Half a lifetime ago, a young Kelli Campbell put Iola in her rearview mirror.
“See ya later, Iola. I’m outta here,” she said as she packed up and moved to Tulsa for college.
The same went for Preston Frazell whose sights were on seeing the world as a professional angler.
In March, the young couple moved to Iola, ready to call it home.
“It’s amazing how much your perspective changes as you get older,” said Kelli. “And once you have children, your priorities change too.”
The two married in 2013 and have a son, Fisher, 20 months.
It was that little bundle of joy that turned their lives upside-down.
“We always had a 10-year plan to move back to Iola,” said Preston. But the desire to have their son enjoy the benefits of close-knit family and a community with good values changed their timetable.
“It hit us, what were we waiting on?” said Kelli. “Why were we waiting to move back?”
In short order, Preston got the OK to do his sales job from Iola and Kelli landed a job with
ONLY OF course it wasn’t that easy.
And both would agree it required their being away for an extended period of time that made coming home seem like a positive step.
For Preston, realizing he would never make it to the pro level of competitive fishing changed his life course.
“I made it as far as ‘Triple A,’” he said, comparing it to minor league baseball. The time and expense required to travel to competitions took a toll. “It’s a cut-throat market,” he said. “And when the recession hit in 2008, sponsorships were harder to come by.”
He gave it one more year, until in early 2009 he took a sales position with Hi-Lo Industries in Chanute.
“I thought that was my move back to Southeast Kansas,” he said.
Instead, after only three months it was the launching pad to a sales position in Tulsa with Canfield & Joseph, a foundry and distributorship of cast metals for industries such as Humboldt’s B&W Trailer Hitches and Monarch Cement.
Preston’s sales territory is from Southeast Kansas to Tulsa, Ark City to the Panhandle of Oklahoma.
“I’m home most nights,” he said, though not as frequently as when Tulsa was home. “Sixty percent of my customers are in the Tulsa area,” he said. His biggest clients are in the aerospace industry, “for blades and wings. Anything that involves surface preparation.”
The stress of sales is high, he admits, but compliments his competitive nature.
He also appreciates the steady paycheck.
“When fishing, I never knew what I would bring home from one month to the next. The stress level of knowing you are going to make X amount compared to not knowing if you’ll make anything is so different. Especially when you have a family.”
These experiences have helped prepare Preston for a return home.
“I never really wanted to be away, but at the same time, I knew my opportunities would be limited here. I thought what in God’s grace am I going to do here?”
Never one for a formal education, Preston strayed from the family tradition of education — his father, several uncles and grandfather were all teachers or administrators.
Preston also felt his world here was small.
“When you live in a small town and you don’t go out and see the world, you kind of become close-minded to different people. I know I did. I used to be very judgmental of people different from me. Being away opens your mind to the differences in society.
“At the same time, you get an appreciation of where you came from,” and quickly adds, “I’m still a hick from the sticks.”
Preston, 29, grew up in rural Kincaid, attending school there up through eighth grade. “Mine was the last eighth grade class,” at the school before it closed and was absorbed by area school districts.
He attended ninth grade at Iola High School but switched to Anderson County High School in Garnett because it offered baseball, graduating in 2006. From there he attended Allen County Community College for one year while working at Gates Manufacturing.
KELLI was attracted to the University of Tulsa after her 2004 graduation from Iola High School because it was something different from what her classmates were doing and her grandparents lived in Tulsa.
Her undergraduate degree from Tulsa is in sports and exercise science and she has a master’s in sports studies through the online program of the U.S. Sports Academy.
“My sights were on physical therapy, but I always got sidetracked by something I liked better, sports science,” she said.
That degree led to a position at Inverness Village, an upscale retirement community at which her grandparents lived.
“It was a great place to work,” Kelli said. “It was like having 300 grandparents.”
Kelli rose up the ranks, eventually becoming its activities director.
“It was much more than Bingo and ice cream,” she said. “We really preached on whole person wellness, looking at their spiritual, emotional and physical wellbeing.”
When both of her grandparents passed away, however, it became a challenge to remain at the facility.
“Memories of them were around every corner. I needed a change.”
Through a connection of Preston’s, Kelli was offered a sales job at Comgraphx, a marketing firm that produces stickers and banners for active wear and goods.
Kelli found selling to high-end manufacturers such as Costa (sunglasses), Burton (snow boards), Rossignol (skis), and Orangatang Wheels (skateboards) was a good fit with her sports science background.
“I liked it!” Kelli said of the job. “It was really neat to be creative and work with some big names.”
The downside? “I like to be face-to-face and a lot of the job was on the phone and sometimes making cold calls. Nobody likes to make cold calls, and for that matter, nobody likes to receive them.”
The commute was also a killer.
“By then we were living on Keystone Lake and the commute to my job in Broken Arrow was one hour and 15 minutes. Each way.
“I was spending more time in the car than I was with my family. I’d get home at 6:30, make and eat dinner, and put Fisher to bed at 7:45.”
“My life today is so much more fulfilling by not losing time like that,” she said.
“On a ‘bad’ day, my commute is 85 seconds,” she said.
She talks about hitching Fisher into a backpack after work to walk the Lehigh trails or taking him on a bike ride. The evening of this interview, the couple had plans to kayak on Elks Lake.
ONCE the wheels starting turning about looking to return to Iola, Preston got the OK from Canfield & Joseph “and I started to ask myself what I really wanted to do,” Kelli said.
“I knew I wanted a job that is bigger than just clocking in and out and where I could make a difference to the community.”
Two weeks later, a job posting at Thrive Allen County appeared.
“I said if that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is,” she said.
Kelli was hired as a navigator to enroll people in the Affordable Care Act. That position has “expanded” to become program manager for a grant focused on providing access to healthy food, worksite wellness and prevention of chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension.
“It does a lot of good for the community,” she said. “It’s a good fit for me. It feels good to be part of a group whose goal is to make a difference in the community.”
