The Magnolia Story (with Bonus Content)

by Chip Gaines

  Looking back on those years, the thing that strikes me is that it all seemed to happen so fast. Maybe it was just a lack of sleep from having four kids in quick succession, but those years just seem to blur together for me.

  I suppose a lot of young couples feel that way once kids come into the picture. Time does fly, just as those other moms had told me.

  Every time I turned around, it seemed as though Drake had suddenly grown another inch or Ella Rose had started walking, or Duke and Emmie were sleeping through the night. These huge milestones came one on top of the other, and I felt truly blessed to be able to work from home so I never missed one—not to mention getting to work alongside my husband as we grew our business together.

  The magic that Chip and I had discovered early on—that we seem to grow stronger the more time we spend together—never seemed to wear off. We were well past the honeymoon stage in our marriage, and yet we seemed to fall even more in love with each other now that we had children. We both fell more in love with our work, too, with every new project we tackled as a team.

  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.

  Moving was never easy for me, though. This was due in part to my own insecurities, which trace back to my experiences in first or second grade back in Rose Hill, Kansas, when kids started noticing that I didn’t look exactly like they did.

  As a small child I had never noticed there was anything different about me. I thought I looked like everybody else. And really, most people don’t look at me and automatically think I’m half-Korean. But in those first couple of years in elementary school, kids started picking on me because of it.

  The worst of it came in the lunchroom. I would get served the same broccoli-and-cheese rice that everyone else in the lunch line was served. But a group of boys—especially this one redheaded boy—would start saying things like “Oh, look at the little Asian girl eating rice.” Going to the lunchroom caused me so much anxiety that I asked my mom to start packing me a cold lunch instead. The kids who ate cold lunch gathered in a separate room, where it wound up just being me and a handful of other girls.

  I thought I was in the clear then—until my grandmother came to live with us for a while and started attending school events. She looked like a traditional grandmother from South Korea. It was her first time in the United States, she wore no makeup, and all the children seemed to notice how different she looked from the average Kansas grandma. This seemed to give that group of boys more r
eason to make fun of me.

  As a child I didn’t know how to process all this. I just felt the pain of being different, and I felt I had to be something else in order to be accepted.

  Luckily, kids grow out of that unfiltered phase, and the torment soon just sort of went away. The rest of my elementary school and middle school years were pretty normal. They were fun. Getting picked on for being different wasn’t an issue I consciously carried with me as I grew. It wasn’t something I worried about. I always made friends, and for years that old fear of walking into the cafeteria stayed buried somewhere deep in my subconscious.

  Moving every few years left me feeling like I could never get comfortable, though. Just when I started to settle in somewhere and find my footing, I’d wake up, and it would be time to move again. I learned to just accept it. I trained myself to get used to it. And I suppose that set me up for my life with Chip in a big way. We may not have been making cross-country moves in our marriage, but moving from house to house is still a big change, and we would make a lot of those transitions.

  I think the toughest move of all for me as a kid was between Corpus Christi and Round Rock. It happened during my sophomore year of high school. I’d gone to private school most of my life, so I was used to having maybe thirty people in my class. When I moved to Round Rock High School, there were nearly six hundred kids in my class. This came as a complete culture shock to me. We also moved in the middle of the year, and that made it even tougher, especially on the first day.

  I had always made friends easily on my first day of school. When you’re the new girl at a private school, everyone’s excited to see a new face. But being the new girl at a large public school in Texas was different. I swear no one even noticed me. I wondered if they even noticed that I was new. For all they knew, I could have been there for years and just blended in.

  I walked into the lunchroom on that first day at Round Rock High, and every bad feeling I had felt as a second grader came flooding back. I was literally crippled by it. In my mind I saw myself in a spotlight, a little girl walking into that crowd of people who would surely look at me as different. I was sure they were going to make fun of me.

  In reality, I don’t think anyone even noticed me, but I still felt awful. I walked through that cafeteria without making eye contact with anybody, went straight into the bathroom, and hid in a stall. I stayed in there for thirty minutes, right up until I heard the bell ring.

  I wound up doing that every day for the rest of the semester, from January through May. I spent lunchtime either hiding in the bathroom or ducking into a quiet corner of the library.

  I’m not sure why I was so terrified. Maybe it was just teenage hormones, but I never even gave those kids a chance to ask me to sit with them. I felt their rejection and acted on it before I even gave them a chance.

  At some point my mom realized I wasn’t eating lunch. She got mad at me at first. Then she said, “I’m going to pick you up. You have to eat.” Sophomores weren’t allowed to leave campus at lunchtime, so I had to sneak off campus to jump into my mom’s getaway car. Once or twice a week we’d plan it so she’d be there at 11:15 on the dot. I would bolt out and jump over the rope at the edge of the lawn. My mom would have the car door open, waiting for me, and we’d take off. She’d take me to Wendy’s and then secretly drop me back at school before the start of the next period. And each time she’d say, “Jo, listen, we can’t keep doing this. You’ve got to make friends.”

  Mom wasn’t enabling my fearful behavior. It was simply her motherly instinct; she wanted her teenage daughter to eat. As a mother now myself, I can’t blame her. And now, looking back, those lunches stand out as some of my favorite times with my mother. We were kind of like lunchtime bandits, stealing away for twenty minutes together to laugh and talk and grab a burger together.

  Over the course of the summer, I did make a few friends, and by the start of the next school year it all sort of worked itself out. It took me a good six months of awkwardness to finally find a friend group through gymnastics—and then we up and moved again in the middle of my junior year.

  I arrived at my small private school in Waco (in a class of twenty-eight people) on the same day a group of Chinese exchange students were visiting the school. Everyone mistakenly thought I was one of them—a Chinese girl who just happened to dress American and didn’t have an accent. Everyone was kind of intrigued by that. It served as an icebreaker that gained me some friendships from the get-go.

  Right after we moved to Waco was when I started working with my dad at the Firestone dealership and started to get involved both at school and at church. It wasn’t until my senior year, though, that I first started to think consciously about what it meant to be half-Korean.

  I remember thinking, I’m either white, Korean, or both, but I’ve got to own this. It’s me. I started to see how beautiful my mom’s culture was and how beautiful she was, and there were times when I wanted people to know she was different and she was unique. I didn’t want to be embarrassed about that.

  To my surprise, in the fall of my senior year I was actually elected as our high school’s homecoming queen. I remember walking out on the football field to be crowned, thinking about how radically different this feeling was from the rejection I’d felt just two years prior, hiding in bathroom stalls at lunchtime. I was thankful my high school career had ended on a good note. I felt there was redemption in my heart from an old wound that had never truly healed.

  A few years later I graduated from Baylor University as a communications major, traveled to New York, and finally got rid of the second-grade chip on my shoulder. After all those years of failing to understand or embrace what an honor it was to be a part of my mother’s amazing culture, I finally believed it was actually a beautiful thing to be unique and to be different.

  And this, of course, was right around the time when Mr. Different-and-Unique himself, Chip Gaines, walked into my life.

  NINE

  CHIPPING IN

  As I mentioned earlier, my mom and dad grew up in Archer City, Texas, a town of maybe two thousand people. When compared to Archer City, Waco would have been like the big city where you would come see a movie on the weekend or something.

  My parents aren’t ashamed to tell anybody that their whole group of friends in that town were all poor growing up, but my dad was the poorest kid of the bunch. He lived in what would be the equivalent of the projects in that town, and the government paid a portion of the rent for the apartment where he grew up.

  His mom, my grandma, was a single mom raising two kids back in the day. In a town where everybody was broke, they were known as the poor family. So to my dad, my mom seemed like a rich girl just because her dad was a rancher and they had a house and some cows.

  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.