The Magnolia Story(30)
Don’t get me wrong. Juggling that sort of entrepreneurial career with four little kids was not easy. It seemed that no matter how hard we worked, no matter how many extra jobs we picked up, we were still barely scraping by and living with huge amounts of debt. Chip never stopped pulling crazy stunts, and each time I’d get just as angry over them as I’d gotten when he left Drake home alone those two times in his first few months.
But we always worked things out. Always. If we hadn’t had each other to lean on, I don’t know how we would have gotten through it all.
With two, then three, then four kids in the house, there wasn’t very much time to think about the hows and whys of what made our relationship or our business tick. It seemed like everything just kept moving along. Thank goodness we had built our life on a strong foundation.
I think it was more than just the foundation of our own relationship, though. Part of what made Chip and I work so well together was clearly buried down deep in our roots. It came from our families and our upbringings and the challenges we’d already tackled within ourselves before we even met.
I’ve already mentioned that my early years were spent in Wichita, Kansas. That’s where I was born in 1978, the middle of three girls. Teresa, the oldest, and Mary Kay (Mikey), the youngest, are still my closest friends today. But the roots I’m talking about really go back somewhere in the DNA of my parents, two completely unique people who met and fell in love back in 1969.
My dad was drafted to serve in Vietnam that year, when nearly all of the men who were drafted were sent straight to combat. But not my dad. He was held back in his class because of a case of shingles and ended up being sent to Seoul, Korea, six months later than originally planned.
During Dad’s first few months overseas, while at a party with his friends, he met my mom for the first time. Though she was taking English classes at the time, she wasn’t able to speak much just yet. But she was fascinated by the American culture, which she’d been exposed to from watching American movies. It seemed to her that women weren’t treated with the kind of respect in Korea that they were in America. She hoped that by learning the language she’d learn more about the culture as a whole.
Interestingly enough, the way my mother tells it, she spotted my dad sitting off by himself in a corner at that party and said to a friend of hers, “That’s the man I’m going to marry.” Her friends thought she was crazy, but she says she just knew.
She wound up hanging around my dad and his friends a lot after that night. As it turned out, one of his good friends really liked her, but she always knew my dad was the one. After a few months they finally started dating—just before it was time for Dad to fly home.
Once he was back in America, the two of them began writing letters back and forth to each other. Whenever a new letter arrived, my dad would take it to a translator to have her words read to him, and she would do the same whenever his letters arrived in Seoul.
Everything was going well until my dad sent her an airline ticket and a letter that said, “Will you marry me? Come to America.” Then my mother got a case of cold feet. It was what she’d always dreamed about, but it was a life-changing decision for her to make—and she had to make it fast.
Of course, ultimately she came and joined him in America, and he went to the Los Angeles airport to pick her up. They were married by a justice of the peace in Las Vegas in 1972 and then went to live in Wichita, Kansas, my dad’s hometown. My dad had been raised Catholic and my mom had been raised Buddhist Korean, so neither set of parents approved of the marriage in the beginning.
From what they’ve told me, they actually had a rocky marriage for several years. My dad experimented with drugs, as many did back in the seventies, and this behavior was an issue between them. Communicating with one another over a cultural and language divide was surely a challenge as well. There were times, they say, when they didn’t think they would make it because all they did was fight.
It wasn’t until my father lost his grandmother, shortly before I was born, that he had an awakening of sorts. He was at her house after she’d passed away and was having a pretty bad trip. He envisioned himself in a casket, with his family surrounding him, and it hit him just how wrongly he was living his life. He knew he didn’t want to end up in that casket the way he envisioned, leaving my mom alone to fend for herself. So he ran out of his grandmother’s house and pleaded to God, “If you let me live, I promise I will turn my life around.”
Through this promise, my parents discovered a faith in God from which there was no turning back. The two of them began memorizing Scripture together each day. This practice helped them discover new wisdom, and their marriage found itself on solid footing for the first time, and continued from that point forward.
My dad’s father, my grandfather, had worked three jobs to support his big family of kids. By watching him, my dad had picked up a strong work ethic that kicked fully into gear right around the time I was born. That’s when he went to work for Firestone, and every promotion after that meant moving our whole family to a new town.
By the time we got to Waco, Dad owned his own Firestone dealership, which was a dream come true for him. By that point my family had lived in seven or eight different houses, from Wichita to Corpus Christi, Texas, to Round Rock, just outside of Austin, Texas. Each one of those moves was a family decision. He sat us all down and discussed it every time, and each time we kind of knew it was coming. We were always sad to leave those places that had become home for us, but we were also always happy for dad and his pursuit of bigger and better opportunities.