is our Convention and Visitors Bureau. LR: I think she’s on our list. JP: She’s on your list? Oh I hope she’s on your list. She’s an amazing young woman, and she has some great stories about her mother. She is the logic and the discipline and the business; she is everything I’m not. I think that’s why it works so well for us, even though we don’t work together, because we don’t compete. If she wants her walls painted or needs something creative, I’m your guy. If I have a legitimate business question about running a business day to day, she’s the one I go to because she is so smart and so level. She can kind of see everybody’s perspective, I can only see my own. LR: That’s great, is there anything you wish as you were growing up that someone would’ve told you? JP: I have very few regrets in my life, very, very few, but one of the major regrets is that I didn’t go to college and I didn’t take advantage of the opportunities that were there. I think I could have been great, I mean if I had my PhD in marketing I could have done ten times for the people that I work with that I do now. So it is one of my true regrets. There were days that I wish that I would’ve gone to work at Hill Field so that I had benefits and a paycheck, so there’s good and bad in everything, but I do feel like I say to everybody, “You may not want to go to college now, but you have such opportunities that are given to you as a student, 30 especially in today’s world. You can do so many things, everybody’s in your corner, everybody wants you to succeed. So take advantage of all of those opportunities as long as you can and then go out on your own.” So I wish I would have done that. LR: Okay, how did you find the courage to do what you love? JP: You know, I think true entrepreneurs don’t even think about having the courage. I think you’re so convinced you have such a good idea, that it seems so logical to you, that it doesn’t take any courage, you just do it. I mean, it’s just natural, because I’m afraid of a lot things and I really have to get myself in a corner and talk to myself and get myself off the ledge and all those kinds of things that everybody does. But as far as starting a new idea or going full force with something, the augmented reality video on the cover of my issue of Where Women Work has never been done before and I thought it was a great idea, never occurred to me that I shouldn’t do it until I got in the middle of it and all I was thinking was, “Oh my, what have I done?” In the beginning, it was a no-brainer. “Nobody’s ever done it, we need to do it, we’re the cutting edge. We’ve won this big award, when we go to accept it we need to have this cover with an augmented reality video on it. We’re gonna do this.” Never occurred to me to be brave, until I was too far into it to get out, and then I needed to be brave. It’s just when anybody has to do anything that scares you to death it’s, “What would I attempt to do if I knew I could not fail?” “A thousand people have done this before me,” “I’m as good as they are,” all those things that you tell yourself so that you can take the next step, because the beginning’s easy, the beginning is the 31 excitement and making the idea work and all of that. It’s the end when you think, “Hmm...yeah, well?” LR: So you mentioned awards, what awards have you won? JP: We’ve won lots and lots of awards. We have won the best of everything in our categories all through the years. When I owned the building across the street, the entire hallway, which was enormous, on two levels was filled with our awards. I’m very honored to be part of that, they’re not just mine, they’re the women that we feature, they’re the people on our pages, they’re the designers’ that push themselves to be part of the best. It takes a team, and I’m just the one who is lucky enough to be able to receive them. But the one we received last month—I have a new publisher, I moved from Stampington after twelve years and went to Disticor out of Canada. When I went to work with Stampington and did magazines Kellene gave me an opportunity that was life-saving but she had an imprint and a style, so I had to do my magazines in her style, her imprint, her brand, the way she wanted to do it. When I went to Disticor, it’s three guys who said, “I don’t care what you do,” and I didn’t know what I didn’t know so when they said, “We want to do four magazines, can you do that?” “Of course!” So we started, and it’s only a year old, and the first four months, I am not exaggerating, I put those magazines together by myself from beginning to end and almost went over the edge. I worked eighteen hours a day. There would be weeks I didn’t get out of my sweats, I would just go to the computer and do my work and take a nap and then go back. But they were mine, they were all mine. It was my idea, everything was mine. So when we received that award, and I 32 always say ‘we’ because one, if somebody doesn’t like it I can blame somebody else and two, it really is ‘we,’ I really do believe in a team. But when we received the award in New York in February and it was for the ‘Four Best Magazines Launched in the Country’ out of over seven hundred for 2018 they were mine, they were all mine. To be able to be recognized on that level by myself was probably the culmination of a really wonderful career. So now I can kind of rest on those laurels for a minute, take a deep breath and think, “Yeah, I’m pretty good. This idea really was a good idea!” LR: That’s fantastic. Do you have any questions? AD: So you have your daughter Sara, do you have any other kids? JP: I have a son, Justin, and a lovely daughter-in-law, Jaimie, and then Sara is married to Brett and I have two grandchildren that are twins, Olivia and Jackson. Justin and Jaimie are moving up here, we hope, they’re in Salt Lake now. They moved up from Laguna and they’re in Salt Lake, and we’re trying to get them to Ogden. They’re in the restaurant business. Justin is the quiet, easy going, doesn’t need a lot of money, likes his life kind of guy. They lead a great life, they’re cute. I call them kids, they get really mad, I mean he’s almost forty. But they’re my kids, they’ll always be my kids. LR: That never changes, no matter how old they get. JP: I know, you think about that and it’s scary, it’s really scary. I mean, what do you do when you have a kid that’s fifty? LR: I don’t know. 33 JP: Right? That’s haunting me, just a little bit because that means I’m going to be eighty. That takes my breath away. LR: I can appreciate that. AD: Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share about being a mother? What are your feelings about it? JP: I love being a mother, it’s the hardest job I’ve ever had and it’s the one you’re most emotionally involved in. You so want to do it right, I mean you have no training and you have only your own mom. Let’s face it, we all have great things about our childhood and things that were not so great, nobody’s life is perfect. You just want your kids—you want to be involved but not intrusive, which is the finest line to walk in the entire world. You want to be the hip-mom everybody loves and yet you want to keep your authority. You want to be the mother, you don’t want to be the friend because you need to keep them safe and that’s even when they’re adults. There are things that you learn along the way that they need help whether they’ll admit it or not, right? They are your greatest joy and your greatest sorrow all rolled up into one, so it’s a rollercoaster that they take you on, that I took my mother on, I mean we’re all guilty of it. Really the only thing you want to do is what’s best for them, and you hope they realize it. They don’t think that from about eleven to eighteen, they think that you’re just the Wicked Witch of the West that’s calling in the monkeys. So I learned to stand quietly in the background, to always be there if they need me. Because I have a free-wheeling personality, so I’m just a take-charge kind of gal and you have to be really careful of that with your children, because you need to let them take charge and make 34 their mistakes and be themselves and not always live in your shadow. I am very proud when people say to me, “Sara Toliver’s your daughter,” and I say, “Yes.” It’s not that they say to her, “Jo Packham’s your mother,” which I don’t ever want—I don’t ever want them to compare her to me, “Oh the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree,” I want her to be who she is in her own right and make all of her own mistakes and all of her own successes and get credit for them. That’s not easy, because you want to stand in front, you want to help them, right? You just want to help them every step of the way. So let them do it themselves. Let them be independent. Let them make their mistakes. Not everybody on the team needs to get a trophy, some of us lose. It is what it is, it’s life. It brings tears to my eyes all the time. When they’re happy, you’re happy, when they’re sad, it breaks your heart and it’s lifelong. I used to think when they grew up, “Oh they’re eighteen, they’re gone, they’re off to college.” Then you have to worry about their husbands, and their wives, and their children, and all of those people, and it’s just overwhelming so sometimes, I just think, “I’m going to go have a chocolate bar,” because I drown all my sorrows in chocolate. But I don’t think not everybody is meant to be a parent. I don’t think every person should be a parent, some people just don’t want to or don’t have the personality to and shouldn’t be and that’s okay too. You just have to do what’s right for you. Does that answer your question? AD: Yeah, thank you. JP: You’re welcome. LR: How do you think the world has changed for women in your lifetime? 35 JP: That’s an interesting question, because I thought it had completely changed. Because in my world of arts and crafts, it was all run by men, but it has completely changed. A couple years ago, my daughter put together a group of women who were fighting for equal rights in the workplace and I was stunned. I said, “Are you still fighting for that?” Because I don’t have to go to a bank anymore and borrow money, and everything that we do is now all driven by women, we’re a women’s category. I think in some ways it’s changed dramatically, and I think in some ways it hasn’t changed at all. There are still those preconceived notions. But what I am dismayed over and really sad about is that women think that they have to be equal to men and I don’t believe that. I was asked a question at an Athena luncheon that said, “What would you do if somebody said, “You run like a girl?” I said, “I would be so proud, because I don’t want to run like a boy. I am a girl, and I’m proud of the way I run.” I want to be the best runner in my category but I don’t want to be compared to men, because biologically and psychologically we’re different, and I don’t think we should be the same. But I think we need to respect each other’s values and what we bring to the table and what we’re best at, and I don’t think that’s completely happened yet. I don’t know if it ever will, I don’t think so. LR: Before I ask my last question is there any other stories you want to share? JP: I have a million stories, no I think you’ve probably heard my whole life now. LR: Somehow I doubt that, but that’s okay. It’s hard when you’re in the moment to think and then it’s afterwards that you, “I should have said this! I should have said that!” So the last question ties directly to the project. How do you think women 36 receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? JP: I think it changed everything dramatically in just one big step, right? It was not a small step, I mean we’re still fighting for it in certain places, but what dismays me is how few women actually take advantage of the opportunity that was fought for so hard for them. Every woman everywhere should vote for everything. They should be involved, they should be interested, they should protect themselves. I’m not involved on a national level it’s too big for me and even on a state level, but I’m very involved on a local level. I can see the changes that I make here. But I always vote on a national level, I try to know about the candidates, I try to know all of that. I think that it’s, what’s the right word to use, I don’t even know the right word to use, but it’s just wrong that some women fought so hard of a battle for so long to give us a right that we take advantage of and don’t use. I think that’s very wrong, because I think it changed history and I think that if we would actually use it to our best advantage we could change history again. LR: I agree with you. I have one more question. JP: Sure. LR: It just occurred to me that you talked about the 25th Street revitalization with Mayor Godfrey and I didn’t ask you a question about it. So how did you get involved in that? JP: Well when I first came down here, I had my offices down here, and we really were the first, what we refer to as reputable business, on 25th Street. You didn’t have to go in the back door or they weren’t selling something illegal, right? I had 37 the building across the street, I rented it from Janica Pantone, we were the only business on the street. It was so scary down here that in the winter time at five o’clock the police would come and escort us to our cars because it was too scary to go by ourselves. If you can believe it, we rented the entire building for two hundred dollars a month because Janica needed to rent the building, because there were a couple of doctor’s wives who had this idea to renovate 25th Street and Janica Pantone was one. So she wanted bodies in the building. I was an all-woman organization that was really involved in the community, so we were good press for the street. Then when Sara came to work with us, we were pretty self-contained, I wasn’t too conscious of what was going on. So Sara came to work for us and she didn’t like publishing and she wanted retail stores, so we talked together and I said, “If you want to do retail stores on this street, then we need to build this street so that people will come to your retail stores so they’ll be successful.” That was just the perfect storm with Mayor Godfrey, he was such a pitbull and he had such a vision that no one could see and the way it all started was Kym Buttschardt started Roosters, Heidi Harwood started Brewski’s, Todd Ferraro started Bistro 25, so we were all together and we started the Historic 25th Street Association. Then Mayor Godfrey came to me and said, “Will you redo Christmas Village?” I said, “Sure, that’s like an art project and it would bring people down and would be less threatening for the streets.” I have to tell this story because this is the dearest community story of my life. So I said, “Where is it? Where is Christmas Village?” It was when they had 38 built the amphitheater and so they moved it down next to the Kokomo. So it was out in the parking lot right next to the Kokomo, which is a great place to bring kids for Christmas Village. He said, “During the summer they’re out in the field,” so I went out to the field and there were these six dilapidated buildings like all over out in the field at the Industrial Park, and so I went back the next morning and said, “I can’t do Christmas Village, it’s too big of a project for me. I’m sorry, no.” He said, “Well you can’t resign,” and I said, “Why not?” He said, “Because it’s an appointed position, and you’ve been appointed and you can’t resign.” So I said to him, “Okay, so I don’t know what that means. Tell me what Christmas Village is.” He said, “You’re going to build these cottages, and you have to put them on trailers.” I said, “I don’t know what a trailer is,” and he said, “They’re those things that you build that you carry sporting equipment on.” That’s not me, you don’t carry your paintbrushes on it so I don’t know anything about them. I said, “So where do I get it,” and he says, “You go to Bubba.” So I go out to Big Bubba’s, who makes trailers, and I walk in and Bubba’s standing there and I introduce myself and I said, “Bubba, I need trailers for Christmas Village.” He said, “Tell me about Christmas Village,” and I said, “We’re building these cottages so that the kids can see,” and he says, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen those in the park, a couple of them.” I said, “Well, we’re going to build a hundred cottages and I’ve got this five year plan and we’re going to do all this stuff and we’re going to start with sixteen, but I need the trailers, and I’ll pay you wholesale. I’ll raise the money to pay you wholesale so that you don’t lose anything, but please don’t make any money on my non-profit project.” He said, 39 “Okay, let’s go see them.” So we go out to the Industrial Park and they’re all in the field and he’s got his secretary with him and they’re taking notes and he’s like, “This is seven feet four inches and this is nine feet,” and he doesn’t have a tape measure. I said, “Bubba, how do you know that?” Well, he used to work on an oil rig and he never learned how to read and write, so he knew exactly by looking at a table to a quarter of an inch how long it was, and then his secretary would write it down so that he could build everything. So we’re standing out there in the middle of the field and he said, “Now tell me about these cottages again,” so I told him and he said, “Now they’re for the kids, right? They’re for the kids.” I said, “Everything we’re doing is for the kids and it’s all free.” He said, “I will build these trailers for free and I will build as many as you need for as many years as you build them.” Bubba has built us sixty-four trailers over the years for free. He donates everything to us for the kids. I love Bubba, and it’s because of people like him in a community like this that they are so willing to give and help, and that helped build 25th Street and now Christmas Village is one of the largest Christmas celebrations in the western U.S. We get press all over the west. Then between everything that Godfrey was doing, everything that we were doing as an association, all the businesses coming in, it took fifteen years to take ten steps. These kids, these forty year old geniuses who have all these businesses now, it’s taken them seven years to take a hundred steps. So we built the foundation, we got it started, we’ve fought the battles, we cleaned it up, and then they took it and grew it and made it what it is today. LR: Okay, yeah I’m glad I asked. 40 JP: Christmas Village is my soft spot, I have the most heartwarming stories about Christmas Village. It has been the greatest thing I’ve ever done for the community and for myself. It brings tears to my eyes. I walk through Christmas Village every single, solitary night and cry because of the stories of building that thing. It was crazy. LR: The first time I’d ever seen Christmas Village was this year, ‘cause I just moved to Ogden. JP: Oh, I did not know that. Welcome to Ogden. LR: Thank you. I had never seen anything like it, it was amazing. I brought my two adult children with me, and my son was bored but my daughter was just like, “Oh my gosh, this is so cool,” so I can appreciate that. JP: I’ve never worked that hard or spent that much money on a project in my life. I donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the city to get those built, but it was important to me. I need to build tangible things, that you can walk by and see. I’m all about the kids and that’s why our’s is free. Thanksgiving Point has a wonderful Christmas celebration but it’s thirty-five dollars, even for the children. So many don’t get to participate, and everything we do is free except for the hot chocolate and then every dime that’s raised at the hot chocolate booth buys shoes for kids in school. So nobody makes any money off Christmas Village. LR: Wow, I did not know that. JP: Now you’ll like it even better. LR: Yes, I will. I will. Is there anything else that you’d like to mention before we turn off the camera? 41 JP: I think that it’s just been such an honor, thank you. I can’t even believe that you’d ask me, I don’t know how I got on your radar but I’m glad I did. LR: I’m glad you did too. JP: I love this town, I love my job, I have a great family. I don’t want everybody to think it’s easy, because it’s not easy. Life is a struggle, but you have to just appreciate the good things and try to get through the bad things, and know that it’s what we have to do to be who we are and you have good days and bad days. Today is a good day, yesterday was not such a good day. LR: Thank you so much for your time.