The two of them started dating in the eighth grade, and their small-town romance never let up. In those days, in that town, just a few folks had gone to college; no one’s mom had gone to college. Nobody even thought about college, and even if they had wanted to go, no one could have afforded it. College wasn’t really an option.
My dad would probably have graduated high school and become a mechanic or something like that. But then he started playing football, and he was good at it. He received a football scholarship to the University of New Mexico, and the whole world opened up to him.
He went off to Albuquerque, and to his small-town mind it was as big of a change as moving to Las Vegas or New York might be to somebody else. I mean, to him it was just the coolest place in the world. He got himself out of Texas for the first time ever and started learning about who he really was. The school was in the Western Athletic Conference (WAC), which played Hawaii, so he got to go to Hawaii. Twice. Before that, he had never even been on a plane!
My mom stayed in Texas and wound up going to a nearby college called Midwestern State. She and Dad carried on a long-distance relationship for two years. Then she transferred to UNM so they could be together—the football star and the cheerleader, the polar opposite of Jo’s parents in many ways.
When my dad stayed on as a fifth-year senior, they got married, and my older sister, Shannon, came along shortly thereafter.
My dad was so excited and motivated by sports and athletics that, after he graduated, he opened a sporting goods store there in Albuquerque, the city where I was born in 1974. My parents tell me that even way back then I had a way of making friends with just about everybody, and I always wanted to do things for others. I was always asking my mom for money to give the homeless people we passed on the streets. And whenever some kid would come knocking on the door, trying to sell something, I’d say yes before he even started his pitch—then go running into the back of the house to get the money.
“Why do you need five dollars, Chip?” my parents would ask.
“Because I already bought this thing. This kid needs the money. Please!”
For some reason, even as a kid, I didn’t qualify people like most folks do. I treated everybody the same. From a young age I understood the true meaning of the golden rule. I literally treated others as I wanted to be treated.
It probably comes as a surprise to no one that I had a certain wild streak as a kid. I had this great friend named Devon who lived directly across the street from me in our cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood. Our driveways sloped down toward the street, and the two of us would ride our Big Wheels down those hills and shoot directly across the road into each other’s driveways, most of the time without looking.
Every other day, someone would have to slam on their brakes and come to a squealing halt to avoid hitting one of us. Then some mom would come knocking on our door and shout at my parents, “He didn’t even look! He just scooted out. I almost hit him!”
We never stopped doing it, though. We just kept on zipping across, back and forth, pulling the emergency brake and spinning to a stop right at each other’s mailbox. Listen, if the Dukes of Hazzard did it, we attempted it on those Big Wheels.
There was nothing terribly difficult about my childhood—certainly nothing like Jo felt when she walked into the school cafeteria. I always joke that my name was Chip, and that was tough enough. But other than that I was this athletic kid with friends, and I thought I had a pretty good life.
My only problem, if you want to call it a problem, is that I just never fit society’s mold, especially at school. I was always talking at inappropriate times. I was always getting in trouble with teachers who said I didn’t do things right. I wasn’t writing right. I wasn’t staying inside the lines. There was always some structure that I just somehow couldn’t fit my little brain into. (That probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me either.)
I never thought of my dad as an entrepreneur per se. I thought of him more as a businessman. And yet I seemed to pick up the entrepreneurial spirit from somewhere early on. I remember having my mom drive me down to the tennis courts, where I’d sell juice boxes to the kids in summer camp. I obviously wasn’t getting rich off of this little business, but it was fun, and it taught me a little about money and work.
My parents did teach me the value of a dollar—and of hard work too. We were always working together as a family, out in the yard or inside the house. That was the beginning of a thought that became a full-fledged goal after I graduated from college. I told myself that I was going to live the rest of my life as if it were Saturday.
I told that to Jo early on, and she was a bit put off by that. At one point she said to me, “Chip, life just isn’t like that. Life isn’t always Saturday.” I realized I needed to clarify what that phrase meant to me—so I suppose I ought to clarify it here too.
When I was growing up, Saturdays weren’t always easy for us. In our house, you didn’t sleep in until noon and then go to the beach. We would wake up at seven thirty on Saturday mornings and pull weeds until eleven. Once we were all sweating our brains out, then out came the lemonade, or here came the Popsicles. Then it was usually back to work—cleaning the house, cleaning our rooms, maybe helping Dad with some project. But when evening came, we would pack up the car and go for a real treat.
A real treat to us sometimes just meant McDonald’s for dinner. If it were a big treat, Mom and Dad would take us camping for the night, or maybe we’d go to a movie once in a while. Whatever it was, it was fun. And that’s what Saturday came to mean to me.
For us, Saturdays weren’t about work, even though we did a lot of work. They weren’t about going to an office somewhere, or to school, and having the whole family separated for the whole day. Saturdays were less structured. They were about getting the work done so you could go jump in the pool or have an ice cream cone.
There was something about school that didn’t work for me—something about the fact that you had to turn in these assignments and you had to be there exactly when they said or else there was some disciplinary effort. Even before I got out of college, I vividly remember thinking, I’m gonna put up with this for as long as I have to. But the second I don’t have to put up with it anymore, I’m out. And I’m gonna live every day for the rest of my life as if it’s Saturday.
There would be times in the coming years when I would be flat broke and think, Maybe I messed up. I feel like I’m living every day as if it’s Monday! But that feeling would never last long. Whenever I’ve been down financially, I’ve just picked myself up and worked a little harder. And whether it’s a little luck or God or a combination, everything seems to find a way of working itself out eventually.
One thing my dad would preach to us when it came to money was, “I’ll provide your needs, but you have to take care of your wants.” So once I was old enough, if I told my parents I wanted some new toy or gadget, they’d say, “Well, great. There’s this lawn two doors down that we keep driving by and noticing that it needs to be mowed. What if you went and knocked on that guy’s door and asked him if you could mow it. How much is this thing you’re looking for?”
“Well, it’s twelve bucks.”
“Okay. Well, if you offered to mow it for five, it would only take you two or three weeks, and you could have it!”
They never said no or “quit asking.” They just said, “If you want that thing, here’s an idea as to how you can go earn it.”