One: I Am a War Baby
I’m a war baby. When I was born, my father was a soldier in Lorraine, France, a First Lieutenant in the Lorraine Infantry Division. Upon news of my birth, he wired my mother that his troops were celebrating with champagne and chocolate. All agreed, he wrote, my name should be “Lorraine.” Who could argue? When he came home, he opened a printing business and named it the Lorraine Press.
I remember the beginning of the 1950s as bright and hopeful. Men replaced their military uniforms with fedora hats and wide ties. The biggest boom in housing construction got going and the economy grew like money really did grow on trees. Women were home raising children; housewives wearing housedresses, a dust cloth visible in an apron pocket.
The 1960s were the opposite. The decade was blunt and contentious. The Vietnam War caused angst and anger at home; sit-ins and marches and campus shut-downs. The Civil Rights Movement began in earnest, too, fraught with riots and violence. In the five years between 1963 and 1968, many great American leaders were assassinated. When Lyndon Johnson became president, he didn’t end the war in Vietnam. In fact, he ramped it up. But he also energized President John Kennedy’s nascent idea of a War on Poverty. Johnson said, this was a war we could win! Economic development agencies opened in poor communities across the country. Hearkening to Kennedy’s ideal, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” Johnson put out a call for volunteers. This was the beginning of the Peace Corps; volunteers helping people in impoverished countries throughout the world. Its sister program was called VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America.
In 1967, I had completed two years at the University of Utah, majoring in American history. I felt there was no better way to learn history than to live it, so I volunteered for VISTA, enlisting as a front-line soldier in the war on poverty. Stationed in eastern North Carolina, I helped start a community newspaper and a day care center. A group of VISTAs assisted one neighborhood in working with the county commission to bring water and electricity into their homes. During training, our supervisors repeatedly told us that we would get more out of our experience than the people we were there to help. They were so right.
I got to know people different from me—living in the same country but in a seemingly different world—and realized how narrow my life had been. I loved being in this new mix of cultures. It gave me a chance to get to know myself better while learning to know and understand others. I picked up some survival skills, too, and some self-confidence. Maybe that’s when I became an adult, being away from home and obliged to be self-sufficient.
After two years of service, I came back to Salt Lake City, got a job, and completed my history degree. But teaching wasn’t for me and the eight-to-five job I had was painfully unrewarding. The work wasn’t satisfying and, no surprise, the staff was perpetually grumpy. I’d go home at the end of the day feeling like I’d accomplished nothing. One small thing made me feel better: taking a tiny portion of my paycheck to Western Gardens every other week to buy a few two-inch house plants. In fact, I was plunking down sixty-nine cents for a rooted cutting of a spider plant when it dawned on me that I could do this. I could sell plants. It wasn’t rocket science.
No doubt memories of my father’s business lurked within me. My parents had five children, and as kids, we all worked in the print shop at one time or another. There was a certain mystique about it, a child’s pride in being part of a family endeavor. I’m sure Dad’s employees didn’t sign up for babysitting, but to me they were like a second family. After dinner, Dad would sometimes ask, “Anybody want to drive down to the shop with me and make sure the lights are out and the door is locked?” Or on Saturday morning, “Who wants to drive to the post office to get the mail?” I remember he used a brass letter opener to slit the seals, and as he threw the envelopes in the garbage can, he stacked checks on the left and bills on the right.
He was tending his business, nurturing it, making sure it was okay, like it had a life of its own. Was it nature or nurture that four of his children became business owners? Maybe those memories were whispering affirmations to me now: Be your own boss. Don’t stay in a bad job. It’s possible to love work.
When I thought about opening a business, I’d get butterflies. Was I afraid? Scared to death. Fear of failure. The idea of self-employment is daunting. Writing a paycheck seemed impossible compared to just getting one. To make decisions rather than take directions is nail-biting. There is no safety net. Was I just jumping from one pot of hot water into another?
Despite my anxiety, I jumped on the idea of opening a plant shop. On Mother’s Day, 1975, I raced to find a building before I could talk myself out of it. I found one that very afternoon—a two-story building with an apartment upstairs. It was the end of the semester and some students were just moving out. The ground floor, once a dry cleaners, was boarded up and the windows were soaped over so no one could see in. I shaded my eyes with cuffed hands and stuck my nose to the glass. With a little elbow grease, it would be perfect! I found the owners, signed a five-year lease with a five-year option, and with that, I became a shopkeeper.