Oral History Program Jan Zogmaister Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon 19 August 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jan Zogmaister Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon 19 August 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: Zogmaister, Jan, an oral history by Sarah Langsdon, 19 August 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Jan Zogmaister Circa 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jan Zogmaister, conducted on August 19, 2019, at the Stewart Library, by Sarah Singh. Jan discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Alyssa Dove, the video technician, is also present during this interview. SS: This is Sarah Singh, and I am here interviewing Jan Zogmaister. It is August 19, 2019, 2 p.m. and we’re at the Stewart Library. So, Jan, we’re going to start at the beginning, so why don’t you tell us where and when you were born. JZ: I was born in Ogden, Dee Hospital, 1952. SS: Yeah, the old Dee hospital. Were you an only child, do you have siblings? JZ: No, there’s five girls. So I have four sisters. I’m the middle child. SS: What did your dad do for a living? JZ: My dad ran a battery manufacturing plant for many years, that’s what I grew up with, and then they closed that because of the cost to move the goods inland for manufacturing. So, he went into real estate for a couple of years, then was approached by a couple of former employees to start their own company. He and two other people started National Battery Sales. SS: What was your dad’s name? JZ: Karl O. Macfarlane. SS: Ok, what about your mom, did she work outside the home? JZ: She did, a lot when we were growing up, she worked at the Union Station for Southern Pacific Railroad. She was a secretary. So she was in a secretarial pool, 2 and that’s where we could reach her when we were unhappy is call her on the phone, like kids do. SS: What was her name? JZ: Lois Nelson Macfarlane. SS: When you were a young girl, who were some women that you looked up to? JZ: Probably the most was my grandmother. We all lived nearby. We had the Macfarlane family orchards along 12th Street, behind the houses back where the junior high is now, over by Gramercy. I don’t remember her working, but I know she was educated to be a teacher. By the time I came along in the grandkids she was home, and she and my grandfather just lived up 12th Street from us. We lived on 12th Street and they lived up at the top of 12th Street, the house is no longer there. Neither is ours, actually. But we were a close family, and then they had the orchard, so every summer, that’s where we spent our summers, is picking cherries or picking fruit or sorting, or just goofing off. We did it as cousins, and so, it was a family operation. But, she was the main influence. SS: Where did you attend school? JZ: Gramercy, Mound Fort, and Ben Lomond. SS: So what was it like going to school in Ogden during that time? JZ: It was great. Didn’t know anything different, I mean, school was two doors down, we’d walk to school. After school hours, we played at the school yard on our bikes and that type of thing, and then we had the orchard behind us. So we were on 12th Street, but 12th Street was a two lane road, and my father would always tell us that there was plans to widen it, and so we finally moved off of 12th Street. 3 We moved one block south over onto Canyon Road and about twenty years later they widened it. SS: That wasn’t an imminent threat then? JZ: No. But it was a good move, we needed to move. So I went to school one day, I was at Mount Fort in ninth grade, and when I came home I went to a different house, I just walked through the schoolyard at Gramercy over to our house on Canyon Road. It was a big move. But that was the only move I ever made, and, matter of fact I’ve lived in Weber County my entire life. SS: Wow. That’s amazing. Were you encouraged, as you were getting to high school and graduating, to pursue an education? JZ: I was, but I didn’t. I was very independent and by the time I got through high school it was like, “Hallelujah, I made it through, and I’m done with school.” I was out of school for a while and then I thought, “You know what, I didn’t like the school system, but I love learning.” I have been an independent learner from that time on. I’m always reading and I’m always studying, I’m always learning, I’ve taken quite a few classes up here, just independent classes, because if I go for a degree in a certain area, there was classes required that I will probably quickly say, “I don’t understand the reason for that,” and dismiss them. I focus on the things I want to do. So yes, I am a little independent. But my children have done much better. SS: So not going to school, not going on to higher education, I assume you went straight to work then? 4 JZ: Well, my husband just had his fiftieth reunion for high school, and we met in my sophomore year. So we dated at Ben Lomond, and then he graduated, and then a year later I graduated and then I got married. So I was young. I was nineteen when I got married, and then we had kids soon after that and I’ve been very involved in that. I really was committed, very, very dedicated to being a stay-at-home mom. I wanted to be there for my kids, I wanted to be involved in the things they were doing, really encourage them in the things that I felt were really important. Education is one of those things, I have to tell you that, and they got that message. But I was a stay-at-home mom up until my last child, she was 18 months. My father was ill and running the company, and he asked me to come in and take over the company. So I did that, and I’ve been doing that ever since. SS: Ok. What is your husband’s name and what does he do for a living? JZ: Darrow Zogmaister. D-A-R-R-O-W. He did a variety of different things and then at one point, he had an offer to go into the family business. I was on the board of directors, I wasn’t working there full time, so I left that decision up to him. If he wanted to work in the family business, that would be his decision, I didn’t want to influence it. He decided to and he’s been there ever since and he just retired last year. But I’m still there. SS: But you’re still there. So you’re running the company. JZ: Yes. SS: So you’re CEO? JZ: You can call me anything you want, whatever you want, I’m the one that does everything anybody else doesn’t want to do. 5 SS: You’re the one where the buck stops? JZ: Yeah, pretty much. SS: So what was it like going from...? JZ: It was a huge transition. Everything that I had studied up to that point, my dad was always feeding me information, he was always sending me articles, literally, because back then there was no email, or he’d tell me about a class or tell me about things and we’d always have these discussions and things. I knew I was going to start a business, I just didn’t think it was going to be batteries. So, in my mind, it was like, “Oh, it’d be a really cool book store and we could have all these things.” I mean, I had a lot of plans, and it was going to be after my kids were all in school. The change came a little earlier than I expected, but it was good. It was a tough transition because you not only go from being a stay-at-home mom, which I thought at first I could work part time and do that part-time but I don’t do anything part-time. I got into it and thought, “No, I’ve got to dedicate, I owe the employees, to dedicate that time.” I had an amazing neighbor who had a child the same age as mine, several of my children, and she took on the child care, which gave me great peace of mind. I just went into it. That first year, both my husband and I will tell you, it was a transition, because we not only were living together, we were married, but we were working together, we were going home, you know what I mean? It was 24/7 and that is a hard thing to do. It’s a very, very hard thing to do. We’ve been married forty-nine years. It’s a tough one, it really is, but we worked through it, and you know as my dad was leaving the business, he didn’t say, “Ok, you’re in 6 charge of this, you’re in charge of that,” or anything. He said, “You two work it out.” It was wise, but it was hard, because we had to work it out. But we did and we’ve worked together for all these years. It’s been a long time. SS: So you and your husband were almost co-running the business, basically? JZ: We were, I took over as president of the company and he was the general manager of the company and we divided up our responsibilities, who was to do what and just made it work. SS: How did you balance those responsibilities between being a working mom and...? JZ: It was difficult. It really, really was. I am a very organized person which really, really helped me a lot when I was leaving home and going to be working out of the home. The organization there were so many times that I reflected back on that, and think, “Thank goodness,” because it helped me so things would still run there when I wasn’t there. And then, I’m organized at work too. My desk is a mess, but I’m organized. But it was a challenge to do that because I was so committed to being there, and so I did have some flexibility. I mean I took off, I remember one of my kids was struggling with one of her teachers. You get the story after school and you’re going, “Wow, how did that happen?” So I spent quite a bit of time one time, when she was in fourth grade, going and sitting in the back of the class to figure out what was going on. So I had some flexibility, which really, really was a huge help. But I also was committed to making sure that I’m doing my part, it came through organization. The spread in my kids, there’s two daughters, six years, and three daughters. That spread helped a lot because I 7 had the older and the younger. They were very helpful, I mean, the kids knew their chores, they did their jobs, they did the stuff that needed to be done, and they turned out fine. Actually, all of them have worked in the company at one time or another, just at different times, different places in their lives. SS: So you had five girls. So no boys again. JZ: No boys again. I really thought I was going to have some, I mean, what’s the odds? My husband came from a family of all boys, so he’s the one that had to make the adjustment there, because he was going from a family of all boys, five boys, to a family of all girls. SS: I’m sure that was quite an adjustment for him. JZ: Yes, and we’re all so strong-willed. SS: So how did you get involved in politics? JZ: That came from my father. He’s the other huge influence of my life. When we were growing up, even when I was in elementary, he was involved in the school board, and he was president of the school board for quite a few years, I don’t know exactly, I was a child. I just know the things I would hear around the table and when I would see what was going on. They brought TV into the classroom, and I always thought the K on the front, this is lame, but I thought the K at the front of the call letters stood for my dad’s name, because he worked so hard on it, we heard about it all the time. I had Spanish when I was in 6th grade on TV, because they had linked in with the education system, and so you could have Spanish on TV, that was my Spanish class. SS: Interesting. 8 JZ: Yeah, it was my dad. He went from there, he ran for city council and he served two terms in city council. He was the assistant mayor under Bart Wolthius, and then the other was Steve, one of the youngest mayors, I’m trying to think of his last name. SS: It’s like I can see his face… Dirks! JZ: Stephen Dirks. Thank you! SS: You’re welcome. JZ: He served there and so we were involved, I mean, you’re his kids, you’re involved. He’s in a business, we’re involved in his work or the school board and other city council, that type of thing, so we were very aware of it. I helped with taking door to door flyers and different things like that when they were running, and then after I was married I just felt like I wanted to be involved, I felt actually that it was a civic responsibility, that it was what you did. My grandfather, H.A. Macfarlane, he was a legislator. He was a democrat and he was a legislator and he served two different terms, I think there was a couple of years in between, but he served there. So that’s where my dad came from, and my dad did his service, and so it’s my turn. That’s where it started. I was involved in my neighborhood, and always went to the caucus meeting. There’s usually four to six of us who show up, “Who wants to do what this year?” I was involved in the party and I was in an organizing convention and one of the legislators, he was the speaker at that time, he came to me and he said, “You know, you ought to run for office.” I said, “Yeah, I think I will sometime.” He said, “I think you could do it.” So I did, I ran, and I lost. I lost at convention, but I learned how to do it. I figured it out. So then, 9 somebody approached me and asked me if I’d run for county commissioner. I had to say, I knew who they were but I didn’t know what they did, so I figured out, what they did, decided to run for it, and was successful. I served there for four years, ran again, served there for four years, ran again, and was beat at convention. But it was ok, all of it, every single one of those things, it doesn’t matter what it is, you learn from it. That was a good/bad experience. Anyway, I stayed involved, I stayed connected with what was going on, I knew how to influence things and decided to continue doing that and trying to get other people involved. I’m always trying to encourage people. I got very involved in the women’s organizations for the republican party and served as president there a couple of times. I got involved at the state level, and engaged in what was happening in the community because really, after having served there, you have a huge responsibility and so I’ve continued to do that. SS: So when did you first join the Weber County commission? JZ: The commission, I came in in 2007. SS: 2007, so you served eight years. What do county commissioners do? What kind of things were you involved in? JZ: I loved it, I absolutely loved it, once I got in there and figured out what I was doing. You have an opportunity that is just amazing. I worked a lot with Weber Human Services. I worked a lot with the libraries. I worked really, really hard when we were trying to get the library bond passed, and it was my demise at the convention. But I did the right thing, we got it, and look at those buildings now. It was a lot of people that were involved in making that happen, it’s not one person, 10 never is. You just got to ask, be able to rally a group. I got very involved in housing, homelessness, and transportation. I love transportation. They wanted to give me the social services assignments cause I was a woman, and I thought, “Well, I can take those, but I really want transportation.” I love transportation, economic development. I mean that all fits in with my business background. I got very involved at the local level and then at the state level in the Wasatch Front Regional Council. It was a good experience. The things that you can do for your community when you know how to do them, that’s what I learned through the commission. But the commission has a lot of responsibility, I mean, you have all these cities and they have their mayor and city council. My job is to coordinate with them, because we oversee the unincorporated areas of Weber County, and that’s still a good portion. You’ve got up in the Valley and then you’ve got out west and little tiny pockets in different places. They’re slowly disappearing though, being scooped up by the cities, as they should be. There is so much variety, so much opportunity, and then, you got the opportunity of working with people in other counties and finding out how they were doing it in other counties and finding best practices and working together on things. We’re very different. Salt Lake County is very different than Weber County. Weber County is very different than Kane County. I mean there’s a huge difference, but you got to meet these people who were also dedicated to serving and work with them and it was a tremendous opportunity. So it was good. SS: So you said they wanted to give you the social services cause you were a woman. Did they fight you when you wanted the transportation part, or...? 11 JZ: No. The two men that I served with, we got along fine, very respectful and there was a lot of meetings and I didn’t mind going to the meetings. I don’t remember having to fight for that. No. But they always assume, there’s always that assumption made, that, “She’d be really good with those warm, fuzzy things.” Which I love. I chaired the homeless coordinating council for the full two terms that I was in there, and we did a lot there. St. Anne’s, the new Lantern House was built during the time when I was in there. We worked a lot with all of the agencies that serve that population, and I’m still involved, because Weber County has a homeless trust fund that was developed when DDO, Defense Depot Ogden, became a business depot. There was an agreement that was made that a portion of land would be used for homelessness, and it wasn’t a good location back then because that was so far away from everything. It’s changed now, everything’s built out, but they decided at that time that they would not locate it there because the services were all down in downtown Ogden and transportation was a challenge for them. So what they did was, sold that area and then took that money and put it into a trust. It is an independent trust, it’s not Ogden City, or Weber County, or anything, it’s an independent trust. There’s people who have been watching over it, taking care of it, and watching it grow, making sure it was invested well, and it grew. Now it is still there and I’m the Chair of it, and we grew the fund up to a million dollars, so you’d have that as the base, and so anything over that, we put an RFP out—request for proposals— each year and then people in the community in the different agencies or for 12 different needs can apply for the grant. So I’m still involved in that and it’s something that I just love doing. SS: How many people are aware that it even exists? JZ: There’s probably not. It took so long to grow it. I can’t remember the original amount or I would tell you what it grew from, but it took quite a while. I know overseeing it and making sure the investments were right and that type of thing, and so there was many people that were involved in doing that. I had the opportunity to serve on that when I was commissioner, and then after I wasn’t on the commission, they asked me to serve as a citizen and then asked me to chair it. That’s one of the things that you have opportunities through serving, you learn these things and then you can continue from there. It doesn’t end when you either say, “I don’t want to run again,” or you’re not elected again. It doesn’t end. You’ve been given the knowledge, you’ve got to do something with it, you’ve got a responsibility. SS: So after your eight years... and you lost in convention, did you go back to work? JZ: I did. I had taken an eight-year leave. I’ll tell you this story. We’re open from eight until five, so I thought, well I’ll come in in the morning to sign the checks and do anything that needs to be done and then I’ll go to the county. I was only two weeks into the job before I said, “You guys, you’re not going to see me.” I delegated everything and my husband was there, so he picked up mine, and everybody did. He made the sacrifice when I was trying to serve, and I was absentee. I walked into the shop one day, cause I needed to come in and check on something. One of the employees came up and said, “May I help you?” I said, 13 “No, I’m actually one of the owners and I’m just here to check my office.” They were so embarrassed and I said, “That’s ok, that’s ok, that’s the way it should be.” So I was totally engaged in the county commissioner for that time. So I took eight years off, my husband was thrilled when I came back, and so that’s what I did. Just took that time off and then came back to it. SS: So what other things have you been involved in? You said you want to continue to stay involved, have there been other things? JZ: I actually wrote a sheet down because I was thinking, “I will always forget the things that I’m doing, that I’m involved in.” Is it ok if I look at it? SS: Yes, of course. JZ: Here’s one. PAAG. Problems Anonymous Action Group. It’s an organization that was established by some remarkable people in the social services area when they were closing down the state mental hospital, and they were sending the people back up to the counties to be cared for there. Rhett Potter is the one that was back here, and he figured out a way to house and to socialize the population that was coming back, which is no easy task. They’re the ones that are difficult, landlords don’t want to rent to them, but families are very frustrated, because they’re difficult, they’re a challenge. He found a way to do it, and so he was quietly doing it, started in the 1970s, and I found out about it, because I was approached by a gentleman that said, “You need to help this group, they need to have a board of directors.” I said, “I’ve never heard of them.” I’d been on the Homeless Coordinating Council and I hadn’t heard of them? Anyway, he told me about them, I looked into it, went in and met with them and I said, “Ok. I will.” My 14 challenge was, I had to go around and ask these people who I knew in the community to be involved with this board and they’d go, “What is that?” I had to start from square one, just like they had to educate me, I had to educate them, every single time. We would get a couple of people and we’d get in a van and we’d go visit the locations, because there are five scattered around Ogden City where these individuals, these people are housed. They’re housed in such a way that they have their own room or their own little apartment or whatever, they have case management that come in and helps them to make sure they stay on track and don’t get themselves ill or they’re eating properly or whatever and then they have socialization. So the middle of the day they go down for lunch and they have a lunch that’s prepared for them, but they also have to work, so they have a working responsibility. Many of these people are on SSI, so they’re not employed, but they still have capability. The other thing that PAAG does is find out what their level of capability is and meets that, so they have a purpose and they have a job, like all of us need, as human beings. I put together the board of directors—they were selling off their properties when I came in, because they didn’t have enough money because the federal funding that they were receiving through social services had changed, and shifted. They were going to have to start selling off their apartments and their housing complexes. They’d already sold some property when I came in, and so this board caught wind of it and really got on board. Because I knew how to get bills passed at the legislature, because I’d already done that for batteries, we organized and went down to legislature and asked them for funding. Again, we 15 had to educate everybody from the ground up because nobody had ever heard of it, because it was a new way of thinking. Matter of fact, I would love to see it duplicated across the state in different pockets because it is duplicatable. I don’t know if that’s a word, but we did that and got the funding for it and we got a one time funding grant which allowed them to continue operating, and then we continued to give our reports and everything for the state funding and we went back again and they granted us ongoing funding. This last session, we had to go through the social services “deep dive,” where it didn’t matter what you had or how you got it, you had to be inspected thoroughly as to how you’re operating, taking care of our tax dollars. They’re doing a really good job of that by going through these processes. But we did that and we made it through, so we’re operating and we’re on good ground and it continues to function. We have around ninety people that are housed in such a way that people in the community don’t even know that they’re there. They’re just the people that live in the neighborhood. It’s amazing. I love PAAG. Utah Federation of Republican Women, I’ve been lobbying for the last four years, for business. I was approached by a lady that had lobbied for, I think twenty-nine years. I knew her from the legislature and from other things and she asked for somebody to help her and I said, “You know what, I’d like to stay in touch with that.” So we worked during the session and we go down there, and again, I left my work to do this, but they’re good. So I go down there and I help her and we work with business to try and protect and help business from regulation to make sure that things are working well, as far as the laws and the 16 regulations that come down and how it impacts business. We work a lot with small business. She’s the state director for NFIB, National Federation for Independent Business, which our business had been a member of clear back in the 1970s, so it was an easy fit to work with Candace, it was delightful. The two of us would just tag team and follow all the bills and the legislation, go to all the meetings, speak, testify if we needed to, that type of thing. It was quite a bit of work. It’s a crazy forty-five days, but it was exciting and you could see the progress and you could watch the bills and then you know what’s going to be coming up possibly for the next year, so then you’re prepared for that. So I’ve been doing that for a few years too. American Mothers. American Mothers is an organization that was started back in I think it was in the 1940s, back when Mother’s Day was started. Utah’s had a strong organization of mothers and I, as a commissioner, I used to go to the luncheon, where they would have the nominations for the Ogden City and the Weber County “Mothers of the Year.” The first one I went to, cause the commissioner said, “You should go to that,” so I did, and it was delightful. I went to it and I’m looking at the program and they got all these women that had served in the past as Mothers of the Year, for Ogden City or Weber County. My grandmother was on there. I was like, “ I don’t remember that.” Then I found a clipping in all the boxes of things that I have, so I have a clipping of back then. But I would go and every year I signed up to be a member because I just though, “This is a good organization because they support mothers.” It’s incredible some of the things they get involved in and they do some charity work in the community 17 and have different projects and things that they do. Very quiet, because women don’t need publicity. All they need is for you to just let them go. I got involved in that and I went every year for the commissioners, and then when I left the commission, somebody nominated me. I got the call at my house, like, these women had all been through and I’ve watched them, and they asked me to serve, and I was just like, “I don’t think so. I am not your Mother of the Year.” It’s a tough one. It is really a tough one. I really thought hard and pondered on it because who walks up to somebody and goes, “I’m mother of the year?” Nobody does. Nobody does. It’s totally outside of your comfort zone. Then I talked to all these women who already had been serving as past Mothers of the Year, and they were all telling me their stories. It finally dawned on me, I had this impression, that I am not the Mother of the Year, but I can represent mothers, I know how to represent people, that’s what I do. I take the group and I figure out how to get the best for them. So I told them I would, I would be the Weber County Mother of the Year for 2015. I did that, and you go to the state and you have all these other women from all the other communities that are nominated that felt just as uncomfortable as you are. I got selected as Utah Mother of the Year. So then as Utah Mother of the Year, I went back to Washington, went to the meetings back there, met amazing people across the whole country. It was fantastic and so amazing and you found out all the things that they were doing in their communities, quietly working, getting these things done. I came back and I served as their president for a little bit. I’m still involved with them; we’ve got some projects coming. We’re going to 18 do the pantry packs for C.C.S. Catholic Community Service. I’ve done that in my home with my kids, I have a lot of grandkids, and I'm always looking for a reason to get us together. In November we come together and I’ve gone out and I’ve done all the shopping and we’ve got all the stuff and we have an assembly line and it’s for all ages. We don’t go to Catholic Community Services to do it because I want to bring my younger kids too. My grandkids range in age from twenty three to nineteen months, and so I want to involve them all and I want them to have that experience of serving, and so we do that as a family. This year, the Weber/Ogden/Morgan American Mothers—Morgan’s been added to our group—we’re going to do that as a project coming up, so we’re gathering stuff for it, but you have to follow the rules of Catholic Community Services, or they will not fit in gallon bags. These are the bags that go into the backpacks that go home with the kids over the weekend, and it provides them eight meals and I can’t remember how many snacks. So for kids that maybe don’t get a lot of time with their parents and their parents are working, they’ve got single parents or whatever, they have food that’s easy to prepare, they can do it themselves, and they have food over the weekend. That’s American Mothers. I have twenty-eight grandkids, and my kids all live nearby—so we get together a lot. SS: Ok, so I’ve heard of the Mother of the Year, but I never understood what they did, so it’s interesting that it’s a service organization that’s been going on since at least the 1940s. 19 JZ: It started someplace else and I can get you the dates and all the details on it, if you want details on it, but it’s been operating for a long time in Utah, and it’s by women who volunteer to try and keep it operating. Everything's volunteer, nobody gets paid for anything. You just volunteer because you believe in it and you want to support mothers. I mean, the ability for a mother to be home with her kids as much as she can, the ability for her to work and to juggle and how to manage all of that. I mean, you learn from each other. Community service, that’s what we do. SS: I just always thought it was a title like a beauty queen or something. I never realized what it was. JZ: I’ve never been into titles. I’ve got to tell you the story of when I had to be in a parade. I’ve been in parades for the county commission, that was part of the job, you get to ride in the cool cars from down at Union Station, that was wonderful, I loved the cars. So here I am, I’m supposed to be in a parade. I’m supposed to have a car with a sign on the side that says, “Weber County Mother of the Year,” and I’m really uncomfortable with that. I express that to a woman that I knew that lived in Provo. She said, “Let me tell you what I did when I was Mother of the Year.” I said, “Well, tell me, cause I’m looking for something here.” She said, “I made posters and signs and it said, ‘Hug your mom.’” I said, “That is perfect.” She says, “You wait, you watch and see.” So I had my grandkids make some signs that said, “Hug your mom!” I had the signs in the car with me. About the time you’re feeling a little bit uncomfortable cause you’re driving down the road saying you’re the mother of the year, and the worst thing would be to have a 20 crown on your head. So I hold up the sign and you should have seen what happened. Out there, in the crowd, the kids are all running over, hugging their moms, the moms are going, “Look what she said, you come hug me.” I was just there, we had so much interaction through the whole parade, because it was not me, it deflected it off. It got everybody engaged in it, hugging their moms and moms saying, “You come hug me, she said, you come hug me.” It went through the whole parade, and it was delightful. So I passed that on to several of the people in our group, I’ve shared that idea that I got from somebody else and it just helps to ease the discomfort of being called mother of the year. I love it if my kids come up and say, “Oh, Mom, you’re mother of the year.” “Oh thanks, you’re kid of the year, too.” When you have to take a public position on it, I can take the position, but I don’t need the title with it. So those are some of the things. I’m involved with my church, I’m involved with the Sutherland Institute, I love them. I was on their board for many, many, many years. I’m proud of the things that they’re doing. SS: Ok. As a woman, how do you define courage? JZ: I would say courage is doing what’s right and not worrying about the rest. That’s courage. SS: Good answer. I don’t know if this question applies so much, but I’ll ask it. Was there a time that you had to be brave at work? JZ: Well, I don’t know. I’ve been the owner of the company and I’ve been the president of the company, that type of thing. You have to make some hard decisions. You have to make decisions that are not popular. I don’t know if it 21 takes courage, you just have to make sure that what you’re doing is right, and that gives you courage. If you’re in it for the right reasons, if you’re doing it in the right way, you have that. You’re given strength, I think. So I can’t think of anything in particular. SS: So what does the term “women’s work” mean to you? JZ: There isn’t women’s work. There’s work for women to do, and there’s a place for women, but there’s not women’s work. You could say that the job that I do is not women’s work, I mean, I’ve served in a male-dominant industry, still is today, and, I served in a male-dominant commission. There’s not that many women that have ever served, I think I was the third to come in and serve. So “it’s women’s work,” that’s demeaning to me. There isn’t women’s work, but there’s work that needs to be done and then there’s people who are willing to do it, but I don’t like that term. You think about my background; coming from all girls, coming from having all girls as children. If we didn’t do it, who’d do it? So we did it. You mowed the lawns, you took the trash out, there wasn’t jobs for boys and jobs for girls, and we knew we could do anything, because we were empowered by our parents, our grandparents. SS: So looking back on your adult life, have there been women that you have interaction with, mentors or women that have influenced you? JZ: You know, I won’t give you an answer that will really work well for you. SS: That’s ok. JZ: I think about this. I have, of course, my grandmother, and my mother. My mother and I were different as night and day, but I learned so much from her as she 22 cared for my dad, who had Alzheimer’s. But when you say mentors, I can tell you men, but not very many women. Maybe it’s because where I’ve worked, what I’ve done, whatever, I don’t know. But I have men that I really look up to and my father, people always say, “You followed in his footsteps.” Yeah, I did. I love women, but I can’t think of one particular one, but I can think of one in like, “I admire this person who does this.” But I admire a lot of people who don’t do the things that I do, because they’re able to do those things. I’m not artistic, I’m not creative. I create businesses, I don’t create lovely, beautiful things. Although, I do sew a lot, and will do more of that one day when I have more time. SS: When you finally decide if you’re going to retire? JZ: Yeah, I haven’t gotten to the point of saying that I’m ready to retire. I enjoy what I do, it’s not work, and if it gets to the point where I think that I can’t do it or somebody else needs to take over, I’m willing to do that because it doesn’t affect me, I’m still me, no matter what I’m doing. I don’t need to be a business owner and I don’t need to be a politician, or I don’t need to be a lobbyist, or I don’t need to be whatever. Those are just things that I get the opportunity to work in. At the end of day I’m still me. I really wish I had a woman’s name, I really do, because I feel guilty that I don’t. But I have amazing men that have mentored me and that have helped me and that I’ve been able to consult with.They’ve helped me in so many different ways. SS: Well, have you found it difficult being a female president of a company? JZ: Yeah. As I came into the company, we were one store. I had one location and then I had routes in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, so I had drivers, salesmen, that 23 type of thing. I decided that I wanted to have guaranteed customers along the route. So I started looking for businesses I could buy, and I did. The first one I bought was up in Logan, and it was a business that had been in their family for a while, they weren’t able to run it, they were at a point that they were interested in selling. I was there, I supplied them batteries, so I went up and talked with the owner. Cantwell Lumber, that’s who the company was, that owned the battery shop, and so I went in and spoke with them and told them that we were interested and what we wanted to do and that I would keep all the employees; I just wanted to have multiple locations, so we’d have a stop along the way as we took our product. So I did, and the manager up there, he was a challenge. I’d worked with employees that, when you come in and you’re the boss's daughter and you know that you’re going to be met with a lot of, “What does she think she’s doing here?” I have a way of getting around that though that works really well. So here I am, and I would go up there and I would talk to him about his numbers and talk to him about how things are going on and how people are working and one of the employees took me aside and said, “Things aren’t going so swell when you’re not here.” And I said, “Well, I’m not going to be here full time.” “Well, you better look into it.” So, I looked into it, found out things weren’t going so swell. So I came up and confronted the manager up there with what I knew and he just turned to me and he said, he didn’t use very good language. “He’d be darned if he was going to work for a woman. He could not work for a woman, he was disgusted, it was demeaning.” I said, “Ok. Well, you’ve made 24 your decision then.” He said, “Yeah,” and I thought, “I wonder if the rest of them are all going to leave.” I only had three full-time and one part-time up there. The other guys stayed, so we found a new manager and went on our way, and I thought, “Ok, that was a learning lesson. Some men can’t work with women.” It was just beyond him, you could feel it in his energy and his emotion. I didn’t take it personally, I took it as, “He’s been raised differently and it’s not working real well for him, so he needs to move on because he’s totally outside of his comfort zone and it’s not working good for the business or the other employees.” SS: Ok, so I’ve got the one last question, and this is a question we’re asking everybody. Since this whole project sort of revolves around or started with the 19th Amendment. How do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, our community here, and you personally? JZ: Well, thank goodness for those women that were willing to do it, because as you read about the stories, not everybody understands. It wasn’t a women’s lib thing, it was a right that they’d been denied. They had to go back to Washington to encourage it and to get it, and actually in Utah, we got the right to vote before we even became a state. SS: Yes, and it was taken away. JZ: Yeah, and then got it taken away, I know that happens sometimes. I think that’s absolutely amazing and I’m grateful to those women who were willing to leave their homes, spend their time, organize groups, I mean, do all this work that it took to really continue to drive it. Because it was a hard thing, they could have given up at any point, they could have disbanded and gone home. So they 25 persevered, so I have a huge amount of respect for those women who did that. With this focus on it, they’ve got these cute little cards with pictures of the women, they’re drawings, artwork, it’s not photographs. It’s charming. It tells a little bit about their story, and they have such a diverse background, and yet they were able to come together on this. That’s what women need to do. So often, women will judge another woman and then we get nowhere. We need to just see them for the contributions everybody makes and then work together on things. Because we can do anything. We can do anything. I always read about women who had done amazing things, and I would read Amelia Earhart, or I would read Helen Keller, just different stories of women. I like real stories, I don’t read much fiction. I like actual stories, true stories about things women have done. It’s amazing the women that we’ve had in our history and in our background. So it has had an influence, and... gosh, I can’t break down again. It has had an influence and it influences me and I hope that my daughters gather that, my granddaughters gain that. I want them to carry on the idea that they’re powerful, that they’re strong, that they can do these things, there is nothing, nothing stopping them but themselves. It won’t be easy, you’ll have to do it a roundabout way sometimes, but you can do it. There is absolutely nothing that they can’t do, nothing. But you know what, I love men and I love to partner with them because they’re a good balance. But I am not happy when I see a board that is involved in things that doesn’t have the representation, because I’ve watched it happen. Women approach things differently than men. They bring different thoughts to the table, they bring different approaches to the table, we 26 need that. We need it, they need it. Our community needs it. We all need to have the influence of women. All of us. SS: That’s great. Alright, well thank you, Jan.