Chapter 18

Office of The First Lady

There is no official playbook for first ladies or first gentlemen when his or her spouse becomes chief executive, but there is an unofficial maxim from those who have done it themselves: Define the role your way.

Jacalyn Smith Leavitt, Utah’s fourteenth First Lady, stepped into the role in 1993 with a bustling young family, a background in secondary and elementary education, and heartfelt ideas about where her impact and time might best be applied to public service endeavors. At the top of the list—children, families, marriage. The choices were natural. As she put it, “I had graduated in education and was very focused on my young family.”

Settling the family into new routines at the Governor’s Mansion and into a higher-intensity lifestyle had to come first, though. We’d always had an energetic but orderly household, and Jackie wanted the structure and pace of First Family life to follow our pre-governorship routines as seamlessly as possible. When the fire at the Mansion in late 1993 forced a relocation just ten months after we had moved in, the return to our former home on Laird Avenue had a settling effect, and the familiar rhythm and flow of family life resumed.

There were invitations, projects, events, and initiatives for Jackie to consider from Inauguration Day onward, competing demands all seeking a first-lady stamp of approval or involvement to some extent.

Requests for appearances and speaking events were plentiful. Parades, dinners, and special events were consistently part of her schedule for more than a decade, as were hundreds of the lighter, more personal touches—the many greetings, welcomes, conversations, and expressions of interest Jackie conveyed to thousands of Utahns on a regular basis.

Initiatives were a more ongoing, lasting, and self-directed consideration, often requiring planning and coordination with my office and state agencies or collaboration with a national cause. And those impacted the lives of many more.

Just as I had a supply of “magic dust” as governor to uplift and encourage Utahns, Jackie had her own special supply of “magic dust,” which she used to also uplift and encourage Utahns. She combined her interest and commitment to children and family issues with her influence as First Lady to strengthen the families of the state, with initiatives such as Every Child by Two and the Governor’s Initiative on Families Today.

Childhood Immunization

First up for Jackie was the Every Child By Two campaign, a childhood immunization campaign tied to a larger nationwide effort headed by two former first ladies and advanced in Utah by state health director Rod Betit.

Rod had sought out Jackie almost immediately to lead Utah’s promotion efforts and chair a new Every Child By Two Task Force, which had begun emphasizing the importance of vaccinating children by age two. Jackie readily accepted and chaired the task force for eleven years.

She kicked off the Utah campaign at an immunization conference in Ogden on March 31, 1993, little more than a month after my swearing-in ceremony. By her side were former U.S. First Lady Rosalynn Carter and Betty Bumpers, former first lady of Arkansas. Earlier in the day, Jackie and I had taken the two former first ladies to Capitol Hill, introducing them to legislators and state officials.

I am deeply concerned about the health and wellbeing of our children.

Utah had lackluster immunization rates for childhood immunizations such as the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) and DPT (diptheria, pertussis, whooping cough) shots—a 46.5 percent rate at the time. And just two years earlier in 1991, the Deseret News reported that the state had experienced the largest measles epidemic in fifteen years, with more than two hundred cases reported.1

Within months of the task force kickoff, Jackie stood before the news media again to announce a multi-week mobile vaccination effort in which free immunizations would be provided at Smith’s Food and Drug stores using a traveling medical van—the “Care-A-Van.”

My administration was moving quickly, as was Jackie’s coalition, hoping to reach the estimated forty thousand Utah children under age two who had not been vaccinated. “I am deeply concerned about the health and well-being of our children,” she told the press, “Less than half are immunized.” The new coalition had a much higher goal in mind— 90 percent.

Thus began regular meetings at the Mansion with the task force, reviewing numbers and brainstorming the ways they could raise awareness and boost immunization numbers upward. And as she would do time and again for multiple programs, Jackie was the immunization effort’s face and voice.

Immunizations are a nonpartisan issue, but not a controversy-free topic. There was often pushback from citizens, Jackie recalls. Some felt the vaccine push was motivated by pharmaceutical companies to increase their profits; others felt it was a government intrusion into family life. Some simply disliked the concept of vaccinations, equating it to introducing an unnecessary poison to a healthy body; or (after 1998) they suspected vaccines as the cause of subsequent medical problems like autism.

Jackie had no such reservations. All five of our own children had been regularly vaccinated, and her task force cited the overwhelming support of childhood immunization by medical professionals, including the American Medical Association and American Pediatric Association.

It was the only program of the many she spearheaded or became involved with that generated any significant negative response, mostly letters of disagreement. The task force would discuss the opposing arguments, but always held to the view that immunizations were sound science and should be encouraged. Pitches to parents became commonplace on radio and television public service announcements, with Jackie’s voice-overs and the catchphrase “Every child by two—it’s up to you.” She also promoted the effort at public appearances.

“People had strong opinions on both sides, and they would often criticize. I wanted to be sure when I was talking that I would know what I was talking about, and I tried to be involved in things that people would think were nonpartisan,” Jackie recalls.

Along with the immunization campaign, Jackie also engaged with Baby Watch, a public awareness effort to help parents monitor and seek health-provider guidance and support if their children’s mental and physical development were not meeting pediatric development markers.

Mike and Jackie in front of the Utah Governor's Mansion.

Pediatricians were the front line of that effort, talking with mothers and fathers at regular checkups of their babies. “It often started with the mother saying, ‘I think he’s supposed to be crawling by now but just scoots around on his tummy. Is that normal?’ A lot of it had to do with physical activities and then how their speech was progressing,” Jackie says.

More public service announcements were done to increase public awareness of Baby Watch as well. “We realized we’ve got to alert parents to age-appropriate activities with your child, because if they’re not saying words and talking by three years old, they’re way behind.” And there was help.

The Utah Health Department was involved with Baby Watch as well, and tag-teamed with Jackie in a similar way to the immunization effort. “People were getting to know me a little better, and the health department would say, ‘Would you help with this? We’ll find a station that will air public service announcements.’ Lots of times I would just do a voice-over. They’d have a baby or mom or dad there, and then I would do my part.”

The most basic unit in our society is family.”

One favorite moment captured in a photo image showed a smiling Jackie holding a young child during a film shoot at Hogle Zoo, one of the locations for the various public service announcements she did.

When the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) was introduced in the state several years later, new screening questions for physicians and educational materials for parents were integrated with health care insurance for children. Baby Watch and the immunization effort became complementary to CHIP.

Jackie helped kick off CHIP as well and followed up with public service announcements and public advocacy letting parents know that health insurance was available for their children, whether the parent had it themselves or not.

She was kept informed of the increasing numbers of insured youngsters and had other indicators that it was working. “One time it was seventeen thousand more children that got insurance. It began to level off as more became insured, but it really increased at first. I’d also see parents who would say, ‘Oh, I have my children on the CHIP program. That works!’”

GIFT

If childhood immunization was a prominent and ongoing agenda item on the First Lady’s schedule, an even larger commitment was the marriage

and family-focused initiative launched in my first term of office, GIFT—the Governor’s Initiative on Families Today.

GIFT was created by a grant from the legislature in 1994 and was chaired from the onset by Jackie. Its stated mission was to support and strengthen family relationships, reaching as many Utah families as possible with parenting, family relationship, and communication skills.

Jackie’s first executive assistant, Carol Bench, became director of the program, which had a fifty-member advisory committee and worked closely with multiple state agencies, such as the Department of Human Services and the Ethnic Affairs Offices of the Department of Community and Economic Development.

“Plato said, ‘The most basic unit in our society is family,’ and we would often say that too, because if you have a family that flourishes and is productive, it is more likely the husband and wife have a strong relationship,” Jackie says.

GIFT used a variety of approaches. Family conferences and marriage seminars were held in regions around the state. Media programs and commercials spread the word on television and radio to inform families of events, available resources, and tips on parenting.

The five ethnic offices operating under the Department of Community and Economic Development—Asian Affairs, Black Affairs, Hispanic Affairs, Indian Affairs, and Polynesian Affairs— took the lead on directing the specific family conferences for their own communities.

The ethnic conferences were tailored to the interests, cultures, and unique concerns of the respective minority groups and would feature expert speakers from a variety of fields. Likewise, the conference programs also highlighted each culture with dances, music, and festivities, and often celebrated the educational, sports, and leadership achievements of the children of ethnic families.

Workshops at the 1997 Polynesian Conference, for example, offered sessions on the juvenile justice system, benefits and assistance for the elderly, coping with the challenges for Polynesian youth, and educational scholarships and financial assistance. A conference for Filipinos in 1995 delved deep into cultural assimilation concerns, asking, “Where did we come from, why are we here in Utah, and where are we going?”

Jackie and I went to all of them and often gave the keynote addresses.

A larger, more encompassing conference was held annually at the Salt Palace Convention Center. Colleges and universities came on board as well, offering marriage-related classes. An elective high school course—Adult Roles and Responsibilities— was encouraged to be offered and taught at nearly one hundred high schools around the state.

Over time, positive feedback streamed in, particularly from the marriage conferences, indicating to Jackie that the effort was worthwhile. She stayed informed and involved even after leaving the state for Washington during my five years of federal service.

“It was really gratifying. People would write things about how it made a difference. The commitment to it paid off,” she says.

Utah Marriage Commission

In 1998, Jackie stepped up the effort still further, creating the Utah Marriage Commission under the auspices of GIFT—the first such state commission in the nation. The commission zeroed in specifically on marriage—helping people form and sustain healthy, enduring marriages—with a special focus on serving populations at higher risk for family instability.

Originating in the Governor’s Office, the commission was moved into the Department of Workforce Services in 2004, and in 2013 was formally put under statute and transferred to the Department of Human Services, where its work remained ongoing and supported with TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) funds.

The Marriage Commission was all Jackie’s innovation. She had the interest and saw the importance of the issue before I did. We discussed it, and she soon began working with the beginnings of a group that evolved into the Marriage Commission. Jackie was the energy force for the whole endeavor.

There were at least twenty volunteer members serving on the commission, who would meet multiple times a year. Jackie attended and was the honorary chair of that group too, for the duration of the Leavitt Administration. Melanie Reese served for many years as its executive director. “It’s still functioning very well,” Jackie says. “We’d have legislators, therapists, faith leaders, an office of education representative, and someone who oversaw the teaching.”

They would start with key focus areas, which Jackie describes as communications, responsibilities (who does what around the house), fairness, respect, and how each treats the other.

“There were about ten different areas that can really help couples, who should, before they’re married, be discussing children, in-laws—how much time, how many children or if there are going to be children. Fiscal responsibility . . . that was really important because you had couples going into marriage where one had thousands of dollars in debt, and you do not want to surprise your mate with that! So, we’d talk about all the challenges of marriage so that people could see these subjects should be addressed, and it could be done in a healthy way.”

The Adult Roles and Responsibilities high school class was regularly promoted to underscore for young adults how much there was to think about before marriage, and to convey that help was available to enrich a marriage, including counseling. In more recent years, completion of a premarital class came with an incentive—a twenty-dollar discount on marriage licenses in Utah County.

There was occasional pushback directed at the messaging behind the Marriage Commission, but not to the degree or extent of the immunization effort—and seemed to drill down more on whether the state was promoting a particular value system by promoting marriage.

“People would ask questions, ‘Are you trying to say women have to stay in marriages? What about abuse?’” Jackie recalls. “And we’d say, ‘We can help. We have resources. A person should never stay in a marriage where they feel unsafe. People had experiences where they really wanted to make sure that viewpoint was expressed. They do have strong feelings.”

It’s a simple message: read to your children.

While same-sex marriage was not lawful when the commission was created, Jackie says the program did not exclude nontraditional relationships. The purpose, she says, was to build “stronger relationships for any couple.”

Child Literacy

Along with establishing the Marriage Commission in the second term of office, child literacy became another high-profile effort for Jackie, another of those issues she considered a natural fit as a mother and former teacher. In 1999, she began her Read to Me campaign, promoting regular reading to young children.

Her involvement bolstered more than one hundred literacy programs throughout the state, reinforcing the message that parents are a child’s first teacher. It was not just a message, however. Jackie authored a book, also titled Read to Me, which was given to all newborns and their parents in Utah in 2000—approximately fifty thousand copies that year. More would follow.

She also made First Lady rounds at hospitals from time to time, visiting new mothers and their newborns and handing out a care package that included the book, a baby T-shirt, and a pamphlet suggesting ways to incorporate reading into children’s daily routines.

“It’s a simple message: read to your children,” she told the Herald Journal while visiting a hospital in Cache County. “It’s something you can do anywhere, anytime, and it isn’t an expensive pastime. It’s something that’s very important for bonding and sharing, but also it makes that foundation of language start to build.”2

Bully Pulpit

Strong families, stable marriages, and thriving children—all beneficial to society, all nonpartisan. And those are topics that can be a minefield for a state official to wade into in an official capacity if seen as moralizing or bringing religious values into the business of the state. I, as governor, had to be circumspect when it came to “values;” Jackie Leavitt had more leeway.

I pushed the envelope a bit, primarily in inaugural and state of the state speeches. For example, a theory I formulated on the “economics of goodness,” which was rolled out at some length in the 1998 State of the State speech, envisioned numerous economic and social service benefits to a state or society that fostered “the inclination of its citizens to do the right thing, voluntarily.”

The theory’s operative notion was that there is nothing more economically devastating than a growing population of people that instinctively do wrong—and no stronger economic force over the long run than people doing right.

As expressed in the speech: “Imagine the economic heft of a nation free of drug and alcohol abuse. Health care costs would plummet, worker productivity would skyrocket. Families torn apart by the abuse and financial hardship wrought by substance addiction would remain together. Welfare rolls would fall. Crime costs would shrink, and that society would build fewer prisons.”

I wanted the legislature to think of the savings— what our state, or a nation for that matter, could do with the taxpayer monies recouped from crime, welfare, and sheer human misery; the money could be reapplied to education, research, technology, investment, and much more.

I’d had memorable discussions with juvenile court officials about the correlation between family stability and crime, abuse, and at-risk children. They told me they could compile a list of people who would be in jail within the next ten years because, as youngsters, those people were already being served by every available family program. The figure was staggering: 84 percent of those in adult prison came from broken homes. who would be in jail within the next ten years because, as youngsters, those people were already being served by every available family program. The figure was staggering: 84 percent of those in adult prison came from broken homes.

Statistics always show the pattern: when the family structure breaks down and a child begins to feel unstable, home life and school life deteriorate. Destructive behaviors like substance abuse soon follow, escalating to crime and further destruction. The correlation between welfare and out-of-wedlock births was the same way.

I knew it, and Jackie understood it as well. But she could highlight, encourage, and persuade in ways that I, as the governor holding the policy and enforcement powers of the state, often could not.

Talking about the economics of goodness was on the edge. Jackie’s family initiative, GIFT, and marriage commission were a way to begin to connect public policy with those subjects—a way to connect the economics and the behavior change that needed to occur.

It’s one thing to encourage policies; it’s another thing to encourage behavior, and the first spouse can encourage behavior more comfortably than an elected governor.

On the policy side, I supported and pushed through the measures that funded the promotion of marriage, the Marriage Commission, and the many programs and resources directed at bolstering the family—to address the societal fallout that occurs when marriages and families break up.

Jackie’s consideration was to take the bully pulpit we had and use it to encourage behavior to produce a better society.

She made those behavioral connections again and again, and not just with her focused initiatives on children’s health and marriage.

She brought attention to other values as well— courage, determination, responsibility and the drive to achieve—in tangible form with a series of children’s books tied to values and events. The books were part of a series called “Worth Remembering,” and dovetailed with Jackie’s child literacy work. Subjects of the books included Utah’s statehood centennial, the tornado that ripped through Salt Lake City in 1999, and the 2002 Winter Olympics.

One of those, The Tornado Desk: A Symbol of Utah’s Spirit and Determination , told of the destruction caused by the tornado that tore a five-mile path from downtown Salt Lake City, up Capitol Hill and into Memory Grove on August 11, 1999—and how a symbolic triumph came out of it.

The tornado had uprooted nearly one hundred trees along the Capitol grounds, some of them century-old spruces or maples that were grown from saplings possibly taken from George Washington’s home.3 From the wood of the downed trees, a carpentry artisan, Chris Gochnour, husband of my communications deputy, Natalie Gochnour, skillfully fashioned a striking oval desk. When completed, the desk was moved to the Capitol, where the trees had come from, as a “legacy symbolic of the Utah spirit of hard work, cooperation, and determination, to make something good come from great difficulty.”

When tragedy happens, people can join together and help each other.

The desk has been used in every administration ever since. Jackie says the point is basic resilience. “When tragedy happens, people can join together and help each other. That is why the tornado desk was built.”

There were five such Worth Remembering books in all: U for Utah , teaching youngsters interesting facts about the state; The Tornado Desk: Light the Fire Within: Olympic Highlights; Everyday Heroes I; and Everyday Heroes II.

Even before those, however, Jackie and I teamed up to get families talking about their own family values. For the Thanksgiving holiday in 1996, the Governor’s Centennial Commission on Values produced a Keeper of the Flame brochure in which Jackie and I encouraged Utahns to take the opportunity of a family-oriented holiday to think about and discuss standard values, including honesty, respect, responsibility, unity, trust, caring, and hard work.

The brochure pictured the Keeper of the Flame painting of the boy holding a lamb in a snowstorm, a commemoration of the Okerlund family story about ten-year-old Melvin Okerlund keeping the fire burning so that his brothers looking for sheep

in the storm could find their way back. It was sent to Utah schools for students to take home to parents and hopefully jump-start value conversations in their own homes.

We took part in those conversation as a family ourselves, spending Thanksgiving in Logan at the home of Jackie’s sister, Christie Needham, with Christie’s husband Eugene, and their children. Another sister, Dixie Lou Poole, her husband Morris, and their children joined us. In all, about thirty Leavitts, Needhams, and Pooles gathered, ate turkey—and talked values.

Among the subjects we talked about were how violence and sexual promiscuity on television desensitize people. The Herald Journal wrote about our family discussion and quoted me saying: “We want to start people recognizing that there are basic behaviors that people should pass on to their children.”

There were an estimated 800,000 families in Utah at the time, I told them. “If we got eighty thousand, that would be important.” 4

Jackie remembers the effort well. The values commission put a diverse group together to help determine common values. “We found that 97 percent of all our values are the same and we have to be able to communicate whatever we say respectfully. That’s how we could take one pamphlet and pass it out to every family, because there are some things very universal and enduring.”

“There was some good success with that. Mostly, the school principals got behind it and didn’t let it just drop. They passed it out to school teachers so they could disseminate it. And it was a really good time during Thanksgiving break to have children talk to their parents about what our values are.”

At least one alternative newspaper sneered at the effort, dismissing the values discussion in a column titled, “Virtuous Mike.” But many more Utahns appreciated the effort and took part.

“It’s getting increasingly rare for elected officials to live moral lives, much less to promote them,” Scott Heiner of Kearns wrote in a letter to the Deseret News. “I doubt any other governor in the United States would have the courage to distribute similar literature promoting decency and uprightness to his citizens.”5

One woman wrote me directly, saying her family had taken part in the discussion and she appreciated the effort. She also told me that her first grader had come home from school with the brochure, excitedly telling her, “Mom, I got a message from the king.”

Talk of values did not abate. Two months after the Keeper of the Flame discussions, my second inaugural speech in January 1997 went even further.

“America’s founders,” I said, “knew from history and their own experience that without a belief in a supreme being, people will redefine morality to their convenience. Contemporary society had done so, developing a misplaced politeness which held that ’we shouldn’t talk about God because it might offend someone.’”

Next came the money line: “Heaven save the society that’s too polite to speak about God.” Letters to the editor and feedback both favorable and unfavorable poured forth.

I took it as a badge of honor.

Faux Paw

By the third term in office, Jackie had established her earlier initiatives as ongoing, resultsdriven programs, written a number of books, and was a trusted figure to Utahns due to her consistent advocacy for families and children.

Faux Paw the Techno Cat

Then, along came Faux Paw the Techno Cat—one of her most impactful and lasting successes—just as technology was revolutionizing daily life, social media and e-commerce were rapidly becoming ubiquitous, and the speed and scope of it all were outpacing the ability to confront newly burgeoning threats to privacy, identity, and safety—particularly for children.

Two things had happened somewhat simultaneously. Like many parents who are startled when a child comes across something obscene while innocently surfing the net, one of our children had happened upon pornographic images while online. Coincidentally, about the same time, we had acquired a cat for the Governor’s Office.

Heaven save the society that’s too polite to speak about God.

The cat, the moment, and the issue of Internet safety converged. Jackie was quickly attuned to the threat and quickly had an answer for it.

Faux Paw, at that point, was known simply as the “office cat.” I always liked cats and just decided our office needed one. The orange tabby—with six toes on each of its front paws—was rescued from a shelter.

The First Cat was instantly at home, roaming the halls, offices, and board rooms at will, even jumping onto the conference table during meetings to lounge or sleep, oblivious to the affairs of state. Favorite places besides the conference table were the yellow sofa in my private office and a basket high atop the upper cabinets in the break room.

The cat was brought to the office every weekday by Mary Lou Bozich, a state employee, who took him home at night and then back to work at the Capitol each weekday.

Before Jackie made him famous, the cat’s first profile was as a media critic with his own email address and a website.6 If my office wasn’t keen on a particular story or press report, the cat would be the one to send a missive.

We then concluded that if we’re going to have a First Cat, the First Cat should have some issues to address. That was the point when Jackie wanted to take on internet safety, and so Faux Paw became the “Techno Cat.” Jackie took it from there, turning the cat into a “spokesfeline” to teach internet safety to kids in an appealing way.

“The cat was the Governor’s Office’s idea, and we just saw how it caught everybody’s attention,” she says. “There were news stories about Faux Paw. And then as I talked with Mike and we had the experiences with our own children, we both agreed it was a very positive step to talk about that.”

The clever name was bestowed, and Jackie did the ground work, teaming up with groups and sponsors, envisioning the marketing approach and ultimately co-authoring six children’s books featuring the cat. She also took the effort national, enlisting other first spouses and sharing the idea with our National Governors Association counterparts.

The main message to children was simple and continuously emphasized as three “Keeps:” Keep safe your private information; Keep away from Internet strangers; Keep telling a parent or trusted adult about anything that makes you uncomfortable online. Every book and Faux Paw message underscored those three key points.

The structural underpinnings of the effort had to be solid as well. First up, Jackie founded the Internet Keep Safe Coalition—iKeepSafe—in 2005, partnering with governors, first spouses, and state attorney generals throughout the US, along with law enforcement agencies and child safety advocates. The first Faux Paw book, Faux Paw the Techno Cat: Adventures in the Internet, came along in short order.

All of it worked. School classes would seek out the cat during visits to Capitol Hill. Jackie would go to schools to promote Internet safety in classes and assemblies. Early attempts to take Faux Paw around to schools had been abandoned because the cat could get mean or hard to control in such settings. But no matter; a star was born.

The character was friendly, relatable, prone to teachable online mishaps and, above all, a compelling teaching guide to kids.

“ Faux Paw was the perfect way to talk about Internet safety with school children,” Jackie told a reporter for the Valley Journals community newspapers years later. “People would come to the office to see the cat even more than the governor. There was so much interest in the cat that it just fit he would be the mascot or the star of the books.” 7

The iKeepSafe Coalition went on to partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and picked up sponsors within Utah and far beyond. Big tech companies such as Comcast, Google, Intel, AT&T, and Facebook came on board, as did Utah foundations like the Larry H. and Gail Miller Family Foundation and the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation.

“We felt empowered to use this famous character to do something really good,” Jackie says.

Each book in the series took Faux Paw through a different online dilemma, from innocently giving out personal information and agreeing to meet a stranger to cyberbullying and stumbling upon inappropriate content.

The exuberant cat character encounters new friends, chat rooms, and online adventures or connections while frequently web-surfing, charging ahead into each new experience, warned away from looming threats by the cautious character Cursor— and saved when needed by The Governor.

In other books, the cat encounters famous people and situations, such as U.S. First Lady Laura Bush and her cat Ernie at the White House. Laura Bush provided the foreword for the second book and recorded her own voice for the audio book. In the third volume, the Olympic Games inspires the setting as the “Great Animal Olympics.”

The connection to Laura and President Bush was an easy fit. In real life, the Bushes, while still the first couple of Texas, had adopted Ernie the cat, and President Bush and I discovered our cat coincidences during a casual conversation one day. It was almost two stories in parallel: Governor Bush’s cat got lost one time and he had half of state government looking for it.

Faux Paw even teamed up once with “McGruff the Crime Dog” in an animated short film made by Brigham Young University students in 2005. All six books in the series have audiobooks, and four of the six also have animated videos.

I trusted her thoroughly, and it was an added bonus to have this delightful woman on board.

Every elementary school in Utah was given copies of four of the books. The entire series has been available free to parents on the iKeepSafe website, and all six books are in e-book form as well.

Jackie says her co-author for all of them, Sally Shill Linford, made the stories “more fun and clever,” and illustrator Adrian Ropp “was able to take a very difficult subject and add an element of fun and personality to it.”

Six books may not be the end point either for a beloved character with nine lives. “If there are new areas that we need to address, then I might write another,” Jackie recently told Valley Journals.

Remarkably, as of this writing, the rescue cat adopted in 2000 is alive and well, and still living with Mary Lou. In 2020, a picture of the twentyyear-old cat was taken at the Capitol, with Faux Paw posed lying down on the building’s steps next to one of the majestic stone lion sculptures.

First Lady Staff

First Lady business generally was conducted on specific days of the week. Jackie carved out Tuesdays and Thursdays as the “heavy load” days spent on scheduling, task force meetings, public service announcements and other work. Her staff, who worked out of the Mansion, were Judith George, Carol Bench, Carolynne Loder, and Lauralee Hill. Melanie Reese, heading up the Marriage Commission, worked out of the Department of Human Services.

Carol had been a campaign supporter who went to the Mansion with the new administration in 1993, becoming Jackie’s assistant. They planned the First Lady’s events and coordinated her schedule. The goal at the Mansion was to always make people feel welcome. After the first year in office, Carol was asked to be executive director of GIFT and the Women’s Commission.

Judith was the residence manager at the Mansion at the time of the fire and kept a log of the restoration period that followed. After Carol Bench moved on, Judith also became the assistant to the First Lady, handling double duty for a time. Carolynne Lund-Loder became the residence manager in the second term after joining the First Lady’s team shortly after the Mansion was restored and then reopened to the public.

Judith was detail-oriented with superb organizational skills, and the two had a comfortable, positive working relationship, “enhanced by Judith’s kindness and bright mind,” Jackie says. Judith went on to serve as the First Lady’s assistant for the wife of Jon Huntsman Jr., the wife of Gary Herbert, and the wife of Spencer Cox.

Carolynne was a charming, gracious individual, who kept the Mansion running smoothly from the second term through the third, Jackie says, including the busy days of the 2002 Winter Olympics when the Mansion was a hive of people, activity, and events.

Lauralee, who supported the Mansion staff but often looked after the children, was always a “sunshine person,” Jackie says. “Because we had a young family, her patience and kindness were essential. I trusted her thoroughly, and it was an added bonus to have this delightful woman on board.”

Melanie Reese became the executive director for the Marriage Commission within a couple years of its formation, coming from the State Health Department over to Jackie’s staff. “She hit the ground running,” Jackie says. “Her determination and ability to work effectively with those on the commission drove it forward.”