This is the second part in a series of posts giving a bit of history as to who we are. The next post will (finally) get to the founding. of Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm. I hope you're enjoying these bits if biography....
Jody and Beth spent four years in Utah. They loved being able to drive 40 minutes and be at a trailhead into the Wasatch mountain wilderness. Many weekends were spent hiking or rock climbing in the canyons east of the city. Still, Utah hadn’t become “home.” The lack of family nearby and the difference in culture ensured that it never would be.
By 1996, Beth was beginning to burn out from teaching. Many young teachers who take jobs in needy schools get ground down by the long hours, increasing demands from their schools, and the heavy workload’s uncompensated time. Beth was no exception. Also, she had eschewed the traditional summer breaks most teachers enjoy to start and run a summer enrichment program at her school. Getting the program off the ground included grant writing. This experience has helped in our farming enterprise, too. (Look for more on grant writing in upcoming posts!)
One of the Beth’s summer program projects was planting a vegetable garden at the school with her students. At the time, she had no idea she was pioneering something that would be prevalent nationwide in 15 years. Beth just knew that it was good for kids to dig in the dirt, plant seeds, watch them grow, and have the sense of accomplishment that comes from producing something good to eat.
When Jody saw an ad for a “curriculum and implementation” consultant position from an educational software company in the Salt Lake Tribune, he encouraged Beth to apply. She had been an early adopter of technology in the classroom. These included the Encarta encyclopedia on cd/rom. Jody remembers Beth’s excitement clicking on the article about Martin Luther King Jr. and hearing audio from his “I Have a Dream” speech or the file on zebras with audio of their braying. She saw how technology might open up the world for her students (remember that this was early-days for the world wide web and 56K dial-up was fast internet).
With some prodding, Beth followed up on the ad and scheduled an interview. She put together a computer presentation and borrowed a screen projector. It was big and weighed about 70 lbs; but for at the time it was cool technology. Beth wowed them and was offered the job. She took it (with a salary a third more than her teaching salary not including annual bonuses) and began travelling around the intermountain west.
At the about the same time, Jody was tiring of his job in sales. He wanted to do something more real and tangible. So, he took a job managing a temporary labor storefront. It got a little too real when he was nearly assaulted by one of the temps. Beth and Jody started talking about a move from Utah after he quit the temp labor job. It was between Seattle (a city they had fallen in love with on a weekend get-away) and Chicago. In the end, the pull of family won out. In the fall of 1997, the Osmunds moved to the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Beth stayed with the software company had need for her in the Midwest and being located fifteen minutes from O’Hare was ideal for her travels. After some training in mainframe programming, Jody went to work for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) as a programmer and was placed on a long-term assignment at Allstate where he took a permanent position a couple of years later.
