“Of course, if you’d rather we didn’t check with your last employer …”

January/February 1984

“Very good. Any other references besides your mother?”

May 1952

“Just because everybody says you’re a character,
Mr. Johnson, we don’t consider them ‘character references.’”

January/February 1978

“I see in your resume that from 1961 to 1982 you were at work. Can you be a little more specific?”

January/February 1984

“Let’s see, I’ve had one week’s experience at Hagley and Company, two days at Farson Brothers, half an hour at Beglo Company …”

December 1953

“I haven’t worked for 20 years. I can’t wait to get back behind a typewriter.”

July/August 2000

Cartoons: Job Interviews The Saturday Evening Post

Photo courtesy of Marina Marchese.

In 1999 Marina Marchese quit her job as creative designer for a small giftware company in New York City and settled into a more rustic routine at her little red cottage in Weston, Connecticut. Tired of commuting into the city and passionate about her new backyard beekeeping hobby, Marina decided to start a business based on her bees and the delicious honey they produced. With only limited savings, the artistic and free-spirited Marina worked odd jobs in catering and dog sitting to help pay the bills while she tended her first few hives.

Marina, then 37, was still a “new-bee,” as novice beekeepers are known. But she wanted to be the queen bee, so she studied every aspect of this industrious insect, from its fascinating social life inside the hive to the many varieties of honey it was capable of producing. She attended meetings at local beekeeper clubs and even traveled to England and Italy where honey tasting is on par with wine tasting.

It’s safe to say that artisanal beekeepers like Marina go to extremes, but the honey they produce is a far cry from the kind that you buy in a plastic-molded teddy bear bottle. Artisanal honey making emphasizes quality and character over quantity and consistency. To produce the finest honey, beekeepers become micromanagers of their honeybees, scouting optimal field locations, knowing when nectar flow begins, and selecting the best ways to extract honey when the season is done.

Beekeeping may seem like a dramatic departure from a career in design, but the passion and creativity Marina brought to her business were nothing new. Growing up, she knew she wanted to create art, but spent her childhood rebelling against parents who didn’t support her artistic nature. “I was this creative kid growing up in a corporate family,” Marina says. “My mother was always pushing me to go to college to study business. Creativity just wasn’t nurtured, and it certainly wasn’t treasured.

“As a kid I always doodled—and I always got in trouble. I doodled in cookbooks, on the walls, in the closet, and behind doors where my parents wouldn’t see it. I remember soaking in the tub as my grandma scrubbed ink off my legs because I doodled all over my body.”

A series of seemingly unconnected events brought Marina to beekeeping. In the late 1990s a neighbor saw her illustrations of bee characters—including a sassy queen bee—and invited Marina to check out his backyard hive of Italian honeybees. Unsure at first, Marina put on the beekeeper’s hat and veil and watched as her neighbor opened the hives. “I was mesmerized,” she says. “The bees were so well-behaved, but I kept thinking they were going to swarm and sting. That day I tasted fresh honey and was smitten.”

Honey sommelier Marina educates others about this culinary delight. Photo Courtesy of Marina Marchese.

She bought her first hive through mail order and tended bees on weekends. During the week she took the train to her job in the city. Some days she would cry because she was so unhappy with her job and the commute. One day Marina pulled a paperback novel, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, from the borrowing rack at the train station. She took this accidental find as a sign that beekeeping was going to play a much larger role in her life. From that day forward she took greater interest in her hobby, joining bee clubs, reading books, and attending workshops.

Within two years honey from her first hive was ready for harvesting. Rather than give her honey away, as many backyard beekeepers do, Marina designed bottles with beautiful labels and prepared to sell her small first batch of 12 bottles at the local farmer’s market. She encountered some resistance from shoppers who weren’t quite sold on the idea of paying premium prices for something that has traditionally been a commodity.

“I pretty much starved that first winter,” she says. “I told myself, ‘I am talented, and I am going to survive.’ When I get interested in something, I go into it deeply. I had only scratched the surface of this amazing creature and wanted to know more.”

To survive she expanded her product line, selling beeswax lip balm and honey-based skin care products such as handmade soaps, facial scrubs, and foot rubs. And, taking full advantage of the bee’s bounty, Marina started to feed her artistic soul by painting with heated beeswax in a technique known as encaustic painting. About five years ago—and a full seven years after starting her business—Marina reached a financial milestone. She no longer had to work odd jobs to help pay her bills. Today Marina’s company, Red Bee Apiary, harvests approximately 100 gallons of honey per year, and is a favorite of regional chefs and gourmands alike. Demand is greater than supply, so she works with local beekeepers who meet her exacting criteria for artisanal honey to boost production.

Like a convert to a new religion, Marina wants others to share her passion for artisanal honey. She travels around the country talking to beekeeper groups and sponsors tastings at her apiary. She even wrote a book, Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper, which encompasses not just her personal story but the history of beekeeping, bee behavior, tips for would-be backyard beekeepers, and the many ways honey can be used in food and healthy living. “My business brings together everything I’ve worked for in my life,” says Marina. “When you’re doing something you’re meant to do, everything just falls into place.”

Queen Bee The Saturday Evening Post

From her book, Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper, these twice-baked cookies are a great treat at any time of the year. We recommend serving them with a cup of black tea or cappuccino—especially while there’s a chill in the air.

Note that the recipe calls for clover honey, which is honey obtained from bees that primarily eat clover flowers, and this can be purchased at your local grocer.

Honey Almond Biscotti The Saturday Evening Post

Always an overachiever with a head for numbers and a personality for people, Chuck let his career goals guide him for years. But eventually he began to feel the strain. As the banking industry underwent a wave of mergers and acquisitions, Chuck’s work was taking him to city after city throughout the Midwest where he would close and consolidate branches, handing out pink slips to long-time employees and fielding tough questions from nervous customers.

After twenty years in the corporate world, Chuck recognized that he had stopped enjoying his work. Making matters worse, a new crop of MBA-toting graduates were entering the field, solving management problems by crunching numbers rather than by building and nurturing relationships. With two young children, Chuck and Peggy realized that they were missing out on milestones and together time. They yearned to find a place to call their “forever home”—a place where they could become part of a community and watch their kids grow up in a stable environment. “It was time for a change,” he says.

In 2001, Chuck, then 45, called it quits.

Today, he is a middle school math teacher in St. Marys, Georgia, a sleepy little coastal town at the southeastern-most tip of Georgia. The job pays just a little more than $40,000 per year. Chuck is also a city councilman and president of the St. Marys Middle School Parent Teacher Student Organization. The couple that moved 12 times in the first 20 years of marriage has now held on to the same zip code for a decade—and they couldn’t be happier.

And, to cap it all off, Chuck was recently named St. Marys Middle School “Teacher of the Year.”

Chuck Trader and his wife Peggy discovered their “forever home” after taking a six-week road trip in a rented motor home along the East Coast. Photo Courtesy Chuck Trader.

Clearly this was the right move for Chuck and his family, but finding the perfect place to plant the family’s roots took some time. The search for their “forever home” began in early 2000 when Chuck and Peggy took the kids on a six-week road trip in a rented motor home along the East Coast. Using statistics and a personal wish-list as their guide, they stopped in 12 towns that met their exacting criteria: good schools, low crime, proximity to major metropolitan areas, coastal location, low cost of living, friendly feel, and other must-haves. St. Marys satisfied everything on their list. After spending the day in town talking to the mayor and other locals and seeing the sights, they were sold on this small waterfront community of approximately 14,000.

“We said, ‘Is this real?’ We went away for a few days and came back, just to be sure. And it felt good to be back,” Chuck says.

The long trip was the beginning of a new era, one in which family time trumped work time. By 2001, the Traders had settled in St. Marys for good, throwing themselves into community life and rehabbing a pre-Civil War-era home. Chuck initially worked for the city of St. Marys as finance director and interim city manager, and he became deeply involved in his children’s school.

It was while becoming active in his children’s school that Chuck realized he had found his true calling: teaching. After earning a provisional certificate by passing a slew of tests, he was hired as a middle school mathematics instructor. Within a year, he enrolled in online courses at Grand Canyon University to earn his Masters in Secondary Education and professional certification. “It was quite grueling,” recalls Chuck, who worked full time while finishing the two-year program in 14 months. But the payoff was well worth the sacrifice. “There is no other profession where you have the opportunity to favorably affect the outcomes and impact the lives of so many young adults,” says Chuck. “Teaching truly is an opportunity to invest in the future of our society.”

Chuck’s life today bears little resemblance to his former corporate existence. He quickly rattles off an eclectic list of the differences: more family time, reduced expenses, deeper relationships, increased understanding of the challenges faced by lower socioeconomic families, shorter lunches, and longer time on his feet, to name only a few.

In the classroom Chuck is able to make lesson plans real by drawing upon his experience in business. And he captivates students by sharing jaw-dropping stories from his past—such as tales of $100 million deals he helped close. “When you’re working with a kid who is struggling and working very hard, it’s very fulfilling to see the smile and satisfaction when they suddenly ‘get it.’ It’s what makes teaching great,” says Chuck.

The former businessman has “a knack for reaching students others deem unreachable,” says Michael Wooden, St. Marys Middle School principal. “Each time I visited Mr. Trader’s classroom, all of his students were engaged in his lesson. Not only is he an extremely knowledgeable mathematics teacher, he is equally skilled at reaching students at whatever academic level they come to him.”

Chuck’s students scored a 96 percent pass rate on the mathematics portion of the most recent statewide student assessment. “That is a very difficult achievement for any teacher,” notes Wooden. “Not to mention one who has a large group of students who are considered ‘at risk.’”

Chuck and Peggy Trader have much to be thankful for these days as they live their version of the American Dream. Their children, plucked from private school when the family moved to St. Marys, have grown up in a more diverse public school environment and learned to do more with less as their parents scaled back. Yet, they are thriving. Evan, 19, is a sophomore at Georgia Tech, majoring in aeronautical engineering and economics. Hannah, 16, is on her school’s gymnastics team and a member of the National Beta Club, an organization that promotes academic achievement, character, service, and leadership among elementary and secondary school students.

“Moving here was at my insistence,” Peggy says. “It was an effort to focus on the family and not let the corporate job rule our lives anymore. We’ve refocused our priorities on having a more stable family life.”

Chuck Trader today is a walking Chamber of Commerce for St. Marys, extolling its coastal location, beautiful landscape, friendly folks, and strong educational system. He looks back on his corporate past without regret. There is pride in all that he achieved, but he well understands that teaching is what he was truly meant to do. “My days are long and can be challenging, but I feel a deep sense of accomplishment as I see students grow and develop into young adults,” he says. “Each and every day I make a difference in the life of a child. And that has tremendous value beyond the income provided.”

From Financier to Teacher (and Happiness) The Saturday Evening Post