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How Jody Became a Land Baron, sort of (conclusion)

8/30/2017

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PictureJody with our dogs Paco & Benny (named after the character Benaroya in Passing For Human)
Part III- Okanogan:
I write about how Jody and I meet in 1977 in the foreword to the 2015 Strange Particle Press edition of Passing For Human. It isn't long before Jody recruits me to help with the Irondale business. I'm young and inexperienced enough to be flattered to be entrusted with the bookkeeping. (Note to young self, "bookkeeping is not a thrilling piece of adult business, it's just an onerous repetitive pain in the ass.") But to be fair, Jody has been doing this alone for a long time and how I handle this will be an indicator as to whether I can be trusted with greater responsibility. 
     In 1981 we buy our first parcel of land in Okanogan County. By now I have learned how the business operates and how to communicate and sell. Jody is an excellent teacher.    
       Turns out our skills mesh wonderfully, where Jody is weak I excel; where I am weak she is strong. So while she writes full time, I am tasked with finding a new location where we can replicate the Irondale success. 
     There's no internet so research is via phone and mail and in person.  After months of searching I find the place where county regulations, beautiful terrain, views and price align. ​

PictureJody cooking dinner over the campfire
The plan is to buy a large tract of land at a 'wholesale' price, divide it into smaller parcels, and sell those to people in Seattle at a 'retail' price. This "spread," or difference between wholesale and retail, is our profit.
     We do everything ourselves. We find the land and buy directly from owners.  We sell the land for $99 down and $99 per month on a Real Estate Contract we carry ourselves. We tramp and measure and stake and take photos. We figure out how to divide what we buy and write the legal descriptions that make it so. We advertise in The Little Nickel using inexpensive classified ads and we meet people at the local Denny's Restaurant where rent is the cost of a meal plus generous tip.
   ​    We have no competition, no one is doing what we are doing. In later years others begin to offer similar terms, some of them legit and some of them scammers. But we have an advantage because society does not recognize our spousal relationship. For this technical reason we can buy two adjacent tracts of land as separate individuals and each of us divide our parcel into four pieces, giving us eight plots to resell. A married couple can only divide the same whole into four parcels. (And that's how to take a crappy hand dealt you and turn it to advantage!)
         We enjoy quite a bit of freedom, but also there is no corporate daddy to fall back on; the bucks stops with us- for good or ill. Nobody funds our retirement account or provides us insurance. We take all the risks, we get all the rewards and we assume all the responsibility. It takes a bit of courage and a whole lot of ethics to pull that off successfully for decades.
        So, we begin our Okanogan business in 1981, we model it after the successful Irondale Lots, which is built on Jody's successful Encyclopedia Britannica experience, and the last Okie property we sell is in 2007, just months before Jody dies.  (We have a lovely time that summer clearing brush growing up in the road and find a big jade rock (OK probably not jade, but pretty) that takes the both of us to lift into the trunk to bring home.)
         Over these 30 years we buy and sell hundreds of acres of land, dozens and dozens of individual parcels.  By creating our own unique business model, to supply exactly what Jody needs to write full time (a modest but steady income from a few months part time work each year), she is able to spend her life doing what she loves; producing the body of work that we all are the lucky beneficiaries of. ​
​-Mary Whealen

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Our very first purchase overlooking the Aeneas Valley (that's Benny in the left foreground)
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We got to take our dogs to work!
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If a property was so beautiful it broke our hearts to have to sell it we knew our buyers would love it too
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Just before a rainstorm
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How Jody Became a Land Baron, sort of (part 2)

8/9/2017

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 part I,   part II,   part III
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Irondale WA
Part II- Irondale:
​
      It's no surprise Jody is an excellent saleman, because she is an excellent communicator; she can talk to anyone, can understand and acknowledge anyone without judgment. (A very handy ability for a writer.)
      So when Jaffarian meets Jody he recognizes the answer as to how to make money with these thousands of Irondale lots.  She pitches him a set of encyclopedias; he pitches her a proposal they go into business together.
       They soon form Scojaf and craft a direct sales campaign based on Jody's Britannica presentation (phone pitch followed by in-person pitch with sales kit-- in this case many maps, photos, brochures, etc). They place a small classified ad in The Little Nickel Newspaper (a thing made of paper that people used before Craig's list) and soon, with her handy Thompson's Guide (a thing made of paper that people used before GPS) and the street-numbering truism that "east is even," Jody is navigating all over Seattle selling vacation lots for $9 down and $9 per month.  
       She is a howling success.  The checks are pouring in. ​  ​
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Irondale is 6 miles south of Port Townsend on the Olympic peninsula
         Jody has her head down, plowing those furrows like the good Capricorn she is, but poor Jaffarian goes a little nuts with the all the money and success. He trades in his wife for a newer, younger model, buys a sprawling estate in Escondido CA that once belonged to Harold Bell Wright, and eventually trades Scojaf for a boatload of Teletrans stock.
       Teletrans, it turns out, is the product of a classic "pump-and-dump" scheme and therefore very soon worthless. (You can still find info about it on the internet with enough searching, because the shell of Teletrans was used again, post-internet, to conduct another "pump-and-dump" before being delisted by the Salt Lake City Exchange.) 
          To his credit Jaffarian feels bad and deeds the remaining lots to Jody in compensation. She continues to sell them directly, and carries the contracts. The monthly payments are by this time up to $29.  And that money coming in steadily every month affords Jody the time to write. She writes Passing For Human which is published in 1977, the year that we meet.
           Over the next several years I assist Jody in this enterprise and learn the business (an education worth many times the price of any college tuition), and as the stock of Irondale lots dwindles we begin to search for a new location where we can repeat what she's done with Irondale.
           We find it in Okanogan County, which I will tell you all about next time.​
​-Mary Whealen

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An interesting aside, Irondale is just up the road from the setting for 'The Egg and I' by Betty MacDonald, adapted to film in the 'Ma & Pa Kettle' movies
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The beach where Chimacum Creek feeds into Puget Sound
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Chimacum Creek that divides north and south Irondale
 part I,   part II,   part III
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