The Magnolia Story(24)

That’s another strange thing, considering what I’m doing now. Growing up, I sometimes felt like this audience of mine was always with me, watching me in my pretend store, watching me doing commercials. It was almost as if I was living in the Truman Show, that movie with Jim Carrey in which a character is filmed from the moment of birth and watched by millions as he goes through his daily life. Even if I was by myself, I would look around and think, I know you are out there watching me.

My parents remember hearing me talking to this unseen audience often when I was a little girl. They say I also swore I had a pet rabbit named Jo. But according to my parents, it was just make-believe. It was all the expression of a creative mind.

Anyway, looking back, I can see there were a whole bunch of things in my childhood that pointed toward what I’d do in my adult life. And once I started doing it “for real,” I thrived. It seemed that the more opportunities I had to get creative and get entrepreneurial, the more fulfilled and energized I felt about life.



Outside of the store, Chip and I kept most of our endeavors in our typical wheelhouse. We sank our money and time into Third Street, where Chip continued to be the honorary “mayor” as he continued to expand his rental and home-building business.

A big part of Chip’s dream for that street began in a deal he made before we were married. Chip and his father went in on a deal together to purchase eleven acres of land just a few blocks from where we would live as newlyweds. Chip was convinced that the Third Street area would go up in value. Baylor University was only about a mile away, just across La Salle Avenue. And eventually, Chip believed, Baylor would run out of room to house its growing student population.

Well, his intuition on that was right. A big out-of-town company came along and saw what Chip was doing with his few small rental houses in this mostly untouched area of Waco, and they made him an offer—a good offer—on those eleven acres. Their plan was to build hundreds of units of dorm-style apartment homes on Third Street to market to the Baylor community. They were basically going to create a whole new neighborhood on the land Chip and his dad had been sitting on.

Chip wasn’t interested in selling all the land off. He had big dreams of owning rental homes up and down Third Street. So he structured a deal that sold off the back part of the acreage to that big company, while he kept the acreage along the road frontage to split into small lots where he could eventually build some individual rental houses himself.

Chip and his father made good money on that sale, and that allowed us to do some more investing, hire more help, and get started building some more little rental homes—basically sinking every penny that came into our long-term future. In our personal lives, we were still barely scraping by. But the business side of things was going well. In fact, we were seeing so much growth and progress on Third Street that there were times when we felt as if the whole neighborhood was ours.

Only it wasn’t.

By this time we had three dogs—Shiner, Maggie, and Blue, all rescue mutts. It was too crowded in an eight-hundred-square-foot house to keep three dogs inside all the time, so we’d let those dogs out to roam around. They were a lot like me and pretty much thought they owned Third Street too. I had this four-wheeler that I’d ride up and down the street, just checking on everything, and those dogs would run right along with me.

They were some of the best dogs you’ve ever seen. They never bothered anyone, certainly never bit anyone or even came close. But we had this one neighbor across the street who hated those dogs, and every single time she saw them off leash—which was just about all the time—she called animal control.

The people from the pound would show up, haul the dogs downtown in their van, and write us a ticket either in Jo’s name or my name. There were times when the officer would call the dogs right off of our front porch: “Come here, dogs!” They’d hop right in his van, and off they’d go, back for another stay in the pound.

These weren’t like parking tickets either. They came with heavy fines, which I absolutely refused to pay out of some misguided form of principle. I never was much of a rule follower, and this “put your dog on a leash” rule was no exception. If the dogs had been hurting somebody, I’d have understood. But to take them from our own front yard?

Well, guess what? When you don’t pay your fines, eventually the police come looking for you.

We owed something like twenty-five-hundred dollars in tickets, and we simply didn’t have that kind of money lying around, even if we wanted to pay the fines. Especially since I was about to have a baby. Sure enough, two weeks early, I delivered a beautiful, healthy baby boy that we named Drake. We named him after the New York hotel where we’d stayed on our honeymoon.

So Drake was a week old, and I was sitting in this house, feeding him in the back room, when I heard a knock on the door. Chip answered it. It was the police.

“Is Joanna Gaines here? We have a warrant here for her arrest,” the officer said.

It was the tickets. I knew it. And I panicked. I picked up my son and I hid in the closet. I literally didn’t know what to do. I’d never even had a speeding ticket, and all of a sudden I’m thinking, I’m about to go to prison, and my child won’t be able to eat. What is this kid gonna do?

I heard Chip say, “She’s not here.”

Thankfully, Drake didn’t make a peep, and the officer believed him. He said, “Well, just let her know we’re looking for her,” and they left.