Oral History Program Sue Wilkerson Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon 5 September 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Sue Wilkerson Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon 5 September 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: Wilkerson, Sue, an oral history by Sarah Langsdon, 5 September 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Sue Wilkerson 5 September 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Sue Wilkerson, conducted on September 5, 2019, in the Stewart Library, at Weber State University, by Sarah Langsdon. In this interview, Sue discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. SL: This is Sarah Langsdon and I am interviewing Sue Wilkerson. It is September 5 2019, it’s about ten o’clock and we’re in the Stewart Library. So Sue, thank you for agreeing to do this. We’re going to start at the beginning so tell us where and when you were born. SW: I was born in San Jose, California on July 22, 1961. SL: Are you an only child or do you have siblings? SW: Oldest of three. Younger brother, younger sister. SL: Okay, so a mixture of both. What is your father’s name and what did he do for a living? SW: His name is Chuck, he’s still very much alive, and he was a rocket scientist for Lockheed. SL: That’s why you were in the Bay Area? Then your mom, what was her name and what did she do? SW: Kate Money, she’s still alive and doing very well also, and she was a school teacher. First grade ‘til we begged her to retire. SL: So, did you grow up mostly in the Bay Area? SW: Yes, I grew up in Boulder Creek. My parents actually still live in the same house that they built in 1959. They never moved, so home is still home. 2 SL: Where did you end up going to college? Or did you go to college? SW: Yes, went to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. I was an ag business management major and met my husband there. Then we moved to Woodland, California and we started a trucking business and built a house, and we stayed married for eleven years. I stayed in Woodland fourteen years total, and then just through a touch of fate, ended up working for Viking Freight and Viking sent me to Utah and I went, “Oh, look at these great mountains. This is awesome, I’m moving.” Didn’t put a whole lot of thought into it, got here, still didn’t have really a job of any kind, because Viking had changed directions, and ended up going to work for Airborne Express in Salt Lake. I lived in a rental in West Jordan, and finally I got tired of working for another company ‘cause I’ve always been sort of an entrepreneur. I read a book called What Color is Your Parachute? and that book literally said, “Hey, you’d make a pretty good real estate broker.” So went and got my real estate license and then met a broker up here in Ogden, started working here in Ogden, moved, bought a house, and then I’m here. Have been here for, it’ll be twenty years in Ogden this December. SL: Wow that’s amazing. So, when you went to college, were you encouraged by your parents to pursue an education? SW: I don’t know that they had to encourage much. It was just my upbringing, having both collegiate parents. Dad went to Redlands and Stanford and Mom went to Oregon State, it was just assumed that we would go to school, and Cal Poly was sixty-three dollars for tuition for my first quarter. SL: Wow, that’s crazy. You can’t even buy a textbook for that at this point. 3 SW: No, no, you cannot. SL: You did agricultural business? SW: I did and my logic behind it was that I did not want to live in a city. I wanted to be able to live in the country and I knew that if I pursued agriculture that the likelihood of not living in a city was high. I had horses growing up, was always in 4-H, participated in all kinds of outdoor. I was probably on my horse or playing sports more than anything. So when I got accepted to Cal Poly, and Davis, and UOP, I mean all the schools. I had pretty strong grades. I think I was eleventh in my graduating class, not too bad. SL: So were there a lot of females in the agricultural business school? SW: There were quite a few, especially in ag business. If you got into like mechanized agriculture, the more hands-on farm equipment, fixing majors, there was mostly boys. It was just fun to be in the ag school. We just did great things, we had a lot of clubs, and I was of course involved in all the clubs and sorority and all that. SL: I was just curious, if there were a lot of women that went into that? SW: There was more than you would think. I bet in our classes it was one-third women, two-thirds men. It was definitely more men but there was still quite a few of us. SL: Okay. So why did you, and your then husband at the time, decide to do shipping? SW: When he was in high school, he went to Davis High School and his senior year, as soon as he turned eighteen, or sixteen, was it sixteen or eighteen, he borrowed some money from his dad and he went and bought a truck and hauled seasonal tomatoes through the last year of high school and all the way through 4 his summers and breaks from college. When he moved and started going to Cal Poly, he was one of the first to haul the tractor-pull sled when tractor-pulls were brand new. He pulled the sled to all of the different fairgrounds and did all of the fun tractor-pulling stuff. So he pretty much was already in trucking and when I met him, and that first summer that we were dating, we were hauling tomatoes in the middle of the night down by Hanford and we were driving along and he’s like, “Hey, do you want to steer?” I said, “Sure,” and I leaned over and he jumped from behind me into the passenger seat at sixty miles an hour on a little two lane road and he basically taught me how to drive that night. Boyd pretty much had, between twelve and fourteen trucks, but both of us drove, I did all the books, he did all the mechanic, work on the trucks and we both supervised drivers. We were a pretty successful little trucking company. But then we were sort of married to our work, which is why we ended up parting ways. We never fought, we never argued, but we were just like working partners, we just lost that spark. So, anyway, life happens. SL: I understand. So when you got to Utah you ended up in Salt Lake first. SW: I ended up in Salt Lake just because I found a rental in West Jordan, a split entry, which to this day I hate split entries ‘cause I had to live in one. The house was nice, the landlord was awful, he was a collections guy in Salt Lake and very wealthy and just really not a nice person. Anyway, I didn’t find a job right off the bat but just to make money, I was interviewing for all these like “real jobs” but it was 1997 and things were a little marginal, I ended up working for Ralph Smith hauling dirt on the freeway because, of course, driving is what I was good at. So 5 jumped in a truck, hauled nights, and then I would sleep during the day, get up at about two or three and go to all these interviews that I had set up. I’d show up to drive my night shift truck in a three-piece black suit that I got at Nordstrom and the drivers’d be like, “What are you doing in that suit?” I made the mistake once of saying, “Well, I’m actually applying for my real job,” and they’re like, “Real job?! This is a real job! You don’t think it’s a real job?” I’m like, “No, I get it’s a real job but it’s just, I have a little more capability, I mean, I’m a really good truck driver but I’m better at other things.” SL: So were you the only female truck driver or were there others? SW: In our company, I was generally the only one. We tried a few times to hire women and they just couldn’t hang or they were always asking the guys for help and they didn’t carry their own weight so they did not last long. So it was almost all men. Yes, definitely in that era, there was very few women drivers, I can still name them just not very many. I think when you’re going over the road too there’s just not many female drivers. You could always mess with the guys and talk on the CB and give them a bad time and we did a lot of that. Driving was fun. I still, every once in a while, help my friend around here ‘cause I still have my class A. So I still jump behind the truck. He got sideways and lost his license, his commercial license, and so I’m like, “Well, I can help you out but I’m not driving dumpster truck every day. Don’t get any ideas, I’m a little busy for that.” So every once in a while hop in the truck. It’s good to keep practice. SL: I assume as the boss of your company you didn’t have any...terrible interactions with the male drivers. 6 SW: No, in fact, the guys for the most part, because I would pull my own weight, I’d tarp my own trailers and never asked for help and broke my trailers up and did whatever I never needed to do without help, they usually would offer help, just to be nice. I had a really good report. There was only one time in all of my years of driving. We were driving along the same highway together, this lumber truck, and he passed me and was going way too fast. I said something like, “God, where’s the fire?” He started in on me, “You stupid female drivers, you think you’re all that,” and he did it over the main channel so all of the other drivers in the area heard it all and they started in on him and they chased him to the rest area and who knows what happened after that. There was people that were, much more supportive, but that was the only really super negative instance. There was a few companies that we worked for that would not talk to me, they wanted to talk to my husband. SL: Ahh. SW: Like I said, “Oh, our truck will be there in the morning,” “I’d like to talk to Ralph about that,” “Oh, okay. Sure. Yeah, they want to talk to you, here,” like it was so dumb but I did run into that. There was still male chauvinism in the upper echelon, more than with the truck drivers. It was interesting. SL: Yeah, that’s interesting. So you’re in Utah, working for a little bit, get your real estate license, so you sold real estate in Salt Lake for a little while? SW: No, I started working for a broker up here, and commuted from West Jordan to Ogden. From October 1st 1999 through December, when I closed on the house that I bought. So yeah, two and a half months, but I liked Ogden a lot better than 7 Salt Lake. Anyway, the broker up here was great and I liked working for him so I just said, “Okay, great.” That’s how it ended up. So I made that move. SL: Okay, so now you’re in Ogden, working as a real estate broker, and then? SW: Back then, I was an agent, cause you have to start as an agent and you have to have three years under your belt. Worked for Coldwell Banker right out of the gate and then I went off with another independent, worked for Franklin Group for about three months while we switched over to our new little brokerage called Angus Stewart, which is no longer around, and worked for that broker for a couple years. He had an unethical streak that really got under my nerves and I just couldn’t compromise my values so I ran into these other partners and they said, “Hey, we’ll be your silent partners if you want to run this new brokerage,” and that’s when I started Terra Venture Real Estate. That was my little brokerage. I’ve always been small, I think we’ve ranged anywhere from three agents to you know twelve agents and somewhere in between. I like being small because I like to sell more than I like to manage. Coaching one or two agents? Great. Coaching twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty? Not me. SL: You’d rather be out there and, SW: Yes and be in the trenches, I think it’s a Cal Poly, learn by doing, mentality. I think it’s more important for agents to see you, for them to learn by watching you do and seeing how things are actually done rather than me just teaching and telling. Went on with Terra Venture all the way through the Recession, which about took everything that I had. It was such a tough time, there was just month after month with no sales, no income, and if it wasn’t for my parents saying, “You 8 need a little help this month?” There were months I had all these rentals and I couldn’t fill any of them because nobody was renting anything, or I’d rent them at a loss. There were months I made mortgage payments from credit card checks because I knew it was more important to keep my payment record perfect. I had tons of credit, I had all these huge credit cards. The companies, they would just send you, “Oh, here’s a thirty-thousand dollar card, here’s a twenty,” so I had all these credit cards and I can tell you every single one of them was maxed. I still have those little sheets of paper where I wrote down every single debt that I had and how much I had to make the minimum. There’s months that you rob Peter to pay Paul, so you learn to balance money, you learn how to handle stress when your whole world is like collapsing. You still have to be upbeat, positive, try to keep in contact with clients and sales, everybody was short selling because everyone was upside down. It was a big challenge I think for, those of us that survived the Recession, and trying to explain what that was like to agents that have entered the business afterward. A lot of my friends now they’re all retiring and I’m like, “Pfft! Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” I had to pull everything out to make those payments over mostly 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and then finally 2012, I think I started to unbury things. 2012 was when I chose to participate in my Re/Max franchise so, I basically converted Terra Venture into Re/Max Crossroads and had a seven year franchise agreement and I just renewed for another five so, we’ll be with Re/Max a little while longer. I like the brand a lot, you don’t have to explain to people what you do. Terra Venture, they’re like, “So 9 what do you do?” It’s like, “Ah, I sell houses.” So anyway, that’s the real estate side. The historic home side, which I think is as compelling. The first house I bought was sort of a tract Woodside home in South Ogden. I didn’t really care for the house or the neighborhood, all my friends thought it was the greatest thing ever, I was not happy in that 1980s multi-level split, it just wasn’t me. I used to drive around and look at old houses in Ogden and drive up and down the streets. One point in 2003, it was like right around October and I was driving down Jefferson and there were all these Victorians that I could see like were in stages of; and I started going to Junior League meetings in 2001 across the street. We were so scared of Jefferson that we would park on Orchard and knowing what I know now, I think it’s really comical, but Jefferson was scary. If you parked in front, you had all of the catcalls from all of these apartments and people, and shopping carts, and beer cans, and who knows what was going on in those houses. It was so rough and not a great place. Anyway, in driving to Junior League or to or from, I saw those Victorians and I could see that the city had started to do some work on that street, and bring up the railroad tracks out of the street, and start to put streetlights, and I’m like, “Wow, I wonder if there’s something I could do to help them sell these houses or somehow get involved.” I called Ward Ogden, who was the community development person, and I said, “I just really love old houses and I notice you’re doing some work on Jefferson, is there something that I could do to help you sell, promote, move these historic homes because I’ve always just loved historic homes.” 10 Woodland is a lot like Ogden and I think for the first five years I was here I would interchange those two words because Woodland and Ogden, both railroad towns, had their old historic districts, very similar makeup. Woodland just probably had a few more farmers in it than Ogden does, but the railroad side of it there was always trains in Ogden, and in Woodland. Ward said, “You know, we’ve got everything under control, but actually what we really need is there’s one house,” and he gave me the address and he said, “That house we just found out we have to tear it down, it’s not, the stone foundation is in too poor of shape, the house isn’t in good enough shape to restore, it doesn’t have anything special. So we need to find someone who is willing to build a house after we tear that one down and commit to live there for five years. If you do that then we’ll give you the lot,” I said, “Oh, well, I’ll do that,” and he says, “No, really, I’m serious,” and I said, “So am I.” So that started rolling and I drove around up and down Eccles trying to figure out how I wanted to design that house so that it mirrored and mimicked houses on Jefferson but took in some of the Eccles’ characteristics I copied a few of the traits from the art center, a lot of the landscaping ideas so that it would hopefully blend in sooner or later and now I don’t think people can even tell it’s a newer house. So I designed the house and found a builder. And I will tell you that this builder, this is just going to kill you. This builder was so creative and he was very ingenious with trying to build houses that were new houses that looked old, like just everything, from the details, the brick mold, the trim pieces, he was just obsessed with making new houses look old. When I first met him, I went up and 11 saw his house in the valley that he’d had built and it seems like a really good fit, and then we sort of made the agreement to put it in the parade of home because we thought it was good enough to do that. We started working together and his name is Chad Flitton. If that name rings a bell, it’s because he is the goofball that just got popped again for voyeurism. He went off the rails after he built well, it started during the building of my house. I could just tell. I’d be at the house at 7:30 meeting with the other subs and Chad’d show up at eleven. I’m like, “Chad where have you been?” Then he’d be in the porta potty smoking pot during the day. I watched the demise of his life and now he’s got all these other psychological problems and I think he’ll probably end up in prison. I don’t tell too many people he is the builder that built my house. The product was so great it was just that personally, is a goofball. Once the house was built, it was in Parade of Homes. The crazy thing is that Parade of Homes has to be a new house and you can move in your personal stuff but you can’t have any personal items out; no pictures, no photos, no personal clothes, no dishes, it has to be model home ready. For three months, I packed up out of the South Ogden house and I boxed the boxes based on which room they were going into, whether they were décor or staples, and I literally predesigned the entire house and kept all of my stuff in boxes in a locked room in the basement for the Parade of Homes. I had to separate my whole life into décor. We barely got it done in time, in fact, all the home builders had bet against us finishing. We broke ground on January 5th, tore down the old house, dug the foundation and poured the footings on Valentines’ Day. The Parade of Homes 12 opened June 4th. That was a really fast build for a forty-three hundred square foot house. That was the yard, that was everything, decorated, ready to open for the Parade of Homes. The morning of the parade, I can still remember the painters on the back porch finishing the deck posts. The interesting thing about that Parade of Homes house is that there was over fifteen thousand people that came through the house, and because I was a realtor, I could sit in my own house and have my little name tag. I sat in the kitchen and I’d listen to these people as they walked through the house and, “Oh my gosh, this is the best house in the parade. This one’s so amazing,” because it was really my stuff, it wasn’t like decor from the At Home store, it was all my stuff that I’d collected over the years so it had a lot of personality to it. I listened to them as they went through the house and they’re like, “Uh, but this person who built this house is off the rocker, this is the worst part of Ogden, it’s never going to improve.” I listened to them talk about how horrible Ogden was and how awful it was and I’d let them get pretty deep and then I’d say, “Well, the person that built this house, I can tell you, she has a strong belief that she can be the one that changes these neighborhoods.” They’re like, “Really?! Who is she?” I said, “It’s me.” They’re like, “Oh my gosh, so sorry we offended you,” I’m like, “Nope, you didn’t offend me at all, but I’m pretty determined that I will be the catalyst that changes this neighborhood.” I’m not afraid of much, which is probably not always a good thing, bums on the lawn with beer cans? Believe me, I’ve seen worse. Trucking, I think, exposes you to a lot of the really interesting parts of the United States. Anyway, I got a really good sense that people just never thought Ogden 13 would change. I of course jumped on the Matthew Godfrey train because I could see that he was also daring enough to make bold decisions that have been complete game changers for Ogden. The changes and the risks that he took, the flack that he took, the negative press, and the Weber State versus Ogden City war that went on between him and Anne Millner, I watched that whole thing and was pretty much integral. I became Ogden City’s realtor in 2005, selling the houses that they would rehab and sell back to homeowners, trying to switch that investment, investment, investment into owner, owner, owner, because it does make a difference. SL: So you were the first one on Jefferson then really. The first homeowner? SW: Well, I wasn’t the first. Travis Pate was there and also Ed Dean lived across the street at the time, Ed and Mary Dean. She had passed away before I had moved in but Ed was still there. Ed’s contribution to my house is that he was probably in his late seventies, early eighties, and his son Pat and I got to be really good friends. He would sit outside at night because he couldn’t sleep, was restless, so his sleep pattern was off. But I will tell you, during my whole house building, he was the one that sat there and called the police, and kept people from literally robbing all the tools and lumber and everything else from that whole house building. Ed Dean played a really critical part. So Ed Dean was there also Dan and Penny McKay, they were pioneers. But it was really McKays, Deans, and Frank Hammond, the Hammond-Pate family, those three were there during all of the shit years. 14 It was so much that they had to put up with that you really need sort of new blood that says, “I’m going to call every time I see a hooker on the Arts Center wall. I’m going to call every time I see a John driving around and around and around the neighborhood over and over.” Bob and Shelly McConaughey that moved in a week after me, next door. I moved in, June 14th, they were a week later, June 21st. Then Steve and Nancy Jones were rehabbing the big house at twenty-five fifty-five, their rehab took a lot longer and they moved in about a year later, but they lived in my rental right behind. So we would all sit on porches and write down numbers and it was all of us working with OPD to slowly eliminate the problems in the neighborhood and I think you have to have people that are dedicated to do that or things won’t change. You can stay in your house and close your blinds and not worry about it but that doesn’t fix the problem, you have to be willing to be out there, taking the risk. We took a lot of risks, we chased one guy around the neighborhood one night. We jumped in our car and chased him down and got licenses. We called ourselves the Hardcore Vigilante Crew. It was fun, we were all entertained by it. I mean, the neighborhood was rough. There was one night I had friends over after a Raptor game and we were in my hot tub, and Steve and Nancy’s house wasn’t done but their driveway runs right alongside my hot tub. We’re in the hot tub and here comes this guy with a Raider’s jacket and he turned, and I’m like standing up in the hot tub, “Hey, that’s a private driveway! You can’t go down that driveway.” He turns and he pulls out like a twelve inch Bowie knife and he says, “What are you going to do? Not make me?!” I said, “You bet I will,” we called the police and we’re still in the hot tub, 15 and the police show up and the guy’d went and jumped over the back fence and we told him where he was and the police went and caught him. Of course he had warrants and he was like a most wanted list and here I was in my bathing suit, “I’m going to call the police right now, so you better get out of here.” SL: There you go. SW: So anyway, there was a lot of fun stories like that. There’s been stuff that happens up to yesterday, losing all my wire yet again. SL: So it’s still happening. SW: It’s still happening. I don’t know that it’s a municipal responsibility, it has to be the home owners. To just sit back and complain about it doesn’t really help, you have to be proactive. SL: Right, so Jefferson has changed. SW: Yes. When I moved onto Jefferson, it was eighty-seven percent non-owner occupied, cutup, Victorian rentals. SL: Right, I remember. SW: Today, there is one five-plex that should not be cutup, everything else is in the format that it was built. So all the ones that were cutup are no longer. So it’s 2687, 2683, 2671 Jefferson is the last house that needs to be converted. It’s a five-plex and it’s, you’d probably remember the name, it was the city engineer back in the day. It’s on the register, but it’s the last one, all the rest were either built as a duplex and still a duplex or built as Smith Villas, built as an eighteen-plex in the 1980s, horrible but it’s there. Then the five-plex on the corner across 16 from the art center, I’d love to get rid of that owner. He lives in China, and he’s horrible. SL: Not even local. SW: Yeah, he’s really bad. The roof is fifty years old. That’s the one we’ve had to fight recently. Jefferson now is ninety, I haven’t done the math since Alex built his, so probably close to ninety-seven percent owner occupied, single family. Makes a big difference. SL: So being here in Ogden, what kind of service organizations, social organizations have you been involved in? SW: So the first thing that I did when I moved here and started work was to join the Chamber. I literally did that before I’d even moved here because I know how valuable Chambers are, from Woodland. So I joined the Chamber here, jumped right into every possible committee on the Chamber; the contacts, leads groups, the women in business, and the membership committee, I just dove in and met people that I’d never met before. I remember the first business after hours I went to, in 1999, the first one I think it was the Christmas social, that was at Newgate Mall. I remember looking around that room going, “There is no way I will ever meet all these new people in this town. I can’t imagine that I will, at some point in the future go, Oh hey, so-and-so and hey, so-and-so.’ Of course that’s changed. Not only was the Chamber such a great catalyst for that, it was a great way to integrate in the community. Actually Monica Hambleton was in my contacts group and she’s the one that recruited me to League. 17 Then I joined Junior League in 2001 and end up going through Junior League, which is all encompassing. I think still one of my proudest accomplishments is saving the League in 2011. I was president 2010- 2011 and that was the year that the Recession was at its, lowest point, I think by the numbers November 2011 was the worst, the bottom of the bottom. What that did to the League is that people didn’t have disposable income to pay dues, people did not have the time, they all had to go back to work just to preserve their family. So the League went from, I think it was close to ninety when I first joined, it was fourteen paying members but I think only nine of us, showed up. We had a vote at Roosters and the vote was whether we moved forward and felt that the League was worth saving. The year that I took over as president, the previous president chose not concern herself with finances so much, put every single expense of the League on a credit card. When I took over, we were fourteen thousand dollars in debt on a credit card at twenty-one percent interest and we had fourteen members. It was pretty dire straits. Yet we had our big endowments, there was money but we couldn’t touch it. So the first thing we did was vote on whether or not we felt the League and its mission were worth saving, because the obvious thing to do, the easiest road would be to give up, turn all of our endowments over to another charity, maybe the YCC or something else that we had started and say, “Okay, here’s all of our money, we’re done.” Or do we stick it out and try to navigate our way through this and still recruit members and still hold some type of a fundraiser and still attend conferences and, you know, try to do the minimal amount of things that the League would need done? The 18 group that voted that night said, “No, we’ve got to stick with it,” but that meant all of us paid for our own conferences, we took turns paying for the meal at the meetings we didn’t order out all this food, there was no budget for that. Let the office manager go, so we were doing the accounting and paying the bills and it was a little challenging. That was in line with my business being just dismal, it was sort of a rough time trying to keep the League going and the business going. We recruited some pretty awesome members that year, being the Jaynee Nadolski and Kim Bowsher and yeah, there was some great talent that we recruited that year, and that talent carried the League through and slowly built it back up to today I think they’re again pushing ninety. It’s definitely on the other side of that but I still think it was a big thing, they’re here doing all the great things that they’re doing today because of that little group of nine. We all had multiple hats ‘cause, to run the League there’s like twenty-five, thirty, different positions and we just all took two or three of them. It was stressful. I look back and go, “I don’t know how we got through that.” From all the people that I met in the League, you know, slowly I meet Kirsten and she and I became best friends right out of the gate, and the two of us sort of played tag team in recruiting each other to multiple boards. So I got involved with the Wildcat Club, got involved with the Eccles Arts Center board, and of course, in 2004 after my house was built, I needed to preserve Jefferson, so I got appointed to Landmarks Commission and am still there today. So it’s those types of things where you just keep meeting more people, you get involved in more things, and definitely there’s a lot of fun 19 interaction in Ogden. It’s easy to get involved if you want to get involved. So back at the Junior League, SL: I know you guys were so focused so much on saving it when you were survival mode, but after you came through that, what were some of your favorite projects or things that the League worked on or did for Ogden? SW: I still think Telitha Greiner’s big project was the Children’s Health Connection. I think that Children Health Connection, what it did for Ogden and the health of Ogden kids today. That was, you know, late 1990s, early 2000’s, and it wasn’t until 2006 or 2007 that we sort of turned that over to Midtown. I think of all of those little kids that we brought through that clinic and where they are today, twelve years later, so they are our millennials, that entire generation. Did we help some of their mothers that were diagnosed with, you know, breast cancer, some of the kids that were diagnosed with life threatening things where are they today? I’d love to see where those two thousand kids that went through every year, where they ended up. But I will say, that they have to be healthier than they would’ve been without us. They had a step up that not everybody in every community gets, so I still think Health Connection was our launching pad, then we launched that right into the Oasis and of course I was a huge part of the Oasis; found the land, negotiated the purchase. Susan Stokes of the Stokes Nature Center in Logan basically donated half of the value of the property to us. We bought half, I think ninety thousand if I remember, and she donated the other ninety and then we got grants to tear down the house, we got grants to clean up the trees, we got just constant grants to improve that Oasis year after year and 20 now it’s close to being self-sustaining. It is almost to that point where I think the League could start thinking about putting the Oasis in its own board and moving it forward into that next category. I don’t know where that would end up, but I think it’s been a great community garden with thirty-eight plots and activities and classes. So the Oasis, it’s been a game changer and I think it will continue to improve as all those parameter houses improve. The unfortunate part of this real estate market now is that I know no one likes the ‘G’ word, gentrification. But I will say, that the pricing now in Ogden is such that the investors are not as inclined to buy in Ogden and turn it into a trashy rental. If they fix that house up and sell it, the upside to a single family homeowner, is still one of the lowest cost houses. To get a house in Central Ogden you’re two hundred thousand, two-twenty, two-thirty, two-sixty, three thousand. I mean, it’s completely different than it was five years ago. So that’s changing those houses one by one by one by one. I just wish people wouldn’t paint their brick, it just drives me nuts. It’s like, “Thanks, Chip and Joanna.” That’s all from those dumb HGTV shows. SL: Yes, yes, that brick should be painted. SW: And Pinterest. SL: Okay, so any other social? SW: Oh, H25. I moved Terra Venture. I opened in Morgan, stayed there for six months and realized that the developer that I had aligned with was just a dirt bag and I was not going to do well hanging my hat on that project. So I moved into office space above Panhandler’s, on 25th Street, where a good company theatre 21 is currently, and I was in that space for five years. I leased it for five, they wouldn’t let me out. My last year I had to pay double payments, because it was so hard to park, like our clients couldn’t park down there, and that was the biggest reason I moved. My involvement on 25th Street started in 2002 and of course I dove into the committee and met Heidi Harwood and Sara Toliver and Kym Buttschardt, and our whole street created the first Harvest Moon, which is coming up on the 21st of September. So I was part of H25 that got that whole Harvest Moon all volunteer based. We’d run up and down the street in our little orange shirts and we could see that that festival was something that was so needed, and it’s still pretty darn busy. So definitely involved in the H25, but this newest format, I think we’ve lost a little bit of the comradery. I don’t think it’s quite as close because now everything is under the Downtown Ogden Alliance and although H25 has their own separate meeting, they’re like once a quarter, and you just go to get information, it’s not going to dive in and participate. I think participation breeds a better relationship than just going to show up to hear about what’s going on, but that’s just my two cents. I think the Downtown Alliance is doing good. They definitely have the whole planning stage and they take a lot of stress off of planning events. The community loves to show up but those of us who used to put it on were so vested in that event, but it’s still is just as successful, it’s like, “Wow, I guess they didn’t really need us after all.” SL: But there wouldn’t be one if it wasn’t for, SW: No, probably not. So I got involved in H25, and definitely met more people to do more things and different off-shoots and Historical This, and I’ve been involved in 22 a lot of things. On the realtor side, I was also on the realtor board. I was very active on that board from 2007 2015. I still call it my best run board because I’m pretty good at Robert’s Rules and the realtor board is the smoothest running board of any board and I always hold other boards to that same standard, and I’ve been on boards that I’ve had to leave because I can’t handle a two, three hour meetings. Meetings need to be an hour. The Art Center, Pat Poce is very good at hour meetings. It’s like, “Hour meetings, here we go. Make a decision on this, this, this, this,” we talk and it’s so well run and that’s how the realtor board was. But it was Junior League that of course introduces you to how good you can get with Robert’s Rules. SL: So when did you purchase where your offices are now? SW: In 2006 I had a search going on the MLS for office buildings in Ogden because I had a client that was looking and I just like to keep what the commercial world was doing. I saw the building come up and it was four hundred thousand and I’m like, “Oh, I can’t afford to look at anything like that,” and then in one day it dropped to three hundred thousand, it dropped a hundred thousand. I saw it and within a half an hour, I grabbed all my agents that were with me at the time, I said, “Come on, we’ve just got to go look at this building.” We ran up there, I met Paul Stockdale, and the address is 795 24th, it’s the Heber Scowcroft building, mansion. Going through the building he had attorneys in it and he had Alpine Health upstairs and it was just sort of an office building. SL: Right. 23 SW: I went, “Oh, this is it. This is the building,” or I guess it was four-fifty to three-fifty, it was three-fifty when I bought it. Anyway, I knew that I could swing a ten-percent down payment, I just didn’t know how brutal SBA loans can be. They take your first born and make you sign in like blood. I wrote the offer that night without even really knowing that I could afford it but I suspected I was having a pretty good year in 2006, right before the cliff, and got it under contract. Paul was really, really sick, he was fighting basal carcinoma. When I met him, he was going through the worst of the worst chemo where the chemo basically kills everything and then they sort of bring you back to life. He looked so bad all the time and had no energy and of course, that affects your mood and he was always really grouchy; I was always scared to death of him. I had put a forty-five day closing on this, not knowing that SBA loans are like a sixty day thing so I had to ask for an extension. Towards the end where I’d already lost all of my earnest money anyway, we’d passed all the deadlines, he finally started to realize that the building to me was not an office building, it was a historic treasure. It was something that I felt that I could be a good custodian of even though there’s always a project. I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” Right now, I’m like, “I’ve got to get those glass windows, fix an atrium,” and the front things that come out on the front porch? One of them is disintegrating and I’m just like, “I don’t even know what to do.” I’m trying to figure out how to fix it and gah! Anyway, meeting Paul and him finally realizing that it wasn’t just about me having an office building, it was a lot more than that, he started to soften up a little bit and we ended up becoming really good friends. He left all of his scrapbooks of the rehab, because he turned 24 it from a nine-plex into the office building and that happened sort of 1987 1989, somewhere in that window. He restored all of the trim to the original trim, there’s still remnants of two apartments in the basement but all seven of the above ground he got rid of, and did just a beautiful job on the woodwork. He spent more on the rehab than what I paid for the building, easily. We just took over and started promoting that building. I’m glad Weber State is so energy conscious. Anyway, he started putting all of his efforts into making sure that I had everything to tell the building’s story and we’ve had some fun things happen over the years. There was one of the Malans dropped by, it was a Malan descendant, and of course the agent that was working in the office that day never got their name, but they dropped by the picture of the two Malan brothers in their lab coats with a skull from when it was Malan’s Funeral Home. One of them has them off to the side sort of looking at it and another one has them with the church, First Christ’s Science Church, in the background. So there’s one on the front steps, one looking at the church, and these two pictures of these two brothers, they are pictures are priceless. They are hysterical. One has a skull in one hand, and so for Halloween last year, Shalae and I got lab coats and a skull and we imitated that picture. It was just really fun. That building, everyone that’s in it now just loves it. I’ve got great tenants, including my best friend Shalae Larsen, and her husband Travis and his organization’s still there and then I have Top Tier Remodeling, who I absolutely love and they’re an incredible remodeling company, and then my few agents. It’s great. SL: I didn’t realize Travis had moved there. 25 SW: His office person is there and if he needs to sort of get away from the house he can come and work on, on bids and that kind of thing if he needs to. It’s too hard with two little ones trying to work at home, so he does whatever he needs to. SL: Yeah, yeah. So when did Shalae move into the Scowcroft Mansion, when was it? SW: Maybe three years ago, I can’t even remember. SL: Maybe 2015, 2016? SW: Might be. SL: Speaking of Shalae, how did you meet Shalae? SW: Oh that’s such a great story. I helped this guy named Don Burnkrant, who’s a broker from the Aspen area, and he wanted to buy a house in Ogden. This is back in probably 2006, it had to have been 2005 or ’06. So I helped Donny buy the C.W. Cross home on 17th and Adams. Donny still owns it to this day. He did a lot of restoration, he lived there, and he would come and ski for a couple weeks, and he had people that would care take for him and he would still sort of move in and out. And we had just a really fun buying experience and we got to be good friends. He had a friend up in Idaho who happened to interact with these other friends that they knew from Hawaii. These Hawaiian friends were coming, they had taken their kids out of school and they were going to all these different towns across the U.S. trying to find a town where they could move so that their kids were exposed to real life versus Hawaii life, which Hawaii life is a little utopian. The schools in Hawaii, unless you go private school are, not reported to be great, whatever that was. 26 So they got a referral from their Idaho friends to Donny who Donny referred to me and they came into town with their tent trailer and their Honda Passport, or whatever it was, and I met Chip and Tamra Anderson and their two kids, Shane and Megan. That first night they came into town, Megan was sick and they were going to try to find a hotel but they couldn’t find a hotel where they could watch their tent trailer and all of their belongings were in. In my typical, traditional self I said, “Oh just come and stay with me. I’ve got all this extra space.” So we parked the tent trailer in the drive way and they stayed with me, which ended up being for weeks because they really didn’t have any place and then they were just looking for the right house. They bought this little, cute house on the corner of Canyon Road and Jefferson, right across from the park, the rodeo park. So they bought that little house and their plan was to restore that and to live in that little one. Then they really, of course, fell in love with Jefferson and they said, “Oh, we really like that red brick house but we’re headed out of town to go see the Who in Chicago so that our kids can experience a big city concert,” so there they were off on their road trip. I went and talked to Randy Layton, who was the owner, and the house was a dump. It had a kitchen in the basement, no kitchen on the main floor, it was made into an office building for Bonneville Title back in the day and it had fluorescent lights in every single room. It was pretty ugly. And I said, “Randy, any interest in selling this house? My friends from Hawaii are really looking at houses, they’re pretty serious, they’d like to buy it.” He’s like, “Well, I supposed we could probably come up with something.” They ended up buying that house, 27 rewrote the offer, site unseen, faxed all the paperwork to the hotel, and they made the offer while they were at the Who concert and then they came back and closed on the house. They lived at Canyon Road but they started working on Jefferson and they restored Jefferson. Through Jefferson, they needed an electrician and they met Travis, so then they got to know Travis and Shalae. This was all in 2007. If you remember, 2007 was also the election year and it was the Susie Van Hooser/Matthew Godfrey election race, and it was also the year that my boyfriend at the time had broken up with me and had an affair with the next door neighbor, and so I was not speaking to either of my neighbors. The one neighbor was a huge Susie Van Hooser fan and he had this giant, big lit Susie for mayor sign in his yard and was always just making a big deal; all these parties for campaign funding and all this at his house. Shalae and Travis were in the Susie camp, I obviously was not. Tamra and Chip kept saying, “You really need to meet Travis and Shalae, they’re really nice people,” I said, “Hell, no. They are on the other side of the political aisle, we are never going to see eye to eye.” Finally Chip and Tamra got their way and they invited us all over for like a barbecue or something pretty low-key and I’m like, “Wow, these guys are sort of fun.” So we pretty much leave politics aside, we don’t always agree on politics but everything else in our lives, we’re pretty much family. We vacation together, now we work together, we have dinners together, we do everything together. So that’s how it started. It was thanks to Chip and Tamra, who are now divorced but life is life, it just happens. But we still do a ton together every day. [laughs] 28 SL: So I’m going to ask you a couple of more of our general questions that we’re asking everybody. So I know you have, so she’s not your daughter, step-daughter? Foster? SW: Yes, Miss Eden, Eden Terry. I dated her dad back in 2013 and we just sort of hung out, I mean, I guess it was sort of dating. I don’t know really what it was looking back. But in the middle of this, I met Dave at a Raptor game, that’s how we met. He sat right below me at the Raptor games and he was always buying beer for everyone and was buying fifty-fifty tickets and was like the life of the party. I’m like, “Oh, what a fun guy!” Little did I know that he’s definitely a crazy one. I had a Chamber retreat that I was supposed to go to up in Midway, and we were supposed to bring our significant other and I’m like, “I don’t even have anyone to bring. I have no date, I haven’t dated. I don’t know what to do,” and he’s like, “I’ll go with you,” “Oh, okay, that’d be great. Should be fun.” Well, what I didn’t know was that date was June 27th and he had Eden that summer ‘cause he sort of went back and forth with her mother and that’s a whole different story. But that particular day, he sent her to go stay with his other friends. It was her birthday, and he just basically just blew her off on her birthday to go. In hindsight, I look back and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that was the big red warning flag that he didn’t even put enough importance on her birthday to say, “Oh no, sorry, can’t go this weekend, it’s my daughter’s birthday.” Anyways, spent the whole weekend with me, we went out on his boat and I thought he was like all that. So in hanging out with Dave, Eden and I got to be pretty close. Dave, he drinks a little and there’s times when he’s not very nice. At one point, I took Eden and Dave to my 29 parents’ house and it wasn’t a few days after we’d been back and Eden sent me a text and said, “Dad has packed up all my things and I’m sitting on the front porch with my suitcase. Can you come get me?” “Yes I can.” I drove over, picked her up, she then lived with me for a year or close to a year until her mother got jealous and basically came to DaVinci and kidnapped her back and tied her up in a car and drove her back to Texas. So her life was less than ideal. It’s just crazy that she lived through a lot of what she lived through. She’s flown by herself since she was seven, her mom worked for Southwest, and whenever one parent tired of her they’d just ship her to the other parent, put her on the plane, drop her off at the airport, SL: She’d leave her? SW: Yep, just leave her, she’d figure out to go to Southwest and fly standby, she had it all figured out. So she was pretty independent from that but she’s had to be very resourceful just to get through life. So the same day that Shalae was in labor with Bodie, her second, January 22, 2018, I’m outside the room, she’s in the throes of labor, I’m outside taking a coffee break or something, I get a text from Eden that says, “I know you’re really busy but is there any way I can move back in?” I said, “Yes I’m busy, but that’s never impacted what we do so yes, of course you can.” I came home after Bodie was born to a child of my own. So it was just sort of a funny day because I got home and she was back in her room that we had decorated for her when she was thirteen and, you know, had already put her stuff away. Anyway, she’s been with me ever since. It works for us. We have our struggles, there’s always things 30 we have to work through and with her upbringing you know, we’re two very different backgrounds and trying to balance expectations. My goal for her is to give her a good enough foundation that she can do whatever she wants in life, that she’s not going to be handicapped by this crazy childhood that she had to endure, that she can put that behind and develop some skills that are going to really help her. Yes, we have our good and our bad moments just like any family I think. She found out this last week, she can, you know, if she wants to leave that door’s open. If she wants to—she got mad enough she said, “I’m moving back,” and I thought, “Yeah, we’ll see where that goes,” cause I don’t think it could happen. There’s too much water under the bridge at this point for her to go back, so that leaves her with the choice that whatever the conflict is, we have to work through and that’s what we do. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re family. #familybychoice. SL: There you go. So given that, how do you think the mothering role has changed from what you’re seeing now with Eden and maybe what your mom was like or your grandmother? SW: My grandmothers would never have been able to deal with the issues that I have had to deal with, and it’s nothing to do with me being some perfect child because I was anything but, I was the grey hair on my parents’ head, straight A’s but grey hair, always pushing my limits. Looking back at that, I think it’s definitely taught me patience, which I know mothers are pretty good at patience and I definitely have developed far more patience in this last year than I ever had before. I’ve got a much longer fuse and even if it gets to a boiling point, I have a much more 31 rational response. So I think for me, it’s definitely done that. My parents, it was pretty mayberry growing up. Dad worked at Lockheed, Mom taught school, we were all involved in sports, we all got good grades, we had a dog and a cat, and ran around Boulder Creek, fished in the creek behind the house, and rode horses. Our life to me was pretty like fun, it was pretty fun and pretty normal. My parents never divorced, still alive, and healthy at eighty-four. I’ve got a child that did not come from that. I have a child that came from Crazy Town and I think for me, trying to understand what I can do to support her is very different than what my parents would have done to support me. I already knew about boundaries and I knew that pushing limits and going over the limit, I knew where I would end up. I knew I would be on restriction, I knew I’d have the car taken away, I made my bad choices in full knowledge that I would be, or I didn’t think I’d get caught. Which most of the time I didn’t, which was unfortunate really but anyway, I still turned out alright. With Eden, it’s like she can’t really pull the wool over my eyes too much because I lived, in Boulder Creek, California, I can tell you marijuana and drug capital of the world. It had anything and everything you wanted in our whole high school. I went through my senior list one time and I checked off who drank or did drugs of my hundred and ten classmates and I think there was three that I knew for sure that did not. It was a pretty liberal time, in the Santa Cruz Mountains back then. I probably have that education as a little bit of an edge where my parents were blind to that. They’d have a glass of wine with dinner and that was a big deal. Anyway, the life with Eden is trying to provide a really good 32 example for her and hopefully start building the skills that I sure wish I could’ve built over eighteen years instead of cramming them into whatever this looks like. But we’re both committed to make it work. I think this week has been a test and I think we’re both committed and it is what it is. SL: As a woman, how do you define courage? SW: I think courage is pushing yourself, pushing your comfort zone, going outside of the box and doing things that you never thought possible. It’s definitely speaking up for the underprivileged. It definitely is doing things others won’t do. SL: So looking back on your life, have there been women that you’ve looked up to, women that have been mentors to you? SW: Oh yeah, definitely. My mom wasn’t really involved in the community but the amount of effort that she put into her students. She was not a teacher that got there at the bell and left at the bell. She got there an hour and a half, two hours before, and she’d stay until five or six preparing everything for the next day. Watching how much effort she put into everything, I would say she was still a role model because she put so much effort into making sure that those kids got the best possible education she was able to provide. One of my first jobs was at a sporting goods store and it was a little one man store and owned by the hardware store across the street. That was my first job at sixteen running the hardware store and selling guns and ammo and fishing licenses and all of that in my little store and I got to order things and set up new displays in this little funny mall that had three little stores in it. 33 There was a gal that owned a toy store and her name was Vickie, she was fifteen years older than me, and she was a little bit of a hippie but definitely a business owner and a single mom raising her son by herself. She got out of an abusive relationship and pretty much opened her toy store and did everything on her own and we became really good friends. For a sixteen year old and a thirty-one year old to become as close and we were—probably because my maturity level was far beyond sixteen at the time and she was just great. I think a lot of that high school angst that so many kids are going through now, she was my Facebook, she was one I could bounce everything off of like, “Oh my God, I screwed up last night. I did this, and this, and this,” or, “Oh, I did this and this,” and she would give me her perspective. Anyway, she was a very soft soul, she wasn’t like this big powerful woman, but I think she taught me a lot about coping and just dealing with life because she was pushing through I think her son was nine at the time we first met and just going through a lot of that. Then I would say my mother-in-law was another person I really looked up to. She was a German Jew and, she, her twin sister, her brother, her parents, and an aunt, I think, were the only ones that escaped from Nazi Germany. They emigrated to San Francisco. She was just such a strong woman and so wise and such a great cook and I think being around her, those years were great. She was a no-bullshit kind of person and she would tell you exactly what, there was no, you know, there was no fluff. She was German, it was straightforward, and we just did a lot of really fun family things too and she was always very, very supportive of whatever we were doing and our crazy work schedules. In Salt 34 Lake, I worked for Airborne Express for two years and the manager, she was the terminal manager for Airborne Express for the whole state. As much as I respected her, she was the hardest boss I’ve ever had to work for and there were times I just despised her. She and I were like oil and water, I didn’t react well to her style at all and she didn’t react well to my very short temper. We didn’t get along at all, however, sometimes you look back on those relationships after you’re out of them and go, “Okay, the things that I learned from her were strong, strong customer service skills,” huge because she put me in charge of the customer service department. I got all of the worst of the worst complaints from everybody that didn’t get their package overnight. I had probably five agents that answered phones, if they couldn’t handle it, I got the maddest and the worst and the most awful. I can still remember me putting them on hold and Ardeen telling me, “No, you get back in there on that phone and you do what you need to do,” she kept pushing me to go way outside of what I wanted to do. There was no vacations the first year you worked for them, not a single day off other than your one day off a week, so six days a week, one day off, no vacation, I was just like, “This job just sucks.” Hindsight, I still respect how she managed because she just managed with an iron fist. I still don’t like her style, probably one I could not want to ever emulate, but I still go, “Oh, yeah, that would be an Ardeen thing,” especially from a real estate standpoint, my contracts are perfect, I think it’s the detail that she taught me, there’s absolutely no room for error in deliveries and there’s no room for error in a real estate contract, nor should there be. It’s not rocket science, and I can say that because of my dad. 35 I think in Ogden, Kirsten Cutrubus is probably one, even though we’re peers I still think she’s just amazing. Just what she manages to do and the compassion that she does it, and her commitment and her ability to be on time. I could go on, it’s a very long list but I have so much respect for her and I love her like a sister, which is why I call her Sissy. Of course there’s the Jo Packhams of the world, which I still think Jo is just a bomb woman who’s done so many great things and I think Sarah’s followed in her footsteps and Kim. A lot of my Junior League peers, I look around and I’m like, all my peers tend to be those that I look up to. SL: Makes sense. What does the term ‘women’s work’ mean to you? SW: [laughs] Women’s work, it’s anything I do. It is everything from truck driving to selling real estate to running boards. There’s no differentiation for me personally between a woman’s work and men’s work. I just don’t see the difference. SL: I definitely think women’s work is anything and everything. There’s no line for me between women and men, it’s all just about what you end up liking to do and where you end up, aptitude. SL: Alright, that’s a great answer. So this is our final question that we’re asking everyone. How do you think women receiving the right to vote has shaped or influenced history, the community, and you personally? SW: Having the right to vote, especially in these really insane election times, I almost would prefer that we go back to the elections of the 1920s and 1930s where there was no TV and there was no highly influential media presence. I think voting is just so critical. In fact, to prove that point, here we were with this 36 mayoral primary that just happened and Eden’s ballot ‘cause of course I’ve signed her up for absentee because I’m a very strong believer that really life is so unpredictable the only way to vote is absentee because I’m never around between seven and seven on, I always have way too many things to do to go sit at a poll. I just want to vote on my own time and get the vote delivered and be done with it. So I’ve been absentee probably since 1983. I think maybe once when I was in transition did I have to go in a poll, it was like, “M’kay, that’s it. I’m not going in a poll again,” and it might’ve been as a volunteer poll worker. So the election was happening and I had of course already sent my ballot in and I put it on the floor, “You need to vote today.” Second day, “You need to vote today,” ‘cause of course I’m long out of the house when she graces us with her presence. The third day was Tuesday, Election Day, and I marched down to her room with the ballot and I said, “You have to vote today, you have to take it to the library today. I want you to take a picture with you at the library delivering the ballot to the box ‘cause I’m not sure you’re going to do it.” “But who do I vote for, it’s so confusing?” I said, “There are three choices on the ballot, there’s only three people to vote for.” “Well, who’re you voting for?” So we had that discussion, I said, “You can vote for whoever you want but I will warn you about this one or that.” Anyway, so I got her to vote and I just think it’s not an option. Voting is not an option. I think the women voters have an awful lot of clout, especially in these election times, and hopefully we can get the younger people to start voting. I’m more worried about age than I am about sex, in voting. We need everyone to vote. We need everyone to vote, everybody’s vote counts and 37 it’s so important to instill that in our younger generation. So that’s my two cents on voting. SL: Well, thank you Sue. SW: Okay, did I cover everything? SL: You did.