June 4, 2024 • 17 mins
Navy vet John Bethell starts over in a small town, yet finds himself in a familiar, and gratifying, role.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to on the Job. On today's episode, we're headed
up to the Granite State to speak with John Bethell, who,
after years of service to his country as a Navy chaplain,
re entered the civilian life as a small town shop owner.
But as different as the two livelihoods are, as we'll hear,
John discovered they actually had quite a few things in common.
(00:30):
When John Bethell was in the Navy for two years,
he was stationed on the Greek island of Crete. And yes,
it's okay to be jealous. I certainly am. But as
we know, for all the allure of a foreign destination,
especially one as beautiful as crete, being in a distant
land poses challenges, especially when you forget your wallet.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
It was my second day in the village. I forgot
my wallet at my house, and I didn't know how
to appoly gives or say like, my money's not here.
Like I couldn't say any of that, and so I
I was like, do you have to wash dishes? I
didn't know what they're gonna make me do, and so
I uh, I was explaining to him, like, hey, my
wallet's there, I'll be right back. He goes, Oh, no, no,
you're the American. You're in the yellow house. We know
(01:16):
where you are, like, and it was the only taverna
Taverna's a little restaurant. He's like, they're the only tavarna
in the village. He's like, you know where you gonna go.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
And John, who's originally from New York City, found this
small town trust amazing. And that's not the only thing
he loved about life in Greece.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
I was very attracted to the way that it seems
as though they scheduled stuff stuff. Things are open and
closed as they're open and closed, and figure it out.
Some things will be closed for a month because or
there's the feast of Saint Whoever and everything's closed, or
it's the feast of Saint Whoever and everything's open until,
like you know, for days. And I remember when I
(01:54):
first got there, I thought, like, how do these people
live like this? But then after two years of it,
the question I was asking myself was what do I
have to do to live like this?
Speaker 1 (02:05):
A big part of the reason that John was so
enamored of this Greek way of doing things was that
it was so completely foreign to him because in the Navy,
not only was he a small cog in a very
big wheel. But as a navy chaplain, he never really
had any time off.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
With my job as a department head, and I had
had a duty phone with me. So this is a
phone that you This becomes your the phone becomes your mistress.
And I had that phone with me everywhere. If I
went on vacation, it wasn't really vacation. If I went
to visit somewhere else in Europe, it wasn't because I
had to have that phone, and I was the only
chaplain for the whole piece. And so you're always always connected.
There's always a way to reach you, and that it
(02:46):
leaves your adrenal glands at like a sort of like
a quiet low boil, do you know, Like you're always
like you're just waiting for this thing to ring, and
nobody calls chaplain's like with great news. So it's like
if it rings, it's well, somebody's dying or dead, or
there's some other situation, which of course I signed up for.
I get that, but to be bound to not turn
it off was a challenge.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
So after two years of being stationed in Greece being
tethered to a service phone, John was feeling and inkling
to try something new, albeit while incorporating some of the
things he came to love about life and crete.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
I mean, they're industry, you know, they work, you know,
but they sort of put work in its place. And
the reason that I thought about having a shop was
that I fell in love with the idea of looking
at the clock and saying it's five o'clock, it's closing time,
it's quitting time, and locking the door and walking away.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
And ever since John was a kid, he had this
idea of opening a print shop, one of those old
fashioned kinds with those big, heavy machines operated by hand,
which lay out the colors one at a time.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
I've always loved printing as a hobby. My dad's retired
from the printing house of a newspaper, and I kind
of always grew up around that sort of stuff. And
I was just going to open up a print shop.
At first. I was just going to do a letter
press printing shop, and probably most of my work was
going to be online or through an SSI shop or
through the website.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
So we starts bringing it up in conversation with some
of his shipmates, saying, you know, I'm thinking about getting
back to the civilian life, maybe opening up a print shop,
ideally in some small town in the US, where I
could replicate this Greek village way of living and lo
and behold. One of his shipmates says, hmm, that sounds
like where I'm from, Laconi in New Hampshire, and immediately
(04:33):
John's ears perk up, because though he was born and
raised in NYC, he spent his summers in New Hampshire
and always had a fondness for the state.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Part of the other reason that I really wanted New
Hampshire to begin with is that I grew up spending
my summers here. Like a lot of people. I was
down on Spotford Lake, so it's like the southwest corner
of the state, over by Keen.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
But like a lot of the people that spend their
summers in New Hampshire, they don't tend to stick around
much later into the year. And Laconia is much further
north than where John spent his time in New Hampshire,
a state that with every mile you go up, feels
like another leap closer to the North Pole, which that
ship made of his might have failed to mention when
(05:16):
he pitched Laconia yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I remember actually texting him. It was mid April and
I was sitting on the couch shivering, and I remember
asking him like, Hey, how long does this last? Because
it was a cold that gets to your bones. It's
a mean kind of cold. Yeah, so that part of
it was tough. The absolute amount of cold and snow
that year. There was a lot of snow that year too.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
And the town itself wasn't exactly a fantasy land either. Yes,
there was a lovely old main street with beautiful brick
buildings dating back to the previous century, but like a
lot of the small cities in America, Laconia was far
from thriving.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah. What do you do when you hit with the
hard reality of boarding windows, right, and we have a
pretty decent influx of like unhoused people, homeless people. Yeah,
that's a that's a that's a tough one to deal with.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
But despite its current condition, John could see the potential.
So we put on his snow boots and went around town,
introducing himself to some of the local business owners to
get a feel for the place, and very quickly he
experienced that small town charm.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I said, Hey, when they kind of want to do this,
and the cobbler said, you know, we have a cobbler.
That's the kind of downtown Disney we have. The cobbler said, well,
the frame shop is going to he's trying to sell it,
and it's he's going to sell it for a pretty
good price because he's just trying to get out of here.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
So frame shop as in picture and art framing shop,
which John immediately thinks would go perfectly well with his
vision for a printing shop.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
So I asked the cobbler, and the cobbler told me
to go talk to this guy. And I went and
talked to the guy and he said, yep, you can
have it for a song. And so he just wanted
to move on, and it was kind of a fire sale.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
And on top of that, the previous owner even let
John take a look at his accounts to get a
sense of what sort of business he'd be acquiring.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
So I wasn't starting the shop out of absolutely nothing,
saying you know what this town needs is a frame shop. Yeah,
A yeah, That's how I got the shop by walking
downtown with a cup of coffee my handed, and then
I applied for the business loan and that was it.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
When we come back from the break, John Bethel opens
his doors.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Looking for a job is lonely, endless searching, phone calls
that go nowhere, applications that vanish into thin air. What
if you could link with dozens of local companies who
are hiring right now with just one connection. That's Express
Employment Professionals. Find us at expresspros dot com. One connection,
(07:59):
endless opportunity and no fees ever for job seekers Express
Employment Professionals expresspros dot com.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
We're back with John Bethel, who, after years in the Navy,
moved up to the small city of Laconia, New Hampshire
to open a custom frame and printing shop.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Oh, it's called Piedmont. Piedmont Print and Frame. So Piedmont
literally means foothills in French. And I figured that we
lived in the foothills of the Bellnet Mountains, and I
kind of wanted to honor where we were, where we
were located, and at the same time, I didn't want
to name it after myself, so I thought Piedmont would
(08:40):
be pretty cool. I could have called it Foothills. I
should have called it foothills. A lot of people think
that Piedmont is my last name, and so people downtown
have called me John Piedmont, which is one time somebody
walking down the street called said, hey, what's going on JP. So,
in attempting to not name it after myself, I've actually
named it after myself because a lot of people downtown
think that that's my name, and that's okay. It makes
(09:01):
me less searchable. Nice.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
So in a way, you're sort of playing this character
of John Piedmont, the store owner, right, the.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Guy who like dons his aprin and like an old
Italian man, sweeps the sidewalk every morning when I go outside, Like,
I kind of like it. We all have a role
to play.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
I suppose anyone who's lived in a small city or
town probably knows that feeling of having a role to play,
as if the community you live in was a big
theater production and you're just one of the characters on
its stage. John definitely felt that effect in Laconia, especially
as his business was located where the old framing shop was.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, I was the little piece of paper that they
put the understudy paper that they put in the playbill.
Right now, Kevin used to be played by Kevin. Now
it's being played by Johnny.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
But John did do things to let people know that
he was not the same store owner as before. For
one thing, he threw a lot of the old clutter
out and redesigned the place to be more inviting. And second,
when you walk into John's shop, you won't be met
with a generic Hi, how can I help you?
Speaker 2 (10:08):
And it's annoying, right, Like you go to a store
and they say can I help you find something? No, like,
I'm just walking like, let me look. If you say
how can I help you? Know the relationship has become transactional.
And if it's become transactional, then that's how I'm going
to get out of you? Is this one transaction? And
so when people come in, you are to make yourself
the vulnerable one. And you say, you offer your name first,
(10:29):
you know, say what's your name? You go, hey, I'm John,
what's your name? And then they're like, hey, whatever, I'm
Avery And you go, okay, Hey, I was about to
make a cup of coffee, would you like one? I
was about to pour a beer, would you like one?
Speaker 1 (10:42):
So you're saying you drink a lot all day, whether
it be caffeinated or alcoholic.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
The rule is that I can only drink beer after
the glass has been cut. So if I learned that
the hard way, so once, once I crack a beer,
then we're not cutting any more. Last for the day.
So yes, something about doing it with you? Right? If
I just said do you want to beer? That's one thing.
But if I say I was about to have a beer,
do you want one? You're almost always going to say yes,
(11:09):
or a glass of prosecco? Right, and then eventually, look,
you have a poster rolled up under your arm. I
know what you're going to spend. Why rush to that
when I could build a relationship with you? And like
the glass of prosecco cost me maybe two bucks, But
that's not the important thing. The important thing is like
you've built a relationship and now they want to come back,
and then they tell their friends about it.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Probably the hardest part for John about walking away from
his Navy career were the relationships he built as a chaplain,
a position that brought John incredibly close with people who
were sharing their most intimate and vulnerable thoughts. But it
turns out that, unbeknownst to him, his new role as
a shop owner still involved dealing with people in their
(11:53):
times of need.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
For wanting to walk away from being like an active priest.
It has not stopped, right, because people don't frame things
that are not important to them. Not only do they
not frame things that aren't important to them, but there's
a reason they're framing. It's because they want to show
it off, right, So now they have a story to tell.
And what do we do when we gather at during
(12:18):
the liturgy is we sit and listen to stories.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
John remembers one time a woman brought a fork into
the shop.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Her mom died, and everyone else in her family like hungry,
hungry hippos. They just sort of grabbed whatever was there,
and what was left was this sterling silver fork. So
she framed it. She's like, well, this is what I got,
you know, from my mom. But then like I looked
at it and like if you looked at the times
of the fork, the one on the side was more
worn down and it was sharper, Like that was the
(12:48):
fork that she used, you know when you scramble legs
with a fork. That was her cooking fork. And so
it wasn't just a fork from the dinner table that
got used once a year. I was like, hey, like,
this is your mom's cooking fork. For what it's worth.
This is the most. This is the one that she
used the most. This is the one that has been
infused with your mouth more than anything. Right, And so
like I think that that doesn't happen if somebody walks
in the door and you say, how can I help you?
(13:09):
So it does become secret, it does become a holy
moment of sharing.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
So as John says, sometimes your parish is a military base,
and sometimes it's in your frame and print shop over
a beer, looking at a fork or a tile from
Mexico or whatever it is that people bring in wanting
to cherish.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
I tried for the first six months of telling absolutely
nobody that I was an episcopal priest. That did not
work at all. Like, it did not last. Like I
was like, nope, I'm a shop order, Like that is it.
I'm not doing any of that stuff. And eventually who
you are and what you're supposed to be he starts
seeping out of you, right that there's something about you
that you're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
While John loves the relationships he gets to build in
his shop, he also appreciates that at the the end
of the day, unlike that duty phone he had to
carry around when he was in the Navy, that he
gets to leave work at work.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
So the reason that I thought about having a shop
was that I fell in love with the idea of
looking at the clock and saying it's five o'clock, it's
closing time, it's quitting time, and locking the door and
walking away. I mean, my printing press is it's eleven
hundred pounds of CAFs iron, Like you can't take a
work on them, you know. And I don't have a
glass cutter at my house. So you like, whatever's done
(14:30):
is done. Whenever's not done has not been done. But
at five o'clock you're locking the doors and whatever it is,
like that diploma from Kent State is going to wait
till tomorrow, like it's going to be fine.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Sometimes John doesn't even wait till five o'clock to shut
the doors, because, as he learned in Greece, there are
times when life comes before business, like the time a
friend of his showed up in swim trunks and said
he was headed to the lake.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
It was the nicest day we had had in a while,
but we had a lot of rien that year, and
I just remember hearing you guys are swimming in the lake.
Cool here I go, I put a note that it
said God's swimming and you should be too. And even
now I don't remember all those times that I worked
super late or the times that I tried to crank
out frames in time. But I do remember one day
(15:15):
three years ago that I closed the shop and went swimming.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Right After three years in operation, Piedmont Printon Frame is
doing well, well enough that John has taken on a
coworker and some interns to help him meet the now
steady work orders.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
She went to school for graphic design. She has a
better eye than I do, and she's very good at
what she does, and so it's been great having her.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
And a few of those interns have been military folks,
much like John once did, are navigating that tricky transition
from service to civilian life.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
I'm on my fifth intern now and it's been an
amazing thing where I know that in New Hampshire we
have a lot of sometimes people in their twenties and
thirties don't end up sticking around, and I really like
that now through this program, I have two veterans now
that we're not from here, that now live here in
town and they go to Plymouth State, or they go
to Lakes Region Community College, or one of them is
(16:11):
going to want to work for the fire department and
the other one works for the parks Department.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
And with the extra help around the shop, John now
has more time to be part of the community, time
to be the new chaplain at the Laconia Firehouse, time
to volunteer with the local youth hockey team, or simply
just time to stroll around his adopted hometown of Laconia
in New Hampshire with a coffee cup in hand, saying
(16:35):
hi to his neighbors.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
I think it's weird because they come from such a
big city that like here it does. I mean, there's
only a few thousand people in town, and yeah, like
you cannot walk from one end of main Street to
the next one without either being stopped or without finding
a reason to stop and say hi to somebody.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
And John Bethel aka Johnny Piedmont wouldn't have it any
other way.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
It's nice, like it's just it's nice, like you feel
like you belong somewhere.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
The only thing he's got to be careful about is driving,
because those New York City habits of his die hard.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
I have to remind myself that everyone knows my car
and I can't flip out or drive on the shoulder
because you're in my way. So as far as that goes, yeah,
it does help me to be a better human being.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
For on the job, I'm Avery Thompson.
Welcome to on the Job. On today's episode, we're headed
up to the Granite State to speak with John Bethell, who,
after years of service to his country as a Navy chaplain,
re entered the civilian life as a small town shop owner.
But as different as the two livelihoods are, as we'll hear,
John discovered they actually had quite a few things in common.
(00:30):
When John Bethell was in the Navy for two years,
he was stationed on the Greek island of Crete. And yes,
it's okay to be jealous. I certainly am. But as
we know, for all the allure of a foreign destination,
especially one as beautiful as crete, being in a distant
land poses challenges, especially when you forget your wallet.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
It was my second day in the village. I forgot
my wallet at my house, and I didn't know how
to appoly gives or say like, my money's not here.
Like I couldn't say any of that, and so I
I was like, do you have to wash dishes? I
didn't know what they're gonna make me do, and so
I uh, I was explaining to him, like, hey, my
wallet's there, I'll be right back. He goes, Oh, no, no,
you're the American. You're in the yellow house. We know
(01:16):
where you are, like, and it was the only taverna
Taverna's a little restaurant. He's like, they're the only tavarna
in the village. He's like, you know where you gonna go.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
And John, who's originally from New York City, found this
small town trust amazing. And that's not the only thing
he loved about life in Greece.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
I was very attracted to the way that it seems
as though they scheduled stuff stuff. Things are open and
closed as they're open and closed, and figure it out.
Some things will be closed for a month because or
there's the feast of Saint Whoever and everything's closed, or
it's the feast of Saint Whoever and everything's open until,
like you know, for days. And I remember when I
(01:54):
first got there, I thought, like, how do these people
live like this? But then after two years of it,
the question I was asking myself was what do I
have to do to live like this?
Speaker 1 (02:05):
A big part of the reason that John was so
enamored of this Greek way of doing things was that
it was so completely foreign to him because in the Navy,
not only was he a small cog in a very
big wheel. But as a navy chaplain, he never really
had any time off.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
With my job as a department head, and I had
had a duty phone with me. So this is a
phone that you This becomes your the phone becomes your mistress.
And I had that phone with me everywhere. If I
went on vacation, it wasn't really vacation. If I went
to visit somewhere else in Europe, it wasn't because I
had to have that phone, and I was the only
chaplain for the whole piece. And so you're always always connected.
There's always a way to reach you, and that it
(02:46):
leaves your adrenal glands at like a sort of like
a quiet low boil, do you know, Like you're always
like you're just waiting for this thing to ring, and
nobody calls chaplain's like with great news. So it's like
if it rings, it's well, somebody's dying or dead, or
there's some other situation, which of course I signed up for.
I get that, but to be bound to not turn
it off was a challenge.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
So after two years of being stationed in Greece being
tethered to a service phone, John was feeling and inkling
to try something new, albeit while incorporating some of the
things he came to love about life and crete.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
I mean, they're industry, you know, they work, you know,
but they sort of put work in its place. And
the reason that I thought about having a shop was
that I fell in love with the idea of looking
at the clock and saying it's five o'clock, it's closing time,
it's quitting time, and locking the door and walking away.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
And ever since John was a kid, he had this
idea of opening a print shop, one of those old
fashioned kinds with those big, heavy machines operated by hand,
which lay out the colors one at a time.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
I've always loved printing as a hobby. My dad's retired
from the printing house of a newspaper, and I kind
of always grew up around that sort of stuff. And
I was just going to open up a print shop.
At first. I was just going to do a letter
press printing shop, and probably most of my work was
going to be online or through an SSI shop or
through the website.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
So we starts bringing it up in conversation with some
of his shipmates, saying, you know, I'm thinking about getting
back to the civilian life, maybe opening up a print shop,
ideally in some small town in the US, where I
could replicate this Greek village way of living and lo
and behold. One of his shipmates says, hmm, that sounds
like where I'm from, Laconi in New Hampshire, and immediately
(04:33):
John's ears perk up, because though he was born and
raised in NYC, he spent his summers in New Hampshire
and always had a fondness for the state.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
Part of the other reason that I really wanted New
Hampshire to begin with is that I grew up spending
my summers here. Like a lot of people. I was
down on Spotford Lake, so it's like the southwest corner
of the state, over by Keen.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
But like a lot of the people that spend their
summers in New Hampshire, they don't tend to stick around
much later into the year. And Laconia is much further
north than where John spent his time in New Hampshire,
a state that with every mile you go up, feels
like another leap closer to the North Pole, which that
ship made of his might have failed to mention when
(05:16):
he pitched Laconia yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I remember actually texting him. It was mid April and
I was sitting on the couch shivering, and I remember
asking him like, Hey, how long does this last? Because
it was a cold that gets to your bones. It's
a mean kind of cold. Yeah, so that part of
it was tough. The absolute amount of cold and snow
that year. There was a lot of snow that year too.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
And the town itself wasn't exactly a fantasy land either. Yes,
there was a lovely old main street with beautiful brick
buildings dating back to the previous century, but like a
lot of the small cities in America, Laconia was far
from thriving.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah. What do you do when you hit with the
hard reality of boarding windows, right, and we have a
pretty decent influx of like unhoused people, homeless people. Yeah,
that's a that's a that's a tough one to deal with.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
But despite its current condition, John could see the potential.
So we put on his snow boots and went around town,
introducing himself to some of the local business owners to
get a feel for the place, and very quickly he
experienced that small town charm.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I said, Hey, when they kind of want to do this,
and the cobbler said, you know, we have a cobbler.
That's the kind of downtown Disney we have. The cobbler said, well,
the frame shop is going to he's trying to sell it,
and it's he's going to sell it for a pretty
good price because he's just trying to get out of here.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
So frame shop as in picture and art framing shop,
which John immediately thinks would go perfectly well with his
vision for a printing shop.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
So I asked the cobbler, and the cobbler told me
to go talk to this guy. And I went and
talked to the guy and he said, yep, you can
have it for a song. And so he just wanted
to move on, and it was kind of a fire sale.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
And on top of that, the previous owner even let
John take a look at his accounts to get a
sense of what sort of business he'd be acquiring.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
So I wasn't starting the shop out of absolutely nothing,
saying you know what this town needs is a frame shop. Yeah,
A yeah, That's how I got the shop by walking
downtown with a cup of coffee my handed, and then
I applied for the business loan and that was it.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
When we come back from the break, John Bethel opens
his doors.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Looking for a job is lonely, endless searching, phone calls
that go nowhere, applications that vanish into thin air. What
if you could link with dozens of local companies who
are hiring right now with just one connection. That's Express
Employment Professionals. Find us at expresspros dot com. One connection,
(07:59):
endless opportunity and no fees ever for job seekers Express
Employment Professionals expresspros dot com.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
We're back with John Bethel, who, after years in the Navy,
moved up to the small city of Laconia, New Hampshire
to open a custom frame and printing shop.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Oh, it's called Piedmont. Piedmont Print and Frame. So Piedmont
literally means foothills in French. And I figured that we
lived in the foothills of the Bellnet Mountains, and I
kind of wanted to honor where we were, where we
were located, and at the same time, I didn't want
to name it after myself, so I thought Piedmont would
(08:40):
be pretty cool. I could have called it Foothills. I
should have called it foothills. A lot of people think
that Piedmont is my last name, and so people downtown
have called me John Piedmont, which is one time somebody
walking down the street called said, hey, what's going on JP. So,
in attempting to not name it after myself, I've actually
named it after myself because a lot of people downtown
think that that's my name, and that's okay. It makes
(09:01):
me less searchable. Nice.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
So in a way, you're sort of playing this character
of John Piedmont, the store owner, right, the.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Guy who like dons his aprin and like an old
Italian man, sweeps the sidewalk every morning when I go outside, Like,
I kind of like it. We all have a role
to play.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
I suppose anyone who's lived in a small city or
town probably knows that feeling of having a role to play,
as if the community you live in was a big
theater production and you're just one of the characters on
its stage. John definitely felt that effect in Laconia, especially
as his business was located where the old framing shop was.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, I was the little piece of paper that they
put the understudy paper that they put in the playbill.
Right now, Kevin used to be played by Kevin. Now
it's being played by Johnny.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
But John did do things to let people know that
he was not the same store owner as before. For
one thing, he threw a lot of the old clutter
out and redesigned the place to be more inviting. And second,
when you walk into John's shop, you won't be met
with a generic Hi, how can I help you?
Speaker 2 (10:08):
And it's annoying, right, Like you go to a store
and they say can I help you find something? No, like,
I'm just walking like, let me look. If you say
how can I help you? Know the relationship has become transactional.
And if it's become transactional, then that's how I'm going
to get out of you? Is this one transaction? And
so when people come in, you are to make yourself
the vulnerable one. And you say, you offer your name first,
(10:29):
you know, say what's your name? You go, hey, I'm John,
what's your name? And then they're like, hey, whatever, I'm
Avery And you go, okay, Hey, I was about to
make a cup of coffee, would you like one? I
was about to pour a beer, would you like one?
Speaker 1 (10:42):
So you're saying you drink a lot all day, whether
it be caffeinated or alcoholic.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
The rule is that I can only drink beer after
the glass has been cut. So if I learned that
the hard way, so once, once I crack a beer,
then we're not cutting any more. Last for the day.
So yes, something about doing it with you? Right? If
I just said do you want to beer? That's one thing.
But if I say I was about to have a beer,
do you want one? You're almost always going to say yes,
(11:09):
or a glass of prosecco? Right, and then eventually, look,
you have a poster rolled up under your arm. I
know what you're going to spend. Why rush to that
when I could build a relationship with you? And like
the glass of prosecco cost me maybe two bucks, But
that's not the important thing. The important thing is like
you've built a relationship and now they want to come back,
and then they tell their friends about it.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Probably the hardest part for John about walking away from
his Navy career were the relationships he built as a chaplain,
a position that brought John incredibly close with people who
were sharing their most intimate and vulnerable thoughts. But it
turns out that, unbeknownst to him, his new role as
a shop owner still involved dealing with people in their
(11:53):
times of need.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
For wanting to walk away from being like an active priest.
It has not stopped, right, because people don't frame things
that are not important to them. Not only do they
not frame things that aren't important to them, but there's
a reason they're framing. It's because they want to show
it off, right, So now they have a story to tell.
And what do we do when we gather at during
(12:18):
the liturgy is we sit and listen to stories.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
John remembers one time a woman brought a fork into
the shop.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Her mom died, and everyone else in her family like hungry,
hungry hippos. They just sort of grabbed whatever was there,
and what was left was this sterling silver fork. So
she framed it. She's like, well, this is what I got,
you know, from my mom. But then like I looked
at it and like if you looked at the times
of the fork, the one on the side was more
worn down and it was sharper, Like that was the
(12:48):
fork that she used, you know when you scramble legs
with a fork. That was her cooking fork. And so
it wasn't just a fork from the dinner table that
got used once a year. I was like, hey, like,
this is your mom's cooking fork. For what it's worth.
This is the most. This is the one that she
used the most. This is the one that has been
infused with your mouth more than anything. Right, And so
like I think that that doesn't happen if somebody walks
in the door and you say, how can I help you?
(13:09):
So it does become secret, it does become a holy
moment of sharing.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
So as John says, sometimes your parish is a military base,
and sometimes it's in your frame and print shop over
a beer, looking at a fork or a tile from
Mexico or whatever it is that people bring in wanting
to cherish.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
I tried for the first six months of telling absolutely
nobody that I was an episcopal priest. That did not
work at all. Like, it did not last. Like I
was like, nope, I'm a shop order, Like that is it.
I'm not doing any of that stuff. And eventually who
you are and what you're supposed to be he starts
seeping out of you, right that there's something about you
that you're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
While John loves the relationships he gets to build in
his shop, he also appreciates that at the the end
of the day, unlike that duty phone he had to
carry around when he was in the Navy, that he
gets to leave work at work.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
So the reason that I thought about having a shop
was that I fell in love with the idea of
looking at the clock and saying it's five o'clock, it's
closing time, it's quitting time, and locking the door and
walking away. I mean, my printing press is it's eleven
hundred pounds of CAFs iron, Like you can't take a
work on them, you know. And I don't have a
glass cutter at my house. So you like, whatever's done
(14:30):
is done. Whenever's not done has not been done. But
at five o'clock you're locking the doors and whatever it is,
like that diploma from Kent State is going to wait
till tomorrow, like it's going to be fine.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Sometimes John doesn't even wait till five o'clock to shut
the doors, because, as he learned in Greece, there are
times when life comes before business, like the time a
friend of his showed up in swim trunks and said
he was headed to the lake.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
It was the nicest day we had had in a while,
but we had a lot of rien that year, and
I just remember hearing you guys are swimming in the lake.
Cool here I go, I put a note that it
said God's swimming and you should be too. And even
now I don't remember all those times that I worked
super late or the times that I tried to crank
out frames in time. But I do remember one day
(15:15):
three years ago that I closed the shop and went swimming.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Right After three years in operation, Piedmont Printon Frame is
doing well, well enough that John has taken on a
coworker and some interns to help him meet the now
steady work orders.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
She went to school for graphic design. She has a
better eye than I do, and she's very good at
what she does, and so it's been great having her.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
And a few of those interns have been military folks,
much like John once did, are navigating that tricky transition
from service to civilian life.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
I'm on my fifth intern now and it's been an
amazing thing where I know that in New Hampshire we
have a lot of sometimes people in their twenties and
thirties don't end up sticking around, and I really like
that now through this program, I have two veterans now
that we're not from here, that now live here in
town and they go to Plymouth State, or they go
to Lakes Region Community College, or one of them is
(16:11):
going to want to work for the fire department and
the other one works for the parks Department.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
And with the extra help around the shop, John now
has more time to be part of the community, time
to be the new chaplain at the Laconia Firehouse, time
to volunteer with the local youth hockey team, or simply
just time to stroll around his adopted hometown of Laconia
in New Hampshire with a coffee cup in hand, saying
(16:35):
hi to his neighbors.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
I think it's weird because they come from such a
big city that like here it does. I mean, there's
only a few thousand people in town, and yeah, like
you cannot walk from one end of main Street to
the next one without either being stopped or without finding
a reason to stop and say hi to somebody.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
And John Bethel aka Johnny Piedmont wouldn't have it any
other way.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
It's nice, like it's just it's nice, like you feel
like you belong somewhere.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
The only thing he's got to be careful about is driving,
because those New York City habits of his die hard.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
I have to remind myself that everyone knows my car
and I can't flip out or drive on the shoulder
because you're in my way. So as far as that goes, yeah,
it does help me to be a better human being.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
For on the job, I'm Avery Thompson.
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