They do what they love-- and get paid for it. So What’s the trick?
They do what they love-- and get paid for it. So What’s the trick?
When Bill Mullins spotted some hives in Florida on his honeymoon 37 years ago, he told his new wife he had always wanted to be a beekeeper.
“She turned around and looked at me with a no-nonsense look and said, ‘Then why aren’t you?’” said Mullins, who lived in Alabama at the time. “I said, ‘Carol, we live in a big city.’ Birmingham and environs even then was well over a million people. I said, ‘I don’t know a farmer, I don’t know a beekeeper, I wouldn’t know where to start.’”
But she didn’t let it rest. On the couple’s first anniversary, she registered Mullins for a beekeeping class at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He brought the avocation with him when his insurance job took him to Greensboro a few years later. He has continued ever since. The beekeeper and owner of Quaker Acres Apiaries sells honey, beeswax candles and other products derived from bees on Saturdays for more than 30 years at the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market on Yanceyville Street. Carol sells honey rum and lemon cakes there as well.
While not everyone can make a living out of what they love to do, many people in the Triad make a healthy primary or secondary income from their passions. Mullins has made it work.
So has magician Erik Dobell.
“I do festivals, corporate parties — just about anything,” said Dobell, 26, who moved to Greensboro from northern Ohio in October. “And some stuff you’d be surprised, like weddings. That’s what’s really nice about magic. Because of the nature of it, it can either be theatrical or right in front of you. It can be anything you want. If you’re bored, you can hire me.”
Dobell discovered magic at age 23, and it dovetailed nicely with his experience in theater.
“It was in Ithaca, N.Y., at a mall,” he said. “A guy was selling magic tricks at a booth. He was selling a marked deck and like, ‘120 Things You Can Do with a Pair of Shoes,’ or whatever. So I bought it, and I went home with it, and I liked it a lot. I went back the following week to buy more stuff, and he was selling sunglasses. So that’s my magical voyage.”
The mentalist and magician has risen beyond those humble origins to find regular work. While his wife, Tanya Auchanpaugh, has “the real job” in the family, working for PPG Industries, Dobell has found steady work of his own, performing table-side magic at East Coast Wings & Grill in Greensboro on Wednesday evenings, and doing other paid gigs.
Jewelry makers Lynn Reddeck and Vida Bailey stumbled into the art at a perfect time. They currently work as Realtors in High Point, but they both earned art degrees in college and learned to refashion old magazine pages, maps and other paper products into wearable art around the time the real-estate market started slowing down.
“It’s been a mental lifesaver for me,” said Reddeck, 46. “Vida and I are not sit-around-and-do-nothing people ... There is nothing (that’s) not great about this. It’s keeping things out of the landfill; it’s making pretty, unique things.”
Bailey, 61, appreciates the marketing experience and focus Reddeck brings to their partnership, V’dalyn Papercrafts.
“In the past there have been so many times that I have an idea (for a creative project) that I thought would be really good, but just didn’t know how to go about it,” Bailey said, sitting in her High Point kitchen with Reddeck, rolling strips cut from magazine pages for use in bracelets, necklaces, earrings and wine charms. “I feel like I’ve tossed out a lot of things in the past. Then this came along, and gosh, we both just love doing it.”
The women say they each spend about 30 to 40 hours a week making and marketing their colorful jewelry. They sell their work at a variety of specialty shops around the Triad, including Mary Contrary in downtown Greensboro, Posh in High Point and Shady Ladies in Archdale, as well as the gift shop at the N.C. Museum of Art in Raleigh.
Mullins, 79, also spends many hours in the shop behind his house on West Friendly Avenue near Guilford College, building birdhouses, making beeswax candles and bottling honey and gourmet white-wine vinegar made from honey. He has a few beehives behind his house, with more in Summerfield and up in the mountains around Hillsville, Va. Mullins works in his shop several hours every morning before opening his insurance office at 9:30.
The name for his bee business began as a joke. When his wife asked him what he would call it, Mullins combined a rhyming place name with the Latin word for an area where bees are kept.
“I looked down there at the deed to our house — this is Quaker Acres subdivision,” he said. “And trying to be funny, I said, ‘Why, the Quaker Acres Apiaries,’ what else? So for Christmas she gave me 1,000 labels saying ‘Quaker Acres Apiaries.’ I’ve used that ever since then.”
Contact Eddie Huffman at 373-7335 or eddie.huffman@news-record.com.
Vida Bailey and Lynn Reddeck of Vdalyn Papercrafts.
Vida Bailey and Lynn Reddeck of Vdalyn Papercrafts.
Nancy Sidelinger Special Sections Photographer
