It would take us a few months to get everything in livable condition in that house, even though we were living there full-time. Looking back, I don’t know how we did it, but I guess you have a lot more time and energy before there are kids in the picture. We were newlyweds. We had our whole lives ahead of us. And despite the rough start, we were still riding the excitement of our honeymoon and feeding off of that energy we seemed to have whenever we were together, which was basically all the time.
Chip never said no to any of my ideas. He was 100 percent on board for my various theme rooms. He spoiled me in that way. But it was more than that. Chip supported everything I wanted to do. He even supported my dreams. The two of us would dream together all the time, just lying in bed at night, imagining where we could go in life, talking about things we always wanted to do or see or accomplish.
Until I left home and went to do my internship in New York City, I honestly didn’t know what I wanted to do. At some point in my teen years, I told my father that I wanted to take over his Firestone shop when he retired. I thought that was the right thing to do. I thought it would make him proud, as if I were the son he’d never had who would step into his shoes and carry on the successful business he’d created.
Then I went to Baylor and got interested in broadcast journalism. I loved the storytelling and the editing process, and I managed to get two years’ worth of internships under my belt at our local CBS station, KWTX. Everyone said that if you wanted to make it in TV news you had to go to New York City to do it, so I went out on a limb and applied to the Today show, Good Morning America, and 48 Hours. Those shows didn’t have internship affiliations with Baylor at the time, so it was a long shot to say the least. I just went and did it on my own out of blind, naive ambition, I guess.
I had lived a pretty sheltered life up until then, so when 48 Hours selected me, I was worried my parents might fight it. How could they let their little girl go to the big city by herself? But I was wrong. My protective parents not only supported my ambition, they paid for my apartment for those six months—a good thing, too, because it was fifteen hundred dollars a month for a room in a shared apartment with two other people!
As amazing as it was to live on West 57th Street and to work under a man as esteemed as Dan Rather, I quickly fell out of love with the news business while working that job. My job as an intern was to read the papers to find salacious stories, cold cases, or horrible crime stories to pitch to the senior editors. It was heavy.
While I fell out of love with TV news, I did fall in love with New York City. It was more than just wandering in and out of those lovely boutiques that I mentioned before. I was pretty homesick during those six months, and I especially missed my mother. So it was eye-opening and beautiful to see so many people in that big city who looked like my mom and me. It seemed that everywhere I looked there was a woman walking down the street who reminded me of her. It was so unlike growing up in Kansas and Texas. New York is where I finally began to appreciate all of the different cultures and truly began to fall in love with my Korean heritage.
It’s difficult to put into words, but there was something about that experience that helped me find myself. I would go home every night and write about my experiences—what I’d seen, what I’d done, and sometimes just about whatever I was thinking or feeling. And as I did that, something shifted in me. I started owning who I am, realizing that I was unique and that God had a unique purpose for me. I’d spent my whole life worrying about what people thought about me or whether I was good enough or thinking about what I should be doing instead of really digging down to find out what I wanted to do.
I had always been a religious person. I was brought up in the church, and my parents were very committed to getting the family there every Sunday without fail. So from the age of five to about twenty, religion to me was a matter of “you do this, and you don’t do that, and you do your best to walk the straight line.”
I was good at that. I’m good at following the rules—most of the time. But once I was on my own in New York, my faith became something very personal. It was no longer about what my parents knew or what my pastor knew. I came to think of God as more of a gracious friend who was accompanying me on this journey, a friend who wanted to carry my burdens and speak into my life and shape me into who I really was and who I would become.
When I came back to Waco, I had a very different perspective. I went back to work at my father’s Firestone shop knowing that I didn’t want to do broadcast journalism, but also doubting whether or not I wanted to take over the tire business. I spent a good part of my days in that back office daydreaming and sketching ideas out on a yellow steno pad.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to run my dad’s business, but I definitely liked the idea of owning my own business. I thought about what kind of business I’d like to own—a spa, a bakery, a home store. Whatever I chose, I wanted it to be as beautiful and welcoming as those boutiques in New York.
I drew pictures of what the shops might look like. I designed logos. I never shared those ideas with anybody, and there were times when I thought I was just being foolish. In fact, I started to think about my degree and the fact that I’d worked at one of the top evening news programs in all of television, and I wondered if maybe I’d given up on TV news too soon. I wondered if maybe I should go back to New York and go for it. I was actually in the middle of pulling up all the old contacts I’d made during my internship on the very day I met Chip at the tire shop.
And so I stayed in Waco, and my life took a sharp turn down a path I never could’ve imagined.
We’d only been living in the yellow house for about a month when I flipped open that yellow pad and showed Chip some of my ideas. Remodeling and redecorating that house had filled me with all sorts of new inspiration, so I showed him the sketches and plans I had made for a little home décor shop. I told him I wanted to apply everything I’d learned from this house and my days wandering around Manhattan to a business idea I’d been playing around with.
“Someday,” I said.
“Why not right now?” Chip replied.
“What do you mean?”
“Go drive around and find a building you like, and let’s do it. We’ll fix it up just like we’re fixing up this house, and you can open your business right now.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course I’m serious! Go find a building and let’s do it! Why not?”
Chip had this way of turning far-off dreams into something that seemed real and achievable in an instant. He filled me up with a confidence I’d never known. He made me believe I could actually do it.
So I did.
I drove around Waco with new eyes, searching around every corner and strip mall for something that I could turn into my vision. One day, I spotted this little building on Bosque (pronounced BOSS-key) Boulevard. It was sunburnt orange—a bit like Chip on our first date—and it was all boarded up, but it looked more like a little house than a cookie-cutter, strip-mall type of business. It backed up to a residential neighborhood, it had its own little parking lot, and it was right next door to a church. There was something cute and quirky about the place that just caught my eye.
It wasn’t for sale. It basically looked abandoned. But I took a picture on my phone and sent it to Chip.
“I love this building!” I told him.
His response was, “Jo, that thing is ugly.”
“But I love all the windows, and I can imagine these pretty displays . . .”