Larue Barnes: Selling ‘cool stuff’

While Christi Schmidt runs her shops at Nolan River Mall, her husband, Steve, travels across the nation, selling their jewelry and fashion accessories at conventions, trade shows and fairs.

“Steve’s recognized many places we travel,” she said. “When our family visited Disney World, I heard somebody say, ‘There’s the purse guy!’

“He’s also a human map. He knows his way around any city.”

Her brown eyes flashed as she smiled. She is very much at home in her shop — the business world has been familiar to her since childhood.

“My dad, Terry Lay, owned a perfume and cosmetic business,” she said. “The World Trade Center in Dallas was a part of my childhood. I was in and out of the place often, and participated in fashion shows there.

“I remember my dad trading cosmetic samples for sample dresses. All the way through college I never had to buy cosmetics or perfume. I took it for granted, I guess.”

She is outgoing by nature and said that her Papa, Leon Gibbs, who is the father of her mother, Carole, is a people person, too.

“Papa’s the famous person in our family tree. He played Western swing music for Bob Wills. At the beginning of ‘Faded Love,’ it’s his fiddle you hear. He had a huge country music dance hall named MB Corral in Wichita Falls. ‘Playing from the Heart,’ a book about him, was published by the Midwestern University Press in 2003.

“He’s still going strong. His stage name was Leon Miller, with his Miller Brothers Band. They were the main band in the movie, the ‘Last Picture Show,’ filmed in Archer City.

“I loved hearing him tell about how he had his own dressing room on the movie set. Years later, when they made the sequel, ‘Texasville,’ he grinned and said he wasn’t famous anymore. He had to sleep in his car.

“He had a big dance hall in Roswell, N.M., named Scotty’s. I remember my mother going with me to visit him when I was in the fifth grade. Our return flight was delayed, and Mother was really concerned because I was scheduled to be in a fashion show at the Apparel Mart. I wasn’t upset at all because I knew they would wait until I got there.”

She laughed and said, “Of course, they didn’t.”

Christi Lay was born in Dallas in 1962.

Before her younger brother, Jeff, was born, the family lived in an apartment complex across from Elvis Presley’s Graceland in Memphis.

“I was only two or three years old. I don’t know if I remember it or it just seems like I do because I have been told the story so often, but one Christmas Eve I woke up frightened because I heard all these motorcycles revving up their engines outside my window. Elvis had given his all band members motorcycles, and they were riding them in the middle of the night.”

Christi attended L. D. Bell High School in Bedford.

She was a member of the drill team, and was a student council officer. She was also in the National Honor Society and wanted to be a teacher, her goal since childhood.

As a freshman at Stephen F. Austin University in 1980, she met Stephen Schmidt.

“I was a preacher’s kid,” he said. “We lived many places when I was a child, while my father, Clifford, served as a Lutheran minister. At Victoria, our lives changed direction. My dad decided to enter the real estate market in Austin, where his three brothers worked.”

Steve graduated from Anderson High School in Austin in 1980. It wasn’t easy to work football into his work schedule.

“Our dad became the No. 1 real estate guy in Austin,” Stephen said. “My brother, Mark, and I got many spin-off jobs from that. We painted houses, mowed lawns, maintained property. If someone moved out in the middle of the night and called my dad to have the property fixed up for resale, that was our job. For us to play football, that meant we cleaned offices and model homes at 4 a.m. before school and worked again after football practice at night. Our sister, Cindy, lucked out on those jobs.”

He admits that from those experiences he learned how to work hard and to not waste time.

Steve and Christi dated all four years while university students, marrying in November 1985, after their graduation.

“My Papa played ‘A Maiden’s Prayer’ on the fiddle at our wedding reception. He got more attention than I did.”

Christi became a cosmetics and perfume sales representative for her father, running a route.

Steve started working for the family company as well, after selling Austin real estate until the market ebbed.

The couple attended their first fair in 1986, selling jewelry.

Christi said she’s always been an organizer and a list maker, so she took along envelopes labeled with the amounts of their utility bills.

At the end of the show they were excited to find all of them filled, with money left over for a Mexican dinner.

“But we forgot that we needed money to restock,” Steve said with a smile.

Their jobs allowed him to work as a vendor on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at area malls. She went with him.

They lived in Round Rock and alternated weekends at Brownwood, Palestine, Ardmore, Okla., Marshall, Irving Mall and Cleburne.

“One reason we came here was because of the volume of Cleburne’s J. C. Penny cosmetic sales,” Christi said. “Martha Mahurin, buyer, and Vernie Stringer, store manager, were very helpful to me when I called on them.”

For six months Christi and Steve made their weekend rounds.

“We’d pile up our stuff in our car, and bring along our dog,” she said. “I remember being sick one time and sleeping under a display table in Palestine. Every time we came to Cleburne, we did well. They let us stay, and we signed a year’s contract in 1986 for a kiosk out in the middle of the mall. Soon, we had a kid’s store and two kiosks.

“We had a store at North Hills Mall with family and a kiosk at Hulen Mall. We had moved to Arlington, and we were not going to move to Cleburne.”

They changed their minds in 1991. Their first child, Tedi, had been born, and they were ready to settle down.

“We sold our store in Ardmore to a friend, Donna Force, and the one in Brownwood to Steve’s mother, Donna. North Hills Mall closed, leaving our business here in Cleburne.”

On Steve’s first “errand day” here in Cleburne, he was ready to devote most of the entire day as he had done in the city.

“I was through in an hour! We loved Cleburne!” he said.

The Schmidts bought the 110-year-old Hopkins home on Buffalo Street.

“We’ve totally renovated it and love it,” Steve said. “The basement had a kitchen with a dumb waiter that lifted the food upstairs. There were two other full kitchens, as the house included two apartments by the time we bought it. We call it a happy house. It has had only four property owners in all those years.”

“I faithfully feed the cats that have been reproducing in the alley behind the house for generations.” Christi said. “I am allergic to cats — I don’t like cats at all — but I don’t want to break Mary May’s [Hopkins] family traditions of caring for the kitties.”

Steve estimates he drives 80,000 miles a year, pulling a trailer behind his van.

She has learned to be independent as he travels, supporting their children in sports and school activities.

Tedi is a senior at Cleburne High School and will attend Texas A&M University in the fall. Their son, Gibb, 11, attends Coleman Elementary.

Christi will be Heritage Assembly president in 2010-11 and has been active in planning the Black and White Gala for years. She has a close circle of friends that they call “The Pinkies.”

“Well, that started one day years ago when we were playing tennis and my friends admired my pink tennis shoes. They all wanted a pair, too, so we became the Pinkies.”

Despite close friends, some crises do happen that make her wish for Steve while he’s on the road.

“The dog died while he was gone. There was a mouse loose in the house.”

Steve interrupted.

“Don’t forget about the glass you had turned upside down in the middle of the living room that I found one time when I came home.”

Christi grinned.

“Oh yes. That was the spider.”

She has no desire to be a teacher anymore. She says she is fulfilled. She loves serving the public and enjoys good relationships with workers, most of them, teenagers.

“They often work again for me when they are home from college at Christmas. Lisa Hamilton is my right-hand girl, and I depend on Donna, my mother-in-law, with her boutique experience.”

She’s also close enough to Granbury to enjoy spending time with her mother, Carole, and her stepfather, Jerry Reed. Her father is deceased.

Christi and Steve were each eager to praise the professionalism of the other.

“Steve is forming an organization of vendors,” Christi said proudly. “They are looking to him for leadership. He knows what customers want. He comes in, sets up, relates well to everybody, keeps the merchandise reasonably priced, sells it, cleans up after himself, and hits the road again.”

“I’ve worked hard my entire life,” Steve said. “My late father was a great salesman.”

He paused.

“But everything I’ve learned about selling, I’ve learned from Christi.”



www.stevescoolstuff.com



Larue Barnes may be reached at laruebarnes@yahoo.com.