While in school, I developed my love for sales and marketing. I worked part time at Thom McCann shoes. At age 18, they made me a retail store manager. Back in 1974, I was making about $40,000 a year.

Every year, my two children and I would go to the Williamsburg Inn and enjoy the gingerbread houses in the windows. And I wanted to create something that was not just a prefab kind that didn’t smell like any spices. We wanted to bake one.

When I was in college, I coached a recreation squad. Then, out of college, I continued to teach dance, and I coached some recreation teams. And then I started a team at the elementary school in Richmond, where I was teaching.

It was one of those nice surprises in life, where you think for so long, “I’m going to do this after I get out of school. I’ll be in this kind of role, in this city,” and that’s not how it ended up for me. With a lot of people, what you think you’re going into, it doesn’t end up being that way.

  My dad was a supply corps officer in the Navy, and we moved frequently when I was growing up. We lived in six states and Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, and every time we moved, we drove across the country, so I got to see a lot of national parks.

 
As far as the coal business goes on the railroad, I’ve had some experience from mine to market. 

I worked with JAG at the naval operating base in Norfolk. I decided to get out of the Marines because I wanted to settle down and I didn't want to do so much traveling. I wanted to get married and have kids. I decided to stay here and worked with a legal firm. There was an overabundance of paperwork. Its cases were stacked; they had rooms full of paper.

When I was a kid growing up in Chicago, I wanted to be a singer but just didn't have the voice. So when someone offered me $15 to dress up as a clown at a picnic, I jumped at the offer. I was 13 then, and I have been clowning ever since.

I enjoyed clothing. It appealed to me all the way through high school. Not from a sales stand point, but just from wearing it. We wore jeans to school one day a week just because it was different. No one wore jeans in those days.

 I became certified as a lifeguard in January 2007. At that point in time I was interested in entering the work force again and I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was regularly lap-swimming here, at the Northside Pool. That’s when I found out they offered American Red Cross lifeguard training courses.