UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY Valley University Library Archives & Special Collections Oral History Program

Utah Women’s Walk Oral Histories Directed by Michele Welch

Interview with Melissa (Missy) Larsen by Anne Wairepo December 7, 2018

Utah Women’s Walk

TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET

Interviewee: Melissa Wilson Larsen

Interviewer: Anne Wairepo

Place of Interview: George Sutherland Archives, Fulton Library, Utah Valley University

Date of Interview: 7 December 2018

Recordist: Richard McLean

Recording Equipment: Zoom Recorder H4n Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709

Transcribed by: Kristiann Hampton

Audio Transcription Edit: Kristiann Hampton

Reference: ML = Missy Larsen (Interviewee) AW= Anne Wairepo (Interviewer) SD = Shelli Densley (Assistant Director, Utah Women’s Walk)

Brief Description of Contents:

Missy Larsen describes her experiences growing up in , Utah during the time her dad, , was the mayor. She also explains her own experiences serving in student government during her school years. Missy talks about being a young wife and mother while working as the press secretary for . She further explains how she began her own public relations company, Intrepid. Missy details how she helped Tom Smart with publicity during the search for his daughter Elizabeth Smart who was abducted from her home in 2002. She talks about her position as chief of staff to and her involvement in developing the SafeUT app, which is a crisis intervention resource for teens. She concludes the interview by talking about the joy she finds in volunteering her time to help refugees in Utah.

NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as uh and false starts and stops in conversations are not included in this transcript. Changes by interviewee are incorporated in text. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. Clarifications and additional information are footnoted.

Audio Transcription

[00:34] Beginning of interview

AW: My name is Anne Wairepo. Today is December 7, 2018, and I am at the Utah Valley University George Sutherland Archives in Orem, Utah, interviewing Missy Larsen for the purpose of the Utah Women’s Walk. Today we are going to be talking about Missy’s life and her contributions to the state of Utah. Melissa Wilson Larsen.

ML: Yes.

AW: Yes. Could you give us some background information? When and where were you born?

ML: So, born in Salt Lake City, right there on the avenues, in LDS Hospital. I think where everybody was born in the late 1960’s of Salt Lake City. (laughs) To both parents who were also natives of Salt Lake City and really going back multiple generations, so Salt Lake is my place.

AW: Tell us your dad’s name, your mom’s name, and your birthdate.

ML: My dad’s named Ted Lewis Wilson, and my mother is Kathryn Carling Wilson, and my birthdate [is] 5-17-69, which would be May 17th of 1969.

AW: Thank you. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your family life, about growing up, your siblings, birth order, how your parents were, that kind of thing.

ML: You know my parents are both incredible people in their own right and very independent in their own right as well. They met at the and shortly after had my first brother Ben. And my brother is six years older than me. And then Jenny came too. She was about a year and a half after Ben. And they were living in Switzerland at the time when they took little Benjy, which they called him, until the Benjy dog show came out, and then he changed to Ben very quickly. But little Benjy and my mom and dad went to Switzerland so my dad could teach climbing in the winter, right there in the Swiss Alps, in a little town, Leysin. And it’s right there, Swiss Alps side, and he taught climbing in the summer, and he taught skiing in the winter. So they did that until my mom was pregnant with my sister Jennifer, who goes by Jenny. And she said, “No way am I having a baby over here where the hospitals”—they were in a little tiny town, so they went back to the US [] and that’s where Jenny was born. So they had a great adventure for a little while. They drove around in a VW [Volkswagen] bus in Europe and had an incredible adventure. That tells you a little bit about my parents in the early sixties, and Jenny was born in 1965. And then I came three and a half years later, in May of 1969.

My dad said I came at the right time for their marriage. They were at a place where he was very happily teaching at Skyline—Skyline High School in Salt Lake City. He was getting his master’s at the . They spent their summers in the Grand Teton National Park

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 2 where he was a [climbing] park ranger. And they were a young adventurous couple who were in a great place in their life. And so when I came along, I was a really happy baby, and easy to take everywhere, and climbed on anybody’s lap, and in anybody’s car. It’s a good thing that I wasn’t born in current day, or I would end up in somebody else’s home. Hopefully it would be safe; I don’t know. But I had a great upbringing. My very first summer of life was in a little tiny crib. I was born in May and that summer we lived in the little tiny Jenny Lake ranger cabins in the Grand Teton National Park. These things are as tiny as they can come. Bats swarmed above me, and I was in a little tiny crib in there. My dad’s best friend, Rick Reese, used to laugh and say, “I can still see you in your little yellow jammies running around Lupine meadows.” So really that first part of life was just in a remarkable setting.

AW: Yes, such a beautiful place.

ML: And I’ll come back to that later. That’s why the tears are starting. (laughs)

AW: Yes. Now I know you have some siblings that are younger than you.

ML: Yes. So after me, six years later, we were living in Sugar House, at the time, in Salt Lake City, on 18th East. And six years later I finally got a little sister. Now, in between there, I have lots of cousins. And so I had one particular cousin that lived very close by, who was a year and a half younger than me, that really was like a sibling growing up, and we were very very close. And his mother was a second mother to me. I spent many sleepover nights on the bunk beds. And so six years later I finally got a little sister. And at the time she was born, she—it was so much fun. We were living right there in Highland Park area of Sugar House. And about a year after she was born, it was actually, I’m trying to think on timing. [In] 1969 was me; she was born in 1975. My dad was put in as mayor of Salt Lake in that same year. So it was a busy busy year. And at that same time, we ended up moving. And so about a year after she was born, we moved, but she was hit with a really really serious sickness with spinal meningitis when she was one. And it almost killed her, but she made it through it. And at the same time, there was another kid that came through with some pretty heavy mental disabilities with the same condition, and she spent about a month with spinal taps and everything else in the hospital, so you can imagine during that period, with my dad a new mayor, moving, she was very sick, and it was a crazy time of life, but we got to our new home and she was able to get better. And she is a lovely woman with three beautiful children.

And then five years after her, our crazy brother Joey came. So there were very big gaps in our family. And he was the caboose that my mom always said, “God found out I was having one more and threw five spirits in one child.” He was truly, truly that—he was an adventurous kid that was riding—we lived on a hill. When we moved, we moved to the north bench of Salt Lake City, by the block “U”, right above Shriner’s Hospital—very steep hill. And he could get on his big wheel with no clothes on and fly down the hill, and he would come right into where our grass was, and that would stop him. And I don’t know how, because later in life, when he would put his rollerblades on and rollerblade down Virginia Street, that is as steep as can be, without a helmet. I can’t believe he lived through any of these periods, but he is an incredible PhD electrical engineer who’s developed an incredible software—actually true brand new technology

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 3 that is incredible. So somehow, we all made it through childhood. I have no idea how, but we all made it through childhood and everybody—really incredible siblings and an incredible family.

[8:29]

AW: So the name of your sister that was born in 1975 was?

ML: Jessica. She went by Jessie early on, and then she has gone back to Jessica. And then Joey was Anthony Joseph Wilson, and he goes by Joey, still, as an adult.

AW: Fabulous.

ML: And he was in 1980.

AW: It was 1980, okay. You didn’t tell very much about your mom.

ML: You know, my mom is an incredible artist. And it was an incredible time when we were living in the Tetons because my dad was climbing, and my mom was painting. And it really was a very rich upbringing in the way that we really enjoyed the mountains, both from the canvas and from being on them. And so really rich beginnings of understanding, and seeing nature, and seeing light, and all of that in ways that I feel very blessed to have very talented and incredible parents.

AW: Thank you so much. Tell me where you attended school, starting with elementary school and moving on through junior high and high school.

ML: You know, we moved. I told you that we’d moved, and so it seemed that every time we moved, or something happened, a school would be at the period where it would be torn down and rebuilt. So I started elementary at Highland Park Elementary, but it was just my Kindergarten year because then they tore it down and moved it. And so then I went to first grade in the new Highland Park. And then we moved after my second grade year, and I started third grade—oh, no, I started second grade at the old Wasatch, but they were rebuilding a new Wasatch Elementary, so it was now where Roland Hall is. And my second year of third grade was the very first year in the brand new Wasatch Elementary, on our street on South Temple in Salt Lake City. And then they changed the district lines, so they had just redone Ensign Elementary up in the upper avenues on 11th Avenue, so for fourth, fifth, and sixth grade I went to Ensign. So I went to five different school buildings in elementary and moved around a lot during that time period.

And then for junior high, Bryant, and Bryant was awesome because we pulled in a lot of different diversities. It was a rare place in the, it would have been in ‘80, ‘81, and ‘82. It was a rare place because it was one of the places where there was diversity in Salt Lake City. And a lot of people who had moved in, or some of my friends were grandchildren of people who had been held in the Japanese internment camps. And a lot of Chicanos, who really were amazing mixtures of really early Utahns with some of the Mexican descent. And so it was an incredible place, and I feel really really blessed to grow up with diversity, both political diversity in my neighborhoods, the avenues was right there. The avenues have become even more diverse now.

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 4 But at the time, it was probably the only place you would even find diversity because it kind of picked up into the west side and some of those areas, that I was able to have amazingly rich diverse experience. Not so much in elementary, but in junior high and high school I was.

By the time I got to Bryant, my dad had been mayor for at least five years, and so, of course, as a child of a politician, you run for every office. And I look back now, and I think, How rude of me! I kind of just kept taking the spaces up that other people could have taken because I had this great coat tail that I could jump onto. So I was student body president of sixth grade, seventh grade president, eighth grade student body president, and then in ninth grade, I was ninth grade president. And I look back at it and I think, you know, I probably now would have taken a break just to allow somebody else to have that opportunity because it was kind of silly that I hogged it because there was a lot fun. And I got to put the candy bars in the lockers to say happy birthday to people in junior high. (laughs) And leave class early and all the things of student government in eighth grade that are so exciting that it’s hard to give up if you get that opportunity.

I had a really scary math teacher that made me not love math. She was a sergeant that seated us by algebra scores, and I was always at the back of the room, and I hated that class. But here is why I am telling this story. I went home in tears one day, and I said to my mom, “Please get me out of that class, please.” And she looked at me and said, “Nope. You have to deal with all kinds of people in this world, so you’ll stay in there.” And it was the best lesson my mom has ever taught me because I have learned how to deal with some really difficult people. And how to get through some people and then how to get through to some people. She was not anyone that you could get through to. She did not like me, and she did not like the fact that I was an officer, and that I was in the hallway sometimes during class. And she would chase me into the principal’s office and yell at me. Luckily I had a kind of a nice little place to go because the principal was a very kind man. (laughs) It was a great experience, but I look back at that.

At the same time, we were home staying some Native American students, and the first one came in and really—it was not a good fit for her. She wanted to go back home very quickly—Frida. And she ended up back in Dennehotso, Arizona very quickly, after about two months. And then Brenda came from Monticello and the Blanding area. And she was with us for about a year. And it’s interesting when I look back at that time. It was hard. It was hard as a junior high kid, who wants to be with friends, to really extend and try to include her in ways that were real. And so I look back at that time, and I think, I wasn’t a very nice host to her. She shared my room and would lock the door, and it would drive me crazy. So I just wouldn’t come home after school. I would go and find something else to do, and I had lots of options, so I ended up at my friend’s house or doing something else. I think back and I think, looking back at my own heritage—that does have a little Native American heritage—that I think I really missed an opportunity to find out more about Native American heritage and to connect with that. But, you know, when you’re twelve or thirteen years old, it’s about the last thing that you are thinking of. So if I had the opportunity again, but obviously through the adult eyes, I would have taken much better advantage of that opportunity. She has reached back out recently. Facebook is wonderful. So it’s kind of fun to watch her and her family, and she is doing great. So it’s fun to see that, but that was all during that time period. And always rich experiences.

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 5 In 1982, my dad decided to run for Senate against . Orrin had been in one term, and he had run on the—in 1976—against the candidate saying he had been in too long, which turns out to be a really funny story from this perspective when you see how long Orrin served. But it was his very first—it was after his first six years, and so he was running again in ’82. We brought out a man that—well, and prior to this, when he was mayor, he ran for the conference of—it was the mayor’s conference in Denver. This is a funny story that I tell because it tells a lot about my dad.

[16:47]

He decided after only about a year or two, of being mayor, and he was in the middle of a council [from] commission change, and there were some arguments going on in the city, and they actually went to a council, they had been a commission. They went to some different structure, and he was part of all of that. And we went to Denver for a mayor’s conference, and he decided to run for chairman of that. And so I was eight years old, and I wore my shirt, “Please vote for my Daddy.” And I got in every elevator, any one. And I got the great big clap with everyone saying, “Your daughter is the one who got you in there Ted, so you can thank her.”

But I met a really close friend on that trip, who had been working for the conference for cities and towns in DC, and he was a Rhode Island, back east, they had been living in Boston, and the big mustache, wine drinking, smoking, you know, back east guy. So different than what I had grown up around, being a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And here I was, eight years old, sitting here at the wine dinner with lots of cigarettes going, and lots of wine around the table. And my dad looked out the window, and he said, “Oh, it looks like they are setting up for the Denver marathon tomorrow. I think I would like to run that. Gary, could you watch Missy in the morning?” (laughs) I had never met this man, and he was so different. And I just sat there—and it’s really—these lessons in life—I’m really have a wide comfort zone now because I can’t remember how I felt, but I do remember by the time the marathon was over, Gary and I were best friends. And he went home to his wife, and he said, “I’ve fallen in love with a younger woman, and she is eight years old, and I can have children now.” So that next year they had their first child. And then in 1982, that was in 1980 or ’81, or earlier, it would have to be in the 70’s. That would have been 1970—I would have been only eight years old, so ’77. And my dad had only been mayor a couple of years.

And so years later, we had formed a really close relationship with Gary and his wife Peggy. And they had their first daughter in 1980, so it was just right after that. And they moved out, and he came out to by my dad’s financial chair on the senate race. So they became like family, and I ended up travelling with them to help them out. My dad lost that race and stayed in as mayor. It was—he had run in—so his races were 1974, which he went in in ’75. So the race would have been ’74, ’78, and then in ’82 he was reelected for the third time. And then he left about a year early to go to the University of Utah to become the director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics, and hand the reigns over to Palmer Depaulis, who was an excellent mayor for Salt Lake.

But part of that, Gary and Peggy, after Gary had run my dad’s campaign, and he lost, during the process—I guess I need to scoot back a little bit because in the late 60’s, right after Robert

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 6 Redford bought Sundance, he reached out to Royal Robbins of all people. Prior to Royal Robbins being a big clothing designer, it was Royal Robbins the climber, and he said to Royal, “I want to put a climbing school at Sundance. I just purchased this beautiful land up by Mount Timpanogos. And it’s just so gorgeous; I would like a climbing school. So I would like you to come out and access this for me.” And Royal said, “Well, the expert is a guy in your backyard, by the name of Ted Wilson.” And he said, “He’s in Switzerland at the time, so you’ll have to wait for him to come home, but when he comes home, you’ll want to bring him down. So in the early 70’s, my dad and went, and they looked at the different rock that was right there around Stuart Falls and right at the base of Timp. My dad hit him twice and said, “You are not starting a climbing school here. You’ll kill people the first year.” The rock is just too—it’s not a climbing rock. You get great climbing rock on the other side of the canyon, but on that [side] it’s not great climbing rock. And so he just said, “No, we are not doing it.”

And so—but that formed a really close friendship, and we had a remarkable time watching the Redford, you know, just the incredible climb of Robert Redford in the 1970’s. Going to the parties with Goldie Hawn and Jane Fonda, and being in the room when people would just come in. And just being able to see that from a child’s eyes was just a really really interesting upbringing. And it was a great time. Bob was married to Lola Van Wagenen at the time. And Gary and he were taking the Utah Film Institute and turning it into the Sundance Film Institute, which was then the beginning of the . And so I was able to see all of that in the rise. And then the , and my sister went and worked for the group and Gary and Bob. And so seeing that side of Utah was an incredible kind of picture of seeing how that side of Utah comes together. That side of the arts, with my mother’s painting, and the arts that she was doing, and then with the political side of it. Bob was very active politically at the time, [and] got involved in my dad’s senate campaign. And then at the time, , which I keep having to go back a little bit, but this is important to the story as well. My dad got into politics only because he was teaching school at Skyline and had an economics class that he taught. And Wayne Owens was running for Senate, and it was during one of the sad times of the US when Nixon was being looked at very heavily by the judicial committee. Watergate was in full swing. And Wayne Owens was on the judicial committee, so he was there going through all of that while he was running for senate. So my dad was showing up, and he was debating as Wayne Owens representative because Wayne Owens couldn’t get to the district. And so my dad was doing the debates. And finally, Jake said to my dad—Jake had been there and was running for senate again, and he said to my dad, “I don’t know why you are not running. You are doing this.” And so then when it looked like their might be an opening in that early mayor’s race, he just jumped in as a really young thirty—he was the youngest elected mayor of Salt Lake City at the age of thirty five, and my mother was thirty.

[23:57]

And to think about that young couple coming from this mountain, art place, school teacher, into becoming the mayor or Salt Lake that quickly. Incredible things though, looking back at genealogy and looking back at ancestors. And I loved one of the quotes on the UVU incredible wall down there, and that was, “You have to understand your ancestors to look forward to your posterity.” And it’s interesting how it has cycled back within my own family with my marriage. I

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 7 married the great great great great grandson of the youngest ever mayor of Salt Lake City, who was Jedidiah Grant, who was Heber J. Grant’s father. And then my dad was the youngest elected. So my children hold in their blood both of that, which is just an incredible thing I think and really shows the Salt Lake part. And with Jedidiah was Orson Pratt, who was the first person coming in, who was my dad’s great great great great grandfather. So we are just Salt Lake, you know, we are Salt Lake stock and pioneer stock. But I think, more importantly understood, looking through those lineages—and I hope my kids can connect to this and understand that with that lineage comes some responsibility to give back to what we’ve been given. And I think my mom was incredible at teaching that. She would teach us respect and responsibility. And it would come to the ear in the middle of—any time we were being not respectful or responsible. And so I had incredible upbringing, incredible experiences, really the beginning of kind of a dream life, in the way of being able to see multiple layers of stardom, and film, and all of this that interreacts with politics. And then just the good old home, how you help other people out.

And at the same time, with those early ‘80’s, the Tibetans were moving in, and my Aunt got very involved with Tibetans at the time. And so we were able to see really the first resettlement of the Tibetan community in Salt Lake, and they were very close friends. So seeing people come into Salt Lake as pioneers in the Tibetan community was so incredible, especially with what they had just been through. And so being able to kind of see multiple layers, from government and roads issues. During that time was the big flood in Salt Lake City, where my dad was over. And seeing how the Church jumped into that. It was a Sunday and [Spencer W. Kimball] called him that night and said, “We’ll have everybody you need out.” And by morning, they cancelled church for anybody that was in the region that could get over there, and they went and sand bagged all day Sunday. And it really showed, you know, that when there’s times where communities come together, even on a Sunday, and go, and they worked together, you know, to do that. And I was able to see and hear and eat that up as a child. Really really rich rich childhood.

AW: It’s clear the leadership is in your blood. And I know it now, as your friend, and watching what you do in tying communities together; It’s really exciting. Can you tell Gary and Peggy’s last name?

[27:41]

ML: Oh, yes. Gary Beer and Peggy Anderson Beer. And Peggy is deceased now. Peggy was from Boston and Gary was from Providence, Rhode Island.

AW: Thank you. And can you tell us about your high school experience?

ML: Oh, my high school experience was so much fun. Maybe too much fun. I won’t go in to how much fun. (laughs) But I just had such a great high school experience. You know, when you are raised with some diversity, and you’re at probably one of the diverse schools—the Salt Lake district was definitely the school district that had some diversity in them at the time. Not so much anymore. The Granite district is actually more diverse than Salt Lake even now, but Salt Lake was—I went to . And it was the beginning of—if you’ve ever seen the movie,

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 8 Salt Lake City Punk, that was it. My mom, as I said, was an artist, and she had a gallery, The Garden Gallery, at . And my aunt owned the ice cream parlor, and so I got to be the younger, you know, like fourteen years old, scooping ice cream with all the high school kids. And we would shut the gates at the end of the night, and we could stay for an extra hour and play Donkey Kong and mess around with each other. So I always had these incredible older friends. So when I got to high school, I just walked right in and had a ton of friends from my ice cream parlor experience. And then my aunt, at the same time, when she was younger, they lived—my mom is one of five children, she is second, and she’s got this aunt that I told you about earlier that helped raise me, and her son Roman was my soul mate from the time I was tiny. And when she was young, they lived on about 8th East and Kensington, which was close enough to go to the park. And they would go to Liberty Park almost every day when they were little. And when she was little, she was kind of a dreamer, and she would say, “I just want to be queen of Liberty Park.” Well after she did the ice cream parlor, she found that there was an opportunity to open the concessions at Liberty Park, so she was the queen of Liberty Park for thirty years. She ran all of the concessions, the rides, and that was her thing, and it was a great business for her. So that was one of my first jobs as well. I got to work at the concessions at Liberty Park with all the cool older kids that were all the officers and the fun kids. Those were the early days where—those who remember Salt Lake in the ‘70’s—it was a little tricky, you know, with all the low rider cars driving around the outside. So we were kind of in the middle, in kind of an island in the middle, and thinking, Okay, don’t walk too far out because you don’t know what you are going to find too far out, but it was a really really fun high school experience.

My mom had the Garden Gallery, where she sold her art, and she also [sold] floral. So I worked two jobs. I did ice cream parlor, and then I’d jump over and work at my mom’s and put together flower arrangements and learned how to do all of that. I was a Trolley Square rat from the time I was just tiny because she had a gallery there from the time, you know, when I was younger. As I said earlier, they were both very independent, so as my dad was running the city, my mom was running her businesses, and painting, and staying up late. And my siblings and I laugh because she had a chart, and I’m not kidding, on the fridge that said you got a star if you did not wake up mom. So we did not mess with mom in the morning. And there were days we would sneak in and say, “We need lunch money”, and she would say, “Get it out of the jar.” Half asleep. So we would go over and take a couple of bucks and go to school and eat hot lunch every day because there really was no other way.

And if I woke up late, and walked up at 10 o’clock or something because my alarm didn’t go off, she would look at me and say, “Why are you here?” And I would say, “Well, nobody woke me up.” And she would say, “I guess you will have to walk to school then.” And I would have to walk down, like a mile, to school. And I would do it. So I was very responsible so that I wouldn’t have to walk to school. So I would get myself up, breakfast, the whole thing. My sister teased her a couple of years ago and said, “You never made breakfast for us.” And she said, “I put the cereal within reaching.” (laughs) So we were so independent.

And going back to like eight years old, we were riding the bus to like Lagoon and not getting off at the right place because we were eight years old and didn’t know that it’s on the other side of Farmington that you have to get off. And my cousin and I, at eight years old, rode the bus, by ourselves, from the avenues of Salt Lake City, downtown, made the exchange, got on the bus,

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 9 got forty-five minutes, and finally said to the bus driver, “When are we going to get to Lagoon?” And he said, “Girls, we’re almost to Ogden.” And we said, “Well, how did we miss Lagoon?” And he goes, “Oh, it’s on the other side.” He said, “You are going to have to go all the way to the depot.” So, of course—no phones or anything at the time—so we went all the way to the Ogden depot, sat for an hour, and then had to go back. It took us three and a half hours to get to Lagoon. We were literally only eight years old then. The only communication we had with anybody is that we had a set time that we were going to meet families that were coming out later, like six o’clock or something. So we just went and had fun at Lagoon and found them at six and told them that we didn’t get off the bus in time. But I look back on those—and like I said, I really don’t know how I made it through alive. (laughs) Because there were experiences like that all the time where we were just finding our way places, and getting to where we needed to be, and where we wanted to be. It was a ton of fun. And I learned a lot from the elements. I’ll just say that. Remember that book that tells you to back off and let your kids learn from the world? That was mine. That was my upbringing. (laughs)

I thought about it the other day, and I thought, I had wood skis and we were skiing at Park West when my dad was mayor, and I was skiing alone, when my ski broke in half, literally, like broke. And I sat down on the hill until a ski patrol came and said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “My ski broke.” So he just put me on his back and brought me down. And I remember him asking me how much I weighed. And I weighed eighty pounds. So I must have been—I was skiing alone. I had just become a very independent person, whether it’s by blood or by learning, you know, nature, nurture. I’ve become very independent because I’ve learned that through my life. But high school was a lot of that. High school was—I got my car right when I turned sixteen, only because my sister had too many tickets, and lost her license the very day I turned sixteen. So I just, “Oh, thank you for the car!” (laughs) It was things like that that just seemed to work in my way, and just a—really great friends in high school—a lot of friends who really struggled. A lot of sadness. A lot of happiness. A lot of laughter. It was a really—like I said, Salt Lake City Punk era. A friend, Sean Fightmaster, was seen all throughout Salt Lake with a big mohawk, and he was the main person in Salt Lake City Punk, and he was my age and grew up with me. And I was at some of those underground music parties that people were playing hard core alternative, you know, underground rock. And we were riding the bus to the Maxum and dancing. I mean, it was just a really, really fun experience.

It took me to a place where I shouldn’t have gone. Because I was so independent, yet I loved people so much that I found relationships that I wouldn’t have had I had been more like I am now with religion. And I’ve become more religious throughout my life, but I’ve always been spiritual. I’ve always had a really strong spiritual base, and I’ve always had a relationship with God. And I remember, oh gosh, ten years old, with a close friend of mine, walking up our hill, which was kind of an L-shape that went up. And I looked at her, and I said to her, “I don’t understand why people get so upset about this male female thing.” At the time it would have been the ‘70’s right? So ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] and late’70’s. That whole thing that was going on there. And I just couldn’t understand it because—and this is where I think this attaches so well to this topic, is I have been so grateful to be a woman my whole life. It’s never been a negative, and so I look at it, and I think, you know, yeah, there are pressures that happen with women—and around the world it is atrocious—but the way I was raised in my independence, that my true nature was just so grateful to be a woman that had this incredible

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 10 creative source within me and a connection to a God of creativity, that I thought, you know, why are we arguing about this when there is such a richness about being a woman? And I remember having that conversation at ten years old with a friend. And so, it’s just, I’ve always known that that’s a blessing to be a woman. And I think it’s horrible when we lose sight of that, and we give ourselves up for a quick dime or for something because of necessity. So many times, it is out of necessity with a lot of the trafficking patterns, or coercion, or—I just feel horrible that so many of our sisters have lost track of that inner connection to God. And I feel like that has been something that has been very just—that came with me. And it’s something that I hope for all women that they understand how critical that—that there are things they can do that men can’t do. And there are things that they can see that men can’t see. And there are ways of looking at things that men in their very targeted ways of looking at things—and I’m talking, obviously, very delitigated, because I understand that every human being has much of this going through them, and I have some masculine things within me as well, I understand that. But that feminine piece within us is such a gathering, such a talent to be able to juggle, almost in a way, that I don’t see as much within really masculine—it seems that it is a very targeted way of getting at things. And I saw it best in a show that people may have seen with The Caveman. You know, it’s a funny, funny thing. It’s called The Cavemen and—I can’t remember the name of it. And it really talks about women being gatherers and then hunters. And you really do see that in the traditional way of men and women. I mean we have a lot of these that go through us, but so—back to high school. I was sure of who I was, I think, more than anything, during that time period. Yet, I got off of religion for a while.

It was interesting because I met—I kept going. I did go to church, but I justified a lot. And I met a man later in life that immediately—he was the most interesting man because he was a writer, that was not from Utah, and he had done a story on the Olympics, and he had talked to my dad, and he asked me a very poignant question, he said, “I talked to your dad and I know your ancestors because I’ve researched. He said, “You guys take breaks.” And I said, “Excuse me?” And he said, “Yeah, you guys take breaks.” And I started to laugh, and I said, “I did, as a teenager. You’re right.” And he said “Yeah, Orson Pratt did. And he went through my lines, and some of my ancestors took breaks for their whole lives, but it’s come back. And so some of us are religious; some aren’t, but I will say that we all have a strong core of giving back, and understanding humanity, and wanting to be giving people.

[41:05]

AW: Yeah, your whole family is like that. It’s pretty amazing. I know we have talked about important memories from your childhood already. Is there any one experience from your early beginnings that you think prepared you for your life work?

ML: I can’t; there’s not one. There are so many experiences. And I really truly believe in—that our lives are woven patterns. And so my woven pattern and with people that I love and other things, there’s been—I’ve had a lot of sadness. I’ve had a lot of death in my life, a lot of young death. The most poignant was when my cousin, my soul mate, died at twenty-four years old in an avalanche. It was a beautiful passing in that it was three days before Easter. He was in a coma for three days and died on Easter morning. It was the most incredible experience. I do miss him, but I do feel him often. One of my best friends was killed by her husband. I had another friend die in

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 11 another avalanche. Another friend died in a plane accident. A couple of friends that chose to end their own lives. A lot of sadness, of young, too early deaths. I’ve had the whole rich experience, like the—all of it. I’ve had incredible friends that are refugees. I’ve seen people belly laugh that I would have thought I could never connect with, and we’ve laughed together where we are just connecting at that core. I love laughter. One pet peeve I have is people who don’t know how to laugh. You know that about me. (laughs) I think—I couldn’t say—no, there hasn’t been one experience because life, I don’t think, can be defined by one experience. I think its community both extensively this way and almost as importantly our ancestral community and what we are leaving for our posterity. And so it’s just a big pattern. We are all a big pattern. And the more that we can move that pattern for goodness, and help, and support, and supporting our brothers and sisters, the more I feel like, at the end of it, I can say, somehow, I was helpful. And that’s all I really care about.

AW: You are just an amazing person, Missy. I really love you, and I’m glad to get to have this experience with you. I know that you have talked about some of the women in your life that mean something to you. Who did you admire most, as a woman, while you were growing up?

ML: You know, it’s interesting because I’ve never had heroes. Maybe it was because I saw Hollywood as Hollywood. I didn’t ever really define myself as wanting to be something. So it wasn’t like I ever had some long term goal of becoming another person. You know what I mean? So there were lots of people I admired, but it wasn’t ever like—I never really looked at human beings and said, Oh, I would like to be like them. Because I kind of knew, early on, that all our experiences are different. And so there were plenty of leaders that I was able to see up close. And I would have to say, now, my mother is an incredible woman. I wouldn’t have said that at twenty, because at twenty, I was dealing with—she was dealing with some depression. I was dealing with trying to unleash from some issues that were family issues. My parents divorced when I was in my thirties, and there was obviously friction to lead to that early in my twenties. The friction of my family—my aunt Marilee was an amazing influence in my life. She out of all of the siblings in the family is the most like me, in the way that she is the laugher. She is the one who would be in the tree and teasing people as they walked by, and I connected with her very closely. Peggy Beer who I talked about from back east. A very, just hilarious, back eastern, soft woman. I love her. She was such a part of my childhood. Mary Talboys, who was another—my friend’s mother who divorced in my junior high years. I was best friends with her two daughters, and I went through that with them. She was incredible and then she went on to be the administrator at the neuropsychiatric institute. [She] passed away last year of cancer. A lot of good friends. So I don’t know if it was just one. It was just incredible. I got close with who was the first Utah congresswoman. I think the year she was elected we were on a river trip with this friend, and Aunt Marilee, and my mom and their family. So I was close to the politicians. I saw the people that other people were admiring, up close, and so they were friends. They weren’t distant. TV at that time was like Million Dollar Man. You know, all that period, and so I can’t say that there was one—just incredible and strong women around me. People who were really pushing woman’s issues. My aunt was the first woman broadcaster in Salt Lake. So when I really look at my life, I think, wow, how did I get so blessed to be able to see all of this really first hand? Really be in the room.

AW: You have so many trailblazers that are the—

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 12

ML: Yeah.

AW: —first in your family. It’s just amazing. We’ve talked a little bit about people that you felt like influenced or mentored you and also about what you enjoyed doing in your teenage years. If there is anything else that you want to add in those aspects?

ML: You know, it’s been interesting because when I was younger, as I said, I knew who I was early, through those teenage years as you are really trying to figure yourself out. And I was still doing student government all through high school and that kind of stuff. I couldn’t quite tell where I would really land with jobs or anything. I couldn’t really—I kind of let my life unfold. And it’s interesting because some of my girlfriends during that time period are really successful adults, but none of them have stayed here. One is in . One is in Berlin. You know, I attached to people who really were broad thinkers. One is a producer for Conde Naste. More than anything, I’ve just been really really blessed to be around incredible people. And now, you know, all the way along, I’ve just really been blessed to be around the world’s most incredible people.

AW: It’s because you are one and when we talk about strength finders and winning others over, Missy is the most people person I have ever met in my life. And it’s fabulous to watch her, kind of, do it so naturally. So we’ve talked about a lot of the high points. But if you are comfortable sharing, what do you feel like has been one of your most significant trials, and what have you done to overcome it?

ML: I am comfortable in sharing it because I’ve talked about this from the pulpit and some other places. You know, as I go back to patterns and patterns of life, I think that the most alone we can feel is when we don’t understand those genealogical patterns and ancestral patterns and different things that are going on. There was a time in my life, at the end of high school, that I had fallen in love with someone that I shouldn’t have. He lived in my neighborhood, and I got pregnant at eighteen. And here I was, the homecoming queen and daughter of the mayor. My dad was running for governor in 1988 against Norm Bangerter. He was the front runner. He was the lead in the race until got in the race and pulled some of his votes aside with the tax initiatives that were going on. My sister was graduating from college. My brother was getting married. It was a really big year, and here I was eighteen years old, first year of college, and came home to my parents and said, “I’m pregnant.” And we thought about getting married. We were in love, you know, young stupid love. We thought about it for probably longer than we should have, a couple of months. Went and looked at places to get married, the whole thing. He left to go pick up a car, and when he went, he called me and he said, “I usually don’t listen to my spiritual promptings, but I’m not supposed to come back. You are not mine.” But he said, “I’m just trying to figure this out.” “If I don’t hear from you by Friday, we are done, and don’t call me until this baby is born, and we will decide what to do later.” And I didn’t hear from him. So I wrote him a letter and I said, “I’m doing this on my own. Just go do what you are going to do.”

Later he has come back and said, “I had to listen. It was very very strong.” And you know what? It was totally true. That was not what my life should have been with him. I shouldn’t have married him. It would have been a bad marriage. So I told my aunt first, and I told Peggy. Well,

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 13 Peggy knew like that. I walked in, and she said, you’re pregnant. And I said, “How can you look through me like that?” And she goes, “I can see it in you. I know you are.”

[53:05]

And then I went and talked to my Aunt Marilee. And then I told my sister Jenny. And I was so nervous to tell my mom. And so I sat downstairs, and I think Jenny said, “I’m going to go get mom.” She went and got my mom, and then my dad came down. He walked in and he said, “So you’re going to make me a grandpa.” And that’s who my dad is. And when I say that I am blessed, I am beyond blessed because other people who were in my current situation, at that same time, were shipped away, or hidden, or forced to give babies up for adoption. And I know many many situations that were situations just like me but were forced from their families to do something. And my dad said, “What are you going to do?” He said, “There is only one thing that I won’t agree with and that’s abortion.” He said, “But I said that too strongly, if that is what you are going to do, I love you.” How do you thank a father for saying, “Wherever you are, I’m here with you.” And I said, “I’m not aborting, and I don’t know exactly what I’m doing here.”

But, you now, here I am, eighteen years old, first year at University of Utah. I had just pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma. I called them and said, “I won’t be going active. I’m having a baby.” And I chose to keep her. And pushing forward, and going to church, at the ward where, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s congregation where the boy—where the biological father’s family was. I just showed up, and it was hard for them, and it was hard for me. I had an incredible bishop, and he pulled me in.1 I was a sassy eighteen year old that did not—as I told you, very independent. I looked at him, and actually he didn’t pull me in quite yet. I had an incredible spiritual experience where—I need to go back a summer. This relationship was not a positive relationship prior to me getting pregnant, and I needed to loosen myself up, and I needed to get away from it, so I had done so in the spring of my senior year. And my dad had planned to take us to the top of the Grand Teton that summer for the first time. He had been up it over sixty something times at that point. I think now, he has been to the top of that thing almost eighty times, seventy something times. But at the time, he and his best friend Rick wanted to take me, and Jenny, and Rick’s daughter Paige and climb the Grand Teton. And Jenny and I never really got along very well in high school. We were three and a half years apart. She was also—started high school early. She started high school early, so she was four years ahead of me. We were never in the same building as a high schooler, and she had her own life going and we were very different just philosophically. And so we just didn’t really connect, and we fought over clothes and stupid things. And so that was the first year that—that summer it was August of 1987, and I was going through a repentance period, and I remember writing a poem that I am happy to send it to you because it matters here.2 And it was—I don’t want—I’ll have to send it to you, but we climbed the Grand Teton that August, and it was the most spiritual experience of my life. In that I had written about it earlier, and everything that I wrote came to fruition. And even as we went up and through Lupine Meadows, and here this beautiful range that I was raised around. Because after my dad was done being a ranger, we’d go up every summer, and we’d camp, and we spent a lot of time at Jenny Lake with the bears and the—so I knew the area very well, but I had never

1. A bishop is the ecclesiastical leader of a Latter-day Saint congregation or ward. 2. The poem that Missy references is inserted at the end of the interview.

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 14 climbed. So as Jenny and I waited for Rick to bring Paige up, we sat on the friction pitch of the Grand Teton, which is in a very exposed area of the Grand Teton. And clouds at eye level started coming in. We are not roped in at the time because we are just sitting there, and it’s enough of a pitch that you can sit on it, but it doesn’t feel that way. We were sitting there alone, and these clouds came in, and it felt like the twilight zone, and we looked at each other and at the very same time we said, “This feels like the twilight zone.” And we just both—it just came out of our—and it was the strangest—it was our first shared spiritual experience ever, and after that trip we were friends and we connected. We are very different, but we really have a deep love for each other and a deep respect for each other. And we got to the top of the summit, and it was exhausting. The storms started to come in, and my dad and Rick, I’ve never seen them so nervous. They were like, “Come on, hurry. Get over here. We’ve got to get down.” It rained and hailed on us, and the whole thing on our way down. And as I got to the base of that mountain, there was the most gorgeous rainbow over the Teton Valley. And it was probably the first time that I knew that God knew me, and in a way that I knew that he had answered me. And I felt like I was almost there and then something happened in the fall where I ended up one night with this boyfriend and I got pregnant. So I had really already gone through a really strong repentance process, although I had fallen back one night.

And I remember being on my knees and saying, Wow, I really cannot control my own life. I promise that my life is yours. And it was that moment that miracle after miracle was just showered down on me, and I cannot deny that. I met Sam when Abbi was one and a half. We have just had an incredible life. He has been an incredible father to her. We have three more children. And it’s been—it was the defining of when I truly gave my life over to God was right through that period. And I’ve never looked back at that. And I remember one time, realizing, and it’s good that I know this because that gap between when you make changes to find the people to hang out with in this world, when you’ve been hanging out with partiers. And you have to shift and find people who are like minded and want to hang with you when the parties aren’t rolling on. That was a lonely space. And so I have felt loneliness. I have felt all of that, but incredible friends came because I made it through there with the help of a Savior that—so that was probably my most defining moment of my life that really has made my life—sometimes I don’t even know what is going on around me. I just kind of think, I’m just sitting here, and these incredible things are going on around me.

AW: So profound. Thank you so much for sharing that. Because I know you, I wrote a few questions. And so maybe we can just spend a little bit of time going on those. The first one was that you have been recognized for starting the Utah Refugee Connection [formerly Utah Refugee Coalition] and doing much to help those in difficult circumstances. Why have you invested so much in the refugees of Utah, and what would you encourage the average Utah woman to do to help foreigners in their communities?

[1:02:53]

ML: You know, it always starts with the one. It’s hard—I think I’m going to answer that backwards. First, I’m going to talk about first what people can do. Because Gerald Brown who ran the Refugee Services office at the state of Utah when we formed this, he is still involved, but he is

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 15 not the director anymore. Wonderful, wonderful man, but he has always said, “If you want to know what you can do to for a refugee, befriend a refugee.” Such incredible stories coming from these people. And things that our generations of first world problems cannot even fathom what these people have lived through. Killings in front of them and persecutions beyond—just humanities ugliest spaces. And it always starts with the one. And if we can find somebody to befriend, and we allow God to take our path from that, we are led in the places we should do, and that is what happened to me.

I was, at the time— I’ll need to back up a little bit into my adult life. Sam and I had Abbi right at marriage, and obviously that brings with it all sorts of craziness, and trying to figure everything out, and I was working at the time, and I was working for [United States Congressman] Bill Orton as press secretary, so I was crazy busy at work. I had a young daughter, and my husband was finishing school. And I was driving to Provo, and we had an easy place to live in Bountiful, so I was driving from Bountiful to Provo. And he would take Abbi to an all-day school, and we were just trying to make it work. It was a hard period. And then right after that, some lost pregnancies, and finally we get our beautiful boy. At that time, I had left Orton’s office. I was at a marketing company, and I just thought, there has got to be a better way. So I was really led, and I go back to really just allowing God to lead it. It’s these incredible things, but you’ve got to trust it. I had this feeling, you can do this, jump off and do it on your own. And so I started a little PR [Public Relations] firm out of my house in Sugar House, in this tiny little room, right after Tanner was —Tanner was about six months when I left full time employment. And I had lost a couple of pregnancies before him, and then had him. So I was mom in the morning and staying up late doing public relations work and trying to get this all going and started to succeed. I picked up Sundance as a client and had a lot of food and beverage. You know, I had one of the first tech companies that was doing search engine optimization prior to even Netscape. So way before google. It was called Blue Squirrel. It was so exciting because I got to go tell media that this really cool tool would go throughout the internet and find things. And you know you look back at that—and you know my fax was going all night through my computer. My husband finally said, “Get this thing out of our house! I can’t live with it anymore.” And amazingly I had a friend who at that time had a shared office suite that he said, I will trade you PR work for an organization, the boys ranch he was involved with and funding, for the office space. So I had free office space, and it came with secretarial help. So incredibly I was able to pull my Intrepid group out.

And then I wanted to have more children, and so through this period I kept saying, you know what, it will work out, it will work out. And I kept losing pregnancies. Finally, I got my number three. And she came in 2000, but I had brought in a partner in 1998 as an exit strategy for me to get out of my PR because it was successful, and I couldn’t just drop it. And so I had been coming up with an exit strategy. Well she was born in 2000 and she was such an easy baby that I just took her to work. And so I had staff then of about seven or eight in the office and this great little baby area, and I would take her to work every day. And I planned to leave and so we brought in another partner that could support him—tried actually two; one stuck and one didn’t. And then the very next year was the Olympics, and so I had to stay.

We did a number of—we did the Olympic medal unveiling for O. C. Tanner. We had a couple of Olympic clients, and so we were really busy through the Olympics. And then in 2002 I was

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 16 ready to take off and go be a mom. And then in June of 2002, Elizabeth Smart was taken out of her house, and that was my neighborhood. I was there the very first morning where I was at the police station coming up with the flier. I developed the first flier; we got that out. Helping with media and all of this, and then Tom came to me and said, “You might have a problem. One of your family members is being looked at as a suspect.” And I had had a cousin that had had some drug charges and for some reason where Brian David Mitchel had gone, he had gone passed my aunt’s house, right by ours, and so the dog scent went right next to their house because he had some drug convictions, they attached him to it, and so he had just gone to Lake Powell with my daughter. And I trusted him because, I mean, I’ve known him since birth, but there is something inside of you, when the police are telling you that this may have been the problem, and so for the next week I couldn’t touch the case because I kept trying to figure out strategically how we position this if this is family. We love the Smarts; they were in our neighborhood. But my firm kept showing up because Mike Grass, my [business] partner’s dad, Ray Grass, worked with Tom at the . And so Tom got so tired, I think you’ll remember through that time period with about six days with no sleep that he started to go a little crazy and right in front of the international and national media, he looked at my partner Mike Grass and said, “Michael with answer your questions,” and he walked off stage. And Mike had to jump up and start answering the questions. Well my cousin was cleared very quickly. He had a polygraph and completely passed that, and so I jumped back in and was doing all of the behind the scenes, writing the letter to the kidnapper, doing all the really intense work behind the scenes with a family building a house, and I got pregnant with my fourth.

And so when Elizabeth was found, I was eight months pregnant with my baby, with my fourth child, and I felt done. I felt that. We’re done; she’s home. And the minute—I was there with the family when—I actually went and picked up her youngest brother William and brought him to the police station. We did the press conference, and the next day I turned off my phone, and went home, and said, “I’m done.” And we were building, and so, four children, and I was exhausted. But the neighborhood had a really horribly placed, very high risk sex offender home, that they were trying to put in the middle of a cul-de-sac, and it was horrible placement. That pulled me back out of retirement. I started in getting involved in some neighborhood things and then started free lancing again with PR with some of my old clients.

And then our church, our Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s stake, did a project called Army of Angels. And it was connected with two people in our stake that were very involved with the refugees. And they handed me a piece of paper, me and my husband Sam, and they had several kids on it from our local congregation, and they said, this is the family. And I looked at it, and I said, “I’m in.” And there were seven children, and the first one was Omar, in trouble, expelled from school, and then it went through the other kids, and then an address. And I said, “What am I supposed to do with this?” And they said, “Go visit them.” And I said, “Well, how do I know if they are home?” And the answer was, “They are always home.” And so here I was, showing up at their house, in a new Audi. And I pull up, and I’m on the west side of Salt Lake, and all these little African kids come running out of the house, “Who sent you? Who sent you?” And I’m saying, “Amy.” And they are looking at me. I don’t really know Amy. “Paul?” “Oh, yeah, maybe.” And you know, right as I pulled up, the mom was walking out with an empty gas can trying to eek out just a few drops into her gas tank. And I looked at my husband and I said, “Why don’t you take her and fill up her tank.”

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 17

And we came back, Omar was a really, really shy sixth grader who had lived in the camps until he was nine. They had only been in the states for about two years. They were first flown in to Florida, and they migrated here because of family. And she had had two children die in Kenya in the camps. From what I understand, one from starvation, and—she can’t speak English, and so everything is through her kids to me. So I don’t know the exact details, but there were two babies that died in Kenya, and Omar was in between them. And then the next one Hawla, and then Isha and then Mohammad, and then JK, and then Ombara, and Ombara is a baby. And we have pictures of my Tanner, who at the time was maybe twelve or thirteen, carrying Ombara through the peace gardens that were right by their house. And it was the beginning of—I am still very very close with that family. And it’s been—I’ve been through lots of sad times with them. Omar, who was like a son, was deported last year, and it has been horrendous. And trying to help him from afar.

But as I said, it always starts with the one. And so as I got to know their family, I realized, okay, of anybody in Salt Lake, I know where to go to get things done. I’ve had a dad whose been a mayor. I live in an area with resources—everybody around me, attorneys, doctors, such rich resources around me. I know how to use public transit, you know, all of this. If I can’t figure out how to solve some of these problems, what are they doing? They don’t have the language skills; they don’t have the cultural skills. They don’t even speak English. They are trying their hardest. They don’t have the money. They don’t have anything that they—what are they doing?

And so at the time, amazing timing on this—and this is where I am saying, God really sets all of this up—is right at the same time, Mayor [Peter] Corroon, of Salt Lake County and Governor John Huntsman, had just done a massive assessment in gaps in refugee services within the state of Utah. They came back with fifty full pages of single lined gaps. And so they put together, first a refugee services office, and they brought in one of the best in the country, Gerald Brown, out of back east. He had been in refugee services for thirty years and worked in [Washington] DC and other places. And they also formed a state commission under the department of community and culture under Palmer DePaulis. Who—Palmer had taken over as mayor for my dad. I went to Palmer, and I said, “Wow, my eyes have been opened. How can I help?” He said, “Well, they are just finally getting the refugee services office formed. We have this commission. I would like you to come be on the commission and be on my steering committee, and I need you to form a non-profit to be able to fund some of the things we need to do at the state.” And he said, “Meet Lew Miller. He is your co-founder.” And it was amazing because Lew and I were about as opposite as could be. Lew is a quiet attorney, and I am a boisterous networker. And the two of us co-founded that in 2009 with a guy from his office and a couple of other people. We started pulling together—they hired Zee Xiao at the county. We started to do projects and figure out what to do.

The original mission was to put together an organization where public, and private, and non- public resources, and figure out how to get everybody working. So originally it was the Utah Refugee Coalition. We very quickly saw that the refugee services world is very tricky, and a lot of it is international. A lot of it is funded internationally with the refugee resettlement projects, and programs, and companies, and organizations like The International Rescue Committee and the Catholic Community Services. Those are funded nationally or internationally. There’s

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 18 funding that comes in through the federal government, through the state department. Gerald was trying to figure out with humanitarian how to do English classes, so I was part of that whole discussion. I was the only volunteer in the room. And I didn’t want to give up my volunteerism because I felt like I was giving up power if I was paid for it. So for six years I worked my butt off trying to figure out how to get the spaghetti off the wall and get it into a bowl. And how do we work together, and how do we do this, and we just tried to fill gaps and find ways of doing things. And it was hard, hard work, and I knew in every step of that if I took money, I was giving up my power. I knew that I could say things that people who were paid couldn’t say because there were motives that they had to support the organizations that they worked for, or things like that. So I was the only one that was free of all that. So amazingly they listened to me, and I was able to do quite a bit from there. And Lew was amazing to work with. And so we listened, and we worked, and we went to fill gaps, and we kept moving forward.

And we realized very early on that we weren’t doing justice to the local giving community. We didn’t know how to connect with that. Nobody did. The refugee world didn’t, because it is a different kind of giving in Utah. A lot of people are giving to church settings, and the hard thing is that when you are giving to church, you don’t have a lot of time to give to outside interests. And so when you are working on your neighborhood, and your own children, and your neighborhood children, to make sure that they are great adults, there is not a lot else to give. And when you are giving ten percent of your income to an organization that you really trust, and you are giving it to God, and to put in a church setting, you don’t have a lot more to give. And so as much as we are a giving community, we are not great at figuring out how to give beyond, or really go serve beyond, or how to really go serve beyond. And so the whole time it was, how do we not just reinvent the wheel? How do we get into that structure? Because there are groups that want real projects, other than just kind of twiddling their thumbs or going and pushing in someone’s garbage can. There are groups of kids, and there are groups of parents, and there are groups of women, and there’s huge resources that want to do something, and we are not allowing that to happen. So we morphed into fill the gap of the Utah Refugee Connection, which now we have really found a way for a way for the predominant religion’s community, that is already giving a lot, to give. And that is a lot of them are just resources directly through the organizations that are already working well, right to the refugees. So we work a lot with Granite School District. We work with the different agencies: Asian Association of Utah that has the refugee services center. We work with the Refugee Services office, and all of those who are working with the refugee and the refugee communities, then we figure out how to get them what they need. Whether it is backpacks at the top of the school—and the greatest thing is—whether it’s a project do as a that can take that and drop it, or it’s getting on Amazon and sending a child seat or something.3 We figured out how to get people resources to refugees. So that is what it has morphed into, but a lot of gap filling along the way. In between there we looked at actually—for a little while we were the Utah Refugee Center. We started the conversations with USU for the Meadowbrook facility that now is the refugee education center at the department of workforce services runs. But once they saw that that could happen, the state went in there, which was great, and then we took over another gap. So we have always just kind

3. The Relief Society is the official women’s organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 19 of been nimble and filled gaps, and we have a really great space right now and just launched a great new website that has incredible connections. So it’s serverefugees.org.

[1:21:40]

AW: Wow. What a wonderful thing.

ML: Yeah, it’s been amazing.

AW: It’s hard to believe that you had time to do some of these other things.

ML: That’s where I say—I have this kind of thing that I truly have seen in my own life that when you give, you get back. And whether that is through a church donation, or whether that is through just giving, things come back for giving all the time. I also believe this with time. I think time is very relative. And I think when we give, God expands our time. Because there are certain times that I have no idea how it came together, but it happens. I mean sometimes—I mean I can’t even write it down quickly enough. I never write anything down because it’s like miracles every day. And simple things, but big things. It’s like I know I have to be on the University campus to be able to get something to somebody that I have promised, but also have to be at a meeting, and then I’ve also got something to drop off, and all of a sudden somebody will call me and say, “Can we meet closer to the University because I’m going to be there.” And it’s like it just comes together, and I’m able to do everything in a two hour span that I thought there was no way I was going to get to. So my life is reorganized by God, a lot. And I really, really am grateful for that. I sometimes look and go, I don’t know, because my time at the AG’s [Attorney General] office—it was a whirlwind every day, but yet, when my kids needed me to be at school, my schedule cleared. Or when my kids were needing something, I was there. There was an afternoon that was open. And there was never afternoons that were open in that job. So I’ve just found that after that one decision, okay, my life is yours, is so fulfilling because all I have to do sometimes is show up and greet somebody, and they say, “I’ve been looking for you on this thing.” And we do a quick exchange and it takes away having to form a meeting and going through the processes. And now because I know enough people, I am able to say, “Okay, the Legos are here. Go meet here, you know, this, I can get out of here.” And so it allows me now, from an older structure, now that I’ve kind of been in the middle of everything for as long as I have, to now, kind of, help mentor others to be able to be those people in those spaces and kind of get out of the weeds. And I’m trying harder and harder to get out of the weeds. Yet again, it’s funny, people will say, “What is your plan in five years?” And I’m like, “Oh, I never have plans.”

AW: I don’t need to plan that, right? It will happen.

ML: Yeah, I don’t have plans. Who knows? We are hoping.

AW: Let’s talk about the AG’s office. Serving as the chief of staff to the Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, is one of the highlights of your professional career. Describe something about it that you loved and something about it that you hated. What was your most significant contribution in that role? How did you balance the other aspects of your life with such a demanding job, which we

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 20 just heard a little bit about? And what advice do you have for other women in these kinds of intense situations?

[1:25:19]

ML: It’s a very, very intense space, to put it mildly. You are dealing with people’s lives, their freedoms, the public’s life, the public’s freedom. The way we all get along, civility, non-civility. I mean, it’s just where the rubber meets the road. So many things happen in the court rooms. And now because Congress isn’t solving things, or people are not willing to—you know, more and more divisive we become, the more and more things come to the courts because it is the only place that anybody feels like there is a fair assessment of really like constitutional rights or other things. And so what used to just be normal to just be able to get along, we have found that we need, you know, three people, one person, seven people, nine people, telling us how to live our lives. And it’s a very intense space. And people at really intense places in their lives are met at the AG’s office.

My very, very first day, it came at me. As I said, I was freelancing at home. I was working from home. I had been working on the Utah Refugee Coalition, and I ran for office in 2012. I decided that I was really heavily involved in the refugee stuff, and I thought, you know, how can I really do something about this? And I thought, the county is the space where they are doing a lot of the social services. Jenny, my sister, had been a council woman. She was not at the time. She had chosen not to rerun for a six year seat. She was an at large seat, and then decided to go into private. She worked for Moran Eye Center for six years before she—well for four years before she came back into the council. She is back on it now. But, so, I knew county government; I knew governments; I knew what city governments do and what county governments do. And I saw the social services that the counties do. So I decided to run for the fourth district county council seat. I had been married twenty-five years, and I thought I’m not going to come out as a Wilson; that would be weird. I’ve been Missy Larsen for the last twenty-five years. But Larsen is not a political name, and Wilson is. And so I kept my name, and I came out as a Republican, and I let my hair go grey that year. So it was the big coming out year, 2012. Here I am, grey, Larsen, and a Republican. (laughs) And my dad said, “I knew it. Go ahead. I’m fine.” Back to how my dad is. Jenny said, “Good luck with all of your gun wackos.” (laughs) Shows you how Jenny is. My mom took it to heart and was so offended that I would not stand up for the party that had been the flagship women’s rights party, right? All through these years. Which has gone a little too far, which is the reason I am trying to go, “Let’s have these conversations in the middle instead of so extreme. And can we be moderate republicans? Can we be moderate democrats? Can we find each other in the middle?” If I really look at how I see solutions, even with refugee solutions, they’re through self-sufficiency patterns, which is more on the republican side.

I truly believe that the giving is through bridges. I think we have to have public services for support, but they should be bridges to self-sufficiency. They should not be ways that we are tying people up. And I feel like the republican party mentality on that was a place that I needed to go. And there were things that I had dealt with in pregnancy that I could not imagine aborting, and it was an issue that I could not show up as a pro-choice woman in the democratic party. There is no way I could have raised money. People didn’t trust me. I was a Wilson; I was running as a

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 21 republican. Who was I? And I lost that race that year to Sam Granato, who was very very well known for his yummy sandwiches. He had a really cool name. He was a public giver and a service oriented guy, so he was fine. But the best thing happened in that I do think that everyone should run for office at one point in their life, because you’ll see how wacky it is, but the other thing is that I met Sean Reyes on the path, and we got along because he is just a real guy. He was a ton of fun. So we would be at community events, and he would be playing volleyball with the constituents and people who were there from the community, and was nowhere to be seen. The signs would be on the ground, and I kept thinking, what is the deal with this? And so Sean and I connected and then when the problems happened at the state with the Swallow Shurtleff case, and John Swallow stepped in, and Governor Herbert was faced with appointing an AG for just a short time until an election could be held, he looked at two incredible men. And I don’t know who else he talked to, but he talked to Brian Tarbet, who had been the agent general for the state of Utah for twelve years, an incredible man, a full general. I mean he truly is a general. And he was working at the AG’s office at the time, and they looked at him and he talked to Sean. And Sean is an incredible leader and has incredible—just an incredible human being. And he really really was the right person at that time to be the AG. And so the Governor saw that and the Governor put him in, but Sean begged Brian Tarbet to stay in the office, and so Brian did. Brain stayed in the office as the civil deputy. And so I was able to work with both of them. I will say that the best thing about working in the AG’s office is the caliber of incredible leaders that you work with and incredible minds. Never before in my life have I been in rooms that “drinking from a fire hose” is an understatement. To be able to hear the legal arguments and understand that it’s not emotional when you are talking about these things. It is truly down to where the law is written, how they are written, is it in alignment with the law, you know, is it— which rights are more important? You know, is this—all of that.

So the very first day I came in, I went into my office. I had checked in on the Friday, kind of met the office staff, came in, got my office. It was eight thirty in the morning. I sat down, put my computer up, and here I am in this front capitol office. I mean, what an amazing place to work in the capitol of Utah. I was there and Brian Tarbet was in the office next to me. And at nine o’clock on my very first day, he walked out and he said, the US Supreme Court just came through with a stay on same sex marriage. And I looked at him—okay, remember, I had not been in this world. I looked at him and said, “And what are we supposed to do?” He looked at me and he said, “Seventeen hundred people don’t know if they are married or not.” They had been married in that time period. In the days in between the time period the district court had told them they could marry, and the US Supreme Court came through with a stay. And we, by ten o’clock, had cameras going in the state boardroom with Sean in front of the cameras. Brand new AG. He had only been in office for three days. It was January 6th, and there had been a weekend, and he had been put in December 30 of 2013. And there he is standing in front of all of the reporters who are just, “What does this mean?” And he is there saying, “We are accessing, but wherever your life is, freeze it if you were married in that time period. We don’t know where this is going. “And we truly didn’t. It wasn’t an emotional thing. It wasn’t like Sean Reyes wanted to be mean, or the state of Utah wanted to be mean to people. It wasn’t an emotional thing. The state of Utah—the voters had put in a very strong constitutional amendment, Amendment 3, and in that it said that—and the crazy thing about the whole case was that to become a state, we had to declare one man and one woman because of polygamy. So that was in our original constitution, and then added on to it was, “And no others shall be recognized.” Now the

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 22 recognition was the big thing that they were looking at because of recognition of rights. So when you take away all recognition of rights, which are end of life rights, everything else with loving couples, even if they are not married, or if it is a civil union, you have no other recognition. So you have to fight for a right, and so they fought for marriage.

So you are looking at this, and we are in a courtroom, and here you are standing—and I knew nothing. I was like, Oh, my word. So I hadn’t worked with Sean either. I just knew him from the campaign trail. So here he was in front of the cameras, and it’s national. I mean they have flown—by ten o’clock you had every sort of—they were figuring out—AP [] was there getting things out nationally because we were the first state that this was done in. So this was a national thing. Luckily I had had my experience with the Elizabeth Smart case that was international, so the media stuff didn’t scare me, but I didn’t know the issues. And so Sean stood there, and I watched—all I could do was watch for him to get flustered. And the minute he got flustered, I just said, “We are done.” And I just cut him off, and I said, “Go back in the room right now.” And I just cut him off. And he looked at me and said, “What did you do?” And I said, “You were going nowhere after that. All we could say was that.” And so for the next, oh gosh, it went on, it was twenty attorneys in the room day after day really trying to understand the laws on this, pulling different cases, looking at different—you know, and the case went forward. And so I saw every bit of that same sex—I was the only, I think, non-attorney inside the bench of the tenth circuit court arguments, when we argued in the tenth circuit.

I need to write about it. I haven’t written about it yet. I just haven’t had the time to. But that was my first day. And I kept thinking, this will plateau, this will plateau. That very first month, we started to put together the formations of what turned into the SafeUT app. And I would say out of everything I did, that is what I am most proud of. I helped redesign that—where it was going. I got my friend Mary, who I talked about at UNI [University Neuropsychiatric Institute]. [We] talked about what the right thing was to do with it. We had a program that had been done in other states on my desk, and I said, “That’s not the right program for Utah. We are going to rewrite this.” So we pulled together a commission for a year. We talked about how to do it. Pam Hayes, who was with the Utah Bullying Coalition introduced an app. [She] said kids are using apps. So we started going that direction, and it is remarkable to now turn to any of the stories about the sadness of this issue and that to be on there as a resource for everybody. And then that first year we were also looking at putting in a three digit crisis number and fell short on that with some politics in Salt Lake County. Yet now the president, just about two months ago, signed nationally into law that the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] is reestablishing a three digit number for suicide—well for crisis prevention. Very similar to physical emergencies with 911, this will be a mental health emergency line nationwide. And I was there at the beginning and that’s really exciting. And so that one was probably the one that I would say was the most amazing—what was the most amazing thing about working there—the people.

[1:38:16]

AW: Fantastic. Love that. Maybe at some point you want to talk about the anti-trafficking piece that—

ML: Yes. Okay, so the antitrafficking piece was very interesting because when we had first come in, I kept getting questions. I came in actually as chief communications officer, but the person that

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 23 Sean had charted for the chief of staff was incredible at some of the constitutional legal. And because the cases were so heavy at the time, with the same sex marriage case, and some of the other things that were going on, he was very directed towards the legal end of things, and I ended up fulfilling the chief of staff role even from the very beginning, but then changed titles in the process.

But as I came in, I was—communications dealt with all of the media, and they kept asking me, What’s Sean—what is his thing? We didn’t know, and I was very honest. I said, “We don’t know. We are going to see how this unfolds. Well, it did, very very quickly, because by February of 2014, Sean had been in office two months, and it was the legislative session, and there were some things going on with the legislature. And with this issue of human trafficking and looking at the secure strike force with the AG’s office, which is an amazing task force that they have there. They are very good at what they do, like, the best; they are just incredible guys and women. With the secure strike force, you have investigations and prosecutions that overlap, and they work with each other to do investigations and prosecutions at the same time, so that they can contain crime much quicker. The AG uses that model, but a lot of states don’t. And there’s arguments both sides for it, but it works very well in very high risk crime areas like human trafficking.

And so the very first in February, Sean received a tip through a friend from the immigration community. It was actually those that were nervous to come forward because of immigration status. And we promised that we would take all tips anonymously, and we had worked with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] on that to make sure that we could get the information without people being worried about being deported. So the deportation was a really, really scary thing for people, so they wouldn’t come forward on massive crimes. And this particular tip that we received—this particular man that we received a tip on—had been arrested by the FBI and deported six times and was back in the state of Utah from El Salvador. We knew that he was part of MS-13.4 We had heard that he had killed his own mother. This man was a bad bad man, and we had heard that there were multiple victims, all young boys between the ages of nine and eighteen who this man had coerced with trafficking drugs into junior highs, some into older elementary grades, and in to high schools. And not only was he doing that, but he was drugging them and abusing them in horrible horrible ways. And as we started to unfold this, and our investigators started to unfold this, we saw all of this trafficking piece of this, and it was—so when we finally arrested him, he was so—oh, the video of him getting arrested—he was just sure he was getting deported and he said he would come right back. I mean, how many times had this happened? This look on his face was just maddening as he is being arrested. He is just a frumpy guy. It was just a strange thing. His name was Victor Rax. Well, Victor was put in jail here, and Sean Reyes was smart enough to say, “We are not deporting him. We’ll prosecute him here, and we’ll prosecute him in our office.” So he put our best prosecutors on it. And we started working with our investigators and because he was selling on school land, there were certain ways that we could hold him longer, to be able to get the witnesses secure enough to come forward to be able

4. Mara Salvatrucha, popularly known as MS-13, is an international criminal gang that originated in Los Angeles, California, in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Originally, the gang was set up to protect Salvadoran immigrants from other gangs in the Los Angeles area.

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 24 to talk. And when they knew that he couldn’t get out, and that he wasn’t being deported, they started coming out of the walls.

We had forty-five witnesses that were willing to speak, and we think at least twenty more that didn’t want to be on record. And it had been going on for years, and the charges were horrible. And so we saw it first hand in Utah coming in from El Salvador. When Victor Rax saw that we had him, he killed himself in jail. It left us with a problem with a lot of victims that weren’t able to tell their story through the court system, which is sometimes very needed to free themselves of the emotional distress. And so our prosecutor was awesome. He went to the judge and he said, “Can we have a couple of court days for these people to come in and tell their stories to you?” And the judge was amazing. He said, “Yeah.” We had an amazing healing process for these people to come in, and tell their story, and see that there were other people that had the same stories and the same atrocious acts that had been thrown on them.

And that was in February, the very first year that we were there, during the same sex marriage case, during massive office bottom-out because of, you know, five hundred people in the AG’s office that were left by two attorney’s general that were being indicted. And so you had a complete wreck of an office that had not been managed well. So you can imagine the stress level there. And so that is why I say I don’t know how it was done other than through God because there is no way you can do that level of stress and still—for some reason I don’t go home with it. I am able to get in my car at the end of the day, and I don’t carry heaviness when I go home. And it’s such a gift because I couldn’t have done all this. And then just mean spirited things on, you know, you hate gay people and all of this stuff. It wasn’t an emotional thing; I had many friends that were gay. Actually one of my closest closet friends that I had been on the board with Family Promise, who had run Family Promise for years, was on the other side of the parenting case with us, the Barraza Case was there son.5 And so I called Tony, and I said, “Love you.” They ended up getting parental rights on it, so it worked out for him.

But there’s spaces where I am luckily not really an emotionally based person on that kind of thing. I am spiritually emotional, but I’m not structurally emotional on all of this. I can get my head above it, which is a gift. I don’t know, because I don’t know how I could have done it without it. It’s heavy heavy stuff. And that was just the heavy stuff going on. There’s layers and layers of other things that are going on at the same time: your legislative funding, all of the office, and also the CJC’s, which is directed by a really incredible director that has been there for years, so I didn’t have to do much, but I got to see the good work they are doing across the state with abused children. And working with DCFS [Division of Children and Family Services]— amazingly during that same time, we were also involved in something that ’s administration had gotten the office involved with in with the polygamist community. And so I was dealing heavily with the polygamist communities at the time. So take every crazy issue you could have taken, polygamy, same sex marriage, human trafficking, the ICAC [Internet Crimes against Children] unit, internet crimes against children units. And so I was seeing what was going on there. Take every heavy issue in the world, and I had it every day on my desk. I don’t

5. Family Promise is an organization that works with faith communities to provide emergency housing assistance for families throughout Salt Lake county.

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 25 know, but the people that I worked with were amazing. And man, I saw God’s hand in things every single day.

AW: I think that is the answer to my question. This one about your personality, because you are so vibrant and fun, and yet you have worked with some of the most heavy topics that anybody has to ever have to deal with, you know. And I have always wondered what keeps you laughing through these difficulties. And I think your testimony is a strong part of that, and then I think God lifts some of the sorrow from you after.

[1:47:13]

ML: I think that’s exactly what it is. I don’t know, because I never would have thought that I could handle all of that.

AW: Right.

ML: You know what I mean? I would have never—I wouldn’t have ever put myself there. I certainly wouldn’t have dreamed of that, right? I mean it came out of the blue. Sean called me at ten o’clock at night and said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Do you want to come join my administration?” I mean, I didn’t even ask for it. It was, “Here, come join.” I had no idea what that meant. He just asked me to jump into a—I don’t know what—with him. And the two of us are like soul mates. I mean, I just adore the man. I think he is an incredible incredible leader. His diversity that just runs through his veins are—he is everything I am not in so many ways, but we are really good together. We laugh because we say, well, it’s the wonder twins power activate thing.

And what happened was, those jobs are—the chief of staff jobs, because they are so heavy, you burn out. You just do. And had I not had young kids at home, I probably could have done it later, but the was most important things are my kids. And when I didn’t see it plateauing off and that it just continues—I mean there are so many—I could go in story after story after story of intense things where you would say, “What?” I mean movie scripts after movie scripts of just what was going on within that office, and different cases, and the things that we were dealing with. If it didn’t impact my children, I could have stayed longer, but I finally had to say to Sean, “I love you, and I love this work, but not more than my family, and I need to go home.” And so I, kind of, the Lord opened up an exit strategy, and I ended up leaving. And I still am very close with him, and am still working very closely with that office, and doing a lot with them and helping with a lot of these same issues. I’m still—human trafficking with you, the healthcare initiatives—I am still involved with state’s attorney’s general, and refugees, and a lot of these issues. I am very much—I’m still at the AG’s office, you know, quite often just with different meetings and supporting the great work that they are doing there, incredible work is going on, and I love what they are doing, but just couldn’t do it full time anymore.

AW: Well, knowing the things that you have balanced in your life, and thinking about, you know, what you grew up with politically and your heritage, and all of those kind of things, I wondered if you had ever considered running for office? Let’s just suppose that you were the governor of Utah, what would be the first change that you would make?

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 26

ML: You know, I always—never know how to answer that question because right now in my life, I don’t have it in me right now to run. But I also still have children in my house. I still have [children]—they are my priority. The governor’s job is really heavy and mostly for scheduling. It’s days, and nights, and heavy issues that are coming through. The heaviness of the crime and that kind of stuff goes through the AG’s office, but the public awareness and where you have to be, and understanding economies, and all of that, it’s a really heavy job. So I don’t see myself running because right now inside of me, there is not an inclination to do so. I can never say never because I know who I am. I know what the Lord is setting me up for, so I don’t know. I am really happy where I am right now. I don’t know.

I have no idea, but if I were the governor, you know, we have an incredibly run state. The economy is incredible. There are pockets around the state that are a little forgotten, and one of the things I think I would do, almost immediately, is look at every agency and see how they are integrating with true statewide growth. For instance, the governor’s office of economic development. There are pockets in our state that have rich heritage around certain types of fundamental industry. Price was around the coal. There are things that we can do in Price that we can’t do other places because of the type of people that are there, or that want to stay there, that are being pushed out, are people of that kind of industry.

So I would make a very clear reach out—you know the way that companies recruit—to heavily recruit per regions and utilize some of the resources that we have. As much as I found out about the negative parts of the polygamy communities down in Hilldale and Arizona City, I also found that they are extremely rich in some of these—like sewing and some of these incredible things— that if a company that had something that they were building in cloth or things like that, utilized some of the resources that are down there, you would find a pretty cheap labor force down there. I mean, still even if you paid well, they would be paid better than what is happening down there, and you could supplement with some really good talent down there.

So I have been able to see the state in different ways that I do think that we are forgetting some of these areas and just kind of allowing people to kind of figure it out for themselves. Where I do think, like I’ve done with everything else in my life, I would probably, if somebody asked, “who are you?” I am most anything a connector. And so it’s—I would find those—how we connect for those regions that can really support the people that want to stay. And I think doTERRA is amazing at this. I mean, we are finding these people around the world that want to stay in their home areas. They want to farm, and we are giving them an opportunity to farm in their regions. And so I’m seeing it through a world scope with a doTERRA business model of how when people are able to have jobs, jobs change everything because jobs make it so you have self respect. They make it so that you are bringing a paycheck home to the family, so you are not getting into family fights. It changes everything. Instead of the gift, gift gift, because that just takes away human dignity. So, you know, through the job resource area is—but finding ways for people to stay where they want to stay. Why do people have to leave, if they don’t want to leave a region? And let’s find how we really reach into industry because there is enough— there is an industry for all of it. We are seeing that with the doTERRA industries, and wow, people are loving the product. I love the product. But it’s amazing what it does to these little communities

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 27 around the world, and the kids are able to be educated and stay in their regions. And maybe some of them will leave, but they will leave better, and they will leave because they want to, instead of having to.

AW: It’s such a better model, isn’t it? Well, I’ll vote for you. I definitely want you to run someday. I think you would be fabulous. I know it may come to you. Are there any words of wisdom or maxims that you have lived your life by, that you would like to be shared? And along with that, what would you want to be remembered for? And what advice do you have for Utah women?

ML: First and foremost, I want to be remembered as an active, participating mom. I feel like if we neglect our own kids, for a bigger pursuit, why? Because really it is all about family. I feel like if parents—and it kills me that there are so many children that don’t have this, and I think it is the biggest sadness of our world—is kids that don’t have successful patterns to transfer from parent to child. And so the programing that’s developed around the world to support kids, or to support people as they grow from kids to adults, gosh, if we could just figure out a way to connect mentors with kids, and do it with success patterns, that is where I see really the magic happening because it is close to home. It’s just—each person needs somebody that can help them to develop success patterns. And if I can’t do that with my old children, then what am I doing broadening out? And obviously we have to live, right? I mean, we have to make money. We have to be able to sustain ourselves. We have to be able to do these things, and so I tell students, “You can do both.” If you have your priorities straight, you can do both. You can go and do lots of good in the world and still make a living. And it’s hard to see sometimes, and so the only thing I always come back to is, trust your source and trust your gut, and trust it enough to make a leap. Make those leaps of faith because there have been many times in my life, that had I not made that leap of faith, had I not made that leap of faith from a company to start my own company. Had I not made the leap of faith to go and start an organization. Had I not made the leap of faith to get married, right? Or the leap of faith to go into unchartered water and have a baby out of wedlock, not knowing where that would go. Or to go the hard route sometimes. Because sometimes the hard route is actually the easier route. And I have found that, time and time again, that if I’ll just do the work, the gifts that are given back for making the right decision, lighten the load. And my source is Christ and God, but I’m not going to discount another source of where—my very very close friend Alan Bachman, who is one of my closest interfaith friends, and worked with me at the AG’s office, and I adore him, and he’s in his final, you know, he is becoming a rabbi. He’s taught me so much from Judaism, you know, and so I understand that faith traditions are different for many people and wherever that source is, grasp to it, follow it. You can’t do this alone.

AW: Yeah.

ML: And then trust other people to be there with you. And help other people to be there with you. And it goes both ways. So that is what I would say. It is about source and others.

AW: I love that Miss. Thank you for sharing that. I am just going to ask you if there is anything else in our life that you still see as something you would like to accomplish? And if there are any additional things you would want recorded?

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 28 ML: I would like to write. I would like to find enough time in my life to [write]—writing is difficult. The kind of writing I like doing is difficult because I write a lot for work. I can just pop that out, but true writing, getting into this stuff, takes energy. It takes clarity. It takes, getting rid of other environmental things around you and actually doing it, and I haven’t had that. I haven’t had that time. I’ve prayed for that time before, and I get the answer back, “Not now. Maybe sometime.” And I would also like—my mom is a painter, and I love just the meditation of painting. I’d love to find my painting bone. I’ve done a lot of graphic design in my life and things like that, but I would like to paint. For posterity—I just, more than anything, want to really, really support my kids and their kids. And I hope—and this is my biggest—I don’t know, it’s funny. I don’t have fear of a lot of things. My only fear is not being accessible, available, and in a space to be able to really get to know my grandkids and to be part of their lives because I feel like that is really the one thing that I can give. And so that would be the only thing. I just really look forward to this next era in life, to be able to experience my kids as adults and see them flourish and see what they do with life as human beings. And I’m seeing that. I have a thirty year old, who has had an incredible health crisis, again and again, but yet she is amazing. And my second is just finishing his education. We will see what he ends up doing. He is single now, so we will see where that goes. And then two beautiful children—

AW: He served in Japan.

ML: He served in Japan. I am just really excited to see.

AW: And then your two girls.

ML: My two girls, yeah, eighteen and fifteen. We are at that fun brink where they are still home, but they are fun at home. I love having them home, and so I’m excited for this next year. And so I have to keep myself very alert and making sure that I don’t put the outside world above my family. And I have had to readjust numerous times in my life, like I did with the AG’s office, or like I did with when I was working, but the Lord helped open those doors, so I am certain it will be fine, but I just don’t want to miss it.

AW: Well I think you are an amazing person, and so blessed with these beautiful children that were blessed with you and Sam as good parents. Thinking about your heritage and what’s to come after, isn’t it exciting?

ML: It’s really exciting.

AW: It’s really exciting. What a pleasure it has been to talk with you.

ML: Thank you.

SD: Thank you Missy. This was wonderful. Thank you so much.

[2:02:45] End of interview

Utah Women’s Walk: Missy Larsen 29 The following poem was written by Missy Larsen as referenced in the interview.

I don’t want to write. I want to scream. Scream from the tips of my toes. Until I crack and can scream no longer. Until all my energy is drained. And I fall because my legs are worn tired. Then, I can start all over again. Be more selective of what I let inside. What I learn. Stay away from the things I have to unlearn later. To understand only those things that will benefit me. I want to sit on a high peak and cry. Cry my energy… Into a river that will reach the ponds below. After all the tears have dripped out of my body, I want the heavens to open And shake droplets of higher energy Into my soul. I want to dance Out the confusion I have pulled into my mind By knowing too much to ignore But not enough to let go or act. I will start again, As a child With nothing inside, But knowledge. Now, I must learn how to use it. - July 27, 1987

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