Utah Women's Walk Oral Histories Directed by Michele Welch

UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY Utah Valley University Library George Sutherland 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 Salt Lake City, Utah during the time her dad, Ted Wilson, 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 Bill Orton. 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 Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes 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 University of Utah 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 [United States] 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 University of Washington. 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.

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