by Hoda Kotb
But the couple’s once-simple lifestyle soon became quite complicated. Raising twins in the woods was a backbreaking challenge; there was no room for error. Their idealistic life had been hit with a double dose of reality.
“At first I embraced it all because I had chosen that lifestyle. I was a very conscientious environmentalist. I felt that when you haul water and you heat it up with wood that you’ve cut, dried, and hauled, you certainly don’t waste water. You don’t really waste anything. If you brought something in, it was through a lot of effort, and you used every bit of it. I remember buying old coats at the Goodwill and then cutting them down to make little jackets for my kids. We were just very conscientious, because we didn’t have a lot of money and that was by choice. But by the time the kids were ready for school, it became very cumbersome to live that lifestyle, and I did start to get restless and feel that I just didn’t think I was going to be able to do this the rest of my life. I had proven to myself that I could live that way, so I got a little bit restless and felt penned up.”
By 1982, the back-to-the-land philosophy had created a back-to-the-wall lifestyle for the couple.
“It put so much pressure on our relationship. There was a lot of work to do. We had to carry everything into our cabin because it was a mile off of a dirt road. We had twins, and all of their clothing was washed by hand. We never had a telephone so we didn’t feel we could leave our kids at home with a babysitter; our lifestyle just wasn’t set up for that,” Roxanne says. “We had very little money and we had to stretch it as far as it could go. We had lots and lots of chores and two babies, and the mounting responsibilities and hardships eventually became too much for the relationship to bear and I believe was a major reason why the marriage didn’t last. I got married too young. I met George when I was nineteen and we lived together from then on, so I didn’t have a lot of experience. By the time I was in my thirties I was like, Wow, I wonder if he’s really the right guy?” She chuckles. “He was the first guy who came along. I should have waited a little bit longer and evaluated it.”
In 1983, Roxanne told George she wanted a divorce.
“That wasn’t so good. He was a lot more committed to the relationship,” she admits. “He’s not as much of a restless soul as I am and he was into a routine that suited him quite well, but I was just feeling bored and restless and I just needed more change, more variety, more stimulation in my life. So, I went out and pursued that, and he was pretty resentful that I had made a promise to be in a relationship till death do us part, and then I reneged on that promise; that did not go over well.”
Roxanne packed up the kids and her belongings on a toboggan and pulled it to a nearby cabin owned by a friend who was living elsewhere for several years. The setup was just as rustic—no electricity or running water, a well, and a woodstove. She and George traded the kids each week.
“His fathering of our children was really great. They loved him,” she says. “He’s a very patient man, plays the guitar, he really loves them and spent a lot of time with them. They still have a very close relationship.”
Despite the divorce, Lucas and Hannah embraced their down-to-earth upbringing in the woods. Dirt roads provided endless miles of bike trails.
“It was wonderful,” says Lucas. “I grew up a very serious baseball fan and would often bungee-cord a transistor radio to the handlebars of my bicycle, and we would ride our bikes listening to Joe Castiglione, the Boston Red Sox radio announcer.” He laughs. “We spent a lot of time doing that.”
A nearby pond provided swimming in the summer and skating in the winter.
“I remember one ice-skating party we had with a bunch of different families and kids,” Hannah recalls. “We spent a lot of time there.”
In the community the twins called home, “modest” was mainstream.
“They took it as completely normal that they didn’t have a TV and that we lived a very simple lifestyle,” says Roxanne. “I think that, especially looking back on it now, they really appreciate how unique their life was growing up. We never had to warn them of the dangers of civilization and strangers and traffic and those kinds of issues you face when you’re living in the city or suburbs. They had a very idyllic lifestyle. They could get on their bikes and go for the whole day. The only rule was that they had to come home before dark. So they would go pick apples and had a lot of freedom to go fishing or biking. One day they rode sixteen miles away and got a flat tire and had to deal with it.” She smiles. “They had an old-fashioned childhood. I know when they look back on it now, they’re very proud of the way they grew up and they tell their friends about it. It’s a story they love to tell.”
Alone with two children to raise, Roxanne began to worry about her paltry income stream. She was earning about $150 a week buying and reselling items at local flea markets. She continued to waitress but admits she was not cut out for the role of server.
“I had a real problem with asserting my independence,” she says. “I was a very independent person. I had my mind made up about the way things were done, and I never failed to tell my boss what I thought they should do, and that didn’t go over well. So, I ended up not being a very valuable employee because I was not very compliant.”
There were three restaurants in Guilford, and Roxanne got fired from one. And then the next.
“They had started having this Thursday-night pizza night where it was all-you-could-eat pizza. They were trying to get people to come in during the week, and they only did it for four or five weeks in a row. They decided they didn’t have the turnout they were expecting, and they stopped doing it. I remember telling my boss, ‘You gotta keep after it a little bit longer than four or five weeks. It’s gonna take a while for people to tell each other about it and for the word to spread. You gotta hang in there with it.’ I look back now and think that was pretty inappropriate.” She raises her eyebrows. “Telling my boss how to run her business. I’m sure she didn’t appreciate it at all, but that’s the kind of thing I would do.”
When the kids started school, Roxanne began to notice that they felt self-conscious. She realized her personal choices were affecting the social status of the twins in their new environment.
“I was driving this old rickety van, and they would always ask me to drop them off about a block away from school so nobody would see the van that they were being dropped off in. Kids put a lot of pressure on each other, even at a very young age, to conform to society’s standards, and it’s a very unusual kid who can reject all those standards and just be happy for who they are, and I didn’t want to put that pressure on my kids.”
Financial pressure would soon mount for Roxanne; she lost her third and final waitressing job.
“I idolized Sinéad O’Connor. She shaved her head, so I thought I’d do the same. I went to work and they fired me on the spot.” She laughs. “Once I became an employer and had my own employees, I look back on the situation and think, Yeah, I would have fired me too!”
Roxanne, now thirty-four, knew that her lifestyle had to change for the sake of her kids’ future. The mainstream values she’d rejected began to make more sense when she saw them as a launching pad for Lucas and Hannah.
“I was concerned about the limitations that my choices were creating for them. They were going to this little school in northern Maine with an archaic social structure, not very enlightening, with a lot of emphasis on competition instead of cooperation, and I wanted to send them to an alternative school where kids were given more freedom to be themselves and be creative but couldn’t afford to do that,” she explains. “I eventually scraped together the money to get them there, but I realized as they got a little older that I was putting enormous limitations on the way they were going to be growing up because of choices I had made. The responsibility for their well-being motivated me to seek other ways of making a living that would allow me to offer them the opportunity for a better education, and for traveling, and to see the world more and understand it better.”
Ironically, it was Roxanne’s meager lifestyle that changed her world one afternoon. After the road-weary VW bus died, Roxanne had to walk or hitchhike to get around town. In the summer of 1984, a local character named Burt Shavitz noticed Roxanne’s outstretched thumb and picked her up in his beat-up, bright yellow Datsun pickup truck. She knew him as a local beekeeper with a Howard Hughes–style reputation.
“Everybody had this notion that he was very wealthy, and yet he wore clothes that looked like he got them out of the bottom of a Salvation Army reject bag. His truck was a rattling can of nuts and bolts. He’d open the door and all kinds of stuff would fall out of it,” she says, amused. “He set up his little honey stand on the side of the road and sat there in a lawn chair with his honey stacked up, sleeping, with the money jar set out if you wanted to buy some. He lived alone in this little turkey coop that he had salvaged, with his chickens and his horse. People were slightly afraid of him. He’s kind of gnarly looking. He had a big, long beard and long hair. They’d make up stories about his life, like he was a millionaire from New York City who had come to Maine to hide.”
Burt did indeed make his way to rural Maine from the big city. Raised in Manhattan, he developed a love for photography and eventually made a living traveling and selling photos to national newspapers and magazines, including Life and Time. But in 1973, Burt tired of living out of a suitcase and in the chaos of a bustling city. He bought a twenty-acre farm in the small town of Garland, fifteen miles south of Guilford. He fixed up an eight-feet-by-eight-feet turkey coop discarded by a neighbor and called it home. He bought fifty beehives, scattered them across the countryside, and earned about $3,000 a year selling honey on the roadside in nearby Dexter.
“I was completely fascinated by him,” Roxanne says. “He was so odd and unusual and independent. I was really inspired by the fact that he was not willing to compromise in any way whatsoever. He knew what he wanted, he didn’t care what anybody thought about it, and I found that very inspiring.”
And quite attractive. Roxanne was not only romantically interested in the forty-nine-year-old, but as a gardener, she was intrigued by his honeybees. She spent the summer of 1984 learning beekeeping from Burt, and before long, Roxanne realized she could add value to Burt’s substandard business. He was packaging his honey in used pickle jars.
“People called him Dirty Burty. You would really kind of wonder whether you really wanted to eat that honey or not.” She chuckles. “It had no shelf appeal whatsoever. So, I had an art background, and I felt that if I had the opportunity to put the honey into more interesting packaging with more interesting labels, we could sell it for more, and we would both be able to make a living at it. So, I suggested that to him and he was fine with it. He’s kind of a lazy guy.” She smiles. “Y’know, Never do anything yourself that you can get somebody to do for you. He said, ‘Sure, Roxy.’ He called me Roxy. ‘You go for it, Roxy.’ ”
Roxy ditched the pickle jars and packaged the honey in charming teddy bear and hive-shaped containers. Business got sweeter, but the love affair would eventually sour.
“He’s a confirmed bachelor, and he’s not really equipped to have a relationship.” She pauses. “Um, a two-way relationship. He didn’t have a lot of emotional vulnerability and he’s kind of closed off, and after a while it was pretty clear it wasn’t going to work.”
Burt, Roxanne, Rufus. Moosehead Lake, Maine, 2000.
(Courtesy of Roxanne Quimby)
But it was very clear that the business could. Roxanne and Burt agreed to continue their work relationship. A breakthrough came one day as they wandered into the honey house.
“He sold the honey, which was pretty easy; you just bottle it. But he never really figured out what to do with the wax, so he just kept it in the honey house. It’s wonderful stuff, beeswax. It’s fragrant and gorgeous, and he suggested that I make some candles. ‘Why don’t you make some candles with all this wax, Roxy?’ So, I was like, Yeah, this is like sculpture! This is very artistic and a lot of fun! It was sort of an epiphany that we could use this wax, and as soon as we used up all the wax he had on hand, we started buying wax from the other beekeepers who were in the same boat.” She adds, “No one ever knows what to do with the beeswax.”
They struck up a deal: Burt would keep the bees and gather the honey; Roxanne would package the golden treat and make the candles. She bought wicks, drew bees and hives on labels, and experimented with various molds.
“It was trial and error. I’m not really afraid of failure because it usually leads to understanding something that you didn’t know before.”
The local junior high Christmas craft fair and bake sale would be their first shot at selling the handcrafted products; a vendor table cost five dollars. Game on.
“We made two hundred dollars that day,” she recalls, “and I was really psyched, because that was a lot of money at the time for me.”
Burt and Roxanne pooled their funds to buy basic kitchen appliances for mixing, pouring, and dipping. They traveled to craft fairs around the region, and Roxanne set a goal of $20,000 in sales for the first year. That number would mean $10,000 in profits, tripling her current income. Roxanne was exhilarated by the promise of a brighter future for her children and a creative challenge for herself.
“I just unleashed this energy that I didn’t even know I had,” she says. “I was thrilled with the packaging of the honey, designing labels and hang tags, taking it out to the craft fairs, and making candles with the beeswax. I just loved this little craft business that we had going, and Burt was fine with it, like, ‘Yeah, I don’t have to sell honey by the side of the road anymore. I can sleep in my own cabin instead of in a lawn chair in the middle of town,’ ” she mimics, laughing.
Over the years, Roxanne traveled to the majority of trade shows solo, and George would watch the kids. She’d set out at midnight in her old pickup or van and arrive in the morning to avoid paying for a hotel room. Sometimes she slept in the truck. When the twins were around seven years old, Roxanne started taking them along to weekend shows.
“It was like these little adventures every weekend,” says Lucas. “We would pile up the car with candles and honey and get to go to a place where there were a bunch of people. It was always exciting because there were so many people around.”
Hannah remembers looking forward to heading out in the early-morning darkness, knowing a special treat was in store at the first gas station or drive-through.
“I can remember stopping one time and getting McDonald’s or Burger King, or someplace we would never go, and I got French toast sticks.” She giggles. “I can remember so clearly sitting in the back of the van and eating my French toast sticks.”
Roxanne says, “They looked forward to that because it was a trip into civilization. It was very exciting for them. They used to tell me that they were old enough to make change, and then at the trade shows they would try to convince me they were old enough to take orders. They would be highly insulted if I would take the pen away and tell them I was writing the orders.”
Roxanne traveled to larger and larger craft fairs around the region, and before long, to the big city of Boston. Daily retail sales grew from hundreds of dollars to more than a thousand. In an effort to expand the limited product line, Roxanne began to explore additional items she could make with beeswax, like polishes. On her tiny cabin’s wood-burning stove, she brewed batch after batch of shoe and furniture polish. Craft fairs served as the company’s research and development department.
“I didn’t participate in the marketplace very much because I was broke; I didn’t buy anything. I didn’t think I was a consumer myself,” she reasons, “so they were almost sort of an alien species and I was watching them very carefully. It was obviously very important to me to understand what made people buy things. I watched them to see what motivated them to purchase something or when they decided not to buy something. Why didn’t they? I listened very carefully to people who were there with their friends to see
what they said to each other, and I would watch their actions. One of the things I noticed was that everybody would pick up a candle, turn it over, and look at the underside of it for some reason. I don’t know why, but I always made sure the bottom of the candle looked as good as the top.”
Before long, it was time to add square footage. Burt and Roxanne convinced a friend to rent them his abandoned schoolhouse for the price of the annual fire insurance: $150. The building had plenty of critters but no running water or electricity. Still, it was an upgrade in terms of space and allowed them to hire several employees to help meet the growing demand. They installed a gas kitchen range and worked at night by the light of kerosene lamps. Although she was working around the clock, Roxanne was extremely engaged.
“I think I was a born merchant. I just really was fascinated by the whole thing about selling stuff. Making stuff and selling stuff. It really caught my interest, and once I started doing it as an adult I was really into it.”
Hannah says her mom’s laser focus on developing the business didn’t interfere with family time; it actually enhanced it.
“For a long time, I would say until we got to high school, we were very much a part of it,” Hannah says. “When we were younger, we were going to the trade shows and the craft fairs, and we were helping. We probably saw more of our mom than most kids did, because we were helping wrap soap and packaging things up, and doing a lot of that with her. She was working nonstop, but there was this blurred line of what was work and what we were doing as a family.”
The passion and hard work was paying off. Not only had they met the first-year goal of $20,000, by 1987 retail sales reached $81,000. From day one, Roxanne made sure the freedom and independence she valued as a person were intrinsic in their business plan.
“The company grew without debt. All the sales that we made were reinvested in growing the company, and because we had no debt, we had no one that we needed to explain our business strategy to,” she says. “We never had to pay back any loans or interest, which is very liberating because you don’t have a bank or a lender second-guessing your every move. And if we made a mistake we paid for it, so you learn really fast.”
