A Work-Life Balance Worth Framing

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. When John Bethell was in the Navy for two years, he was stationed on the Greek island of Crete. And yes,

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 where you are, like, and it was the only taverna

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.

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 first got there, I thought, like, how do these people

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 he pitched Laconia yeah.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When we come back from the break, John Bethel opens his doors.

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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.

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 be pretty cool. I could have called it Foothills. I

So in a way, you're sort of playing this character of John Piedmont, the store owner, right, the.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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, you know, say what's your name? You go, hey, I'm John,

So you're saying you drink a lot all day, whether it be caffeinated or alcoholic.

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, or a glass of prosecco? Right, and then eventually, look, you have a poster rolled up under your arm. I

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 times of need.

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 the liturgy is we sit and listen to stories.

John remembers one time a woman brought a fork into the shop.

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 fork that she used, you know when you scramble legs

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 three years ago that I closed the shop and went swimming.

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.

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.

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.

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 going to want to work for the fire department and

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 hi to his neighbors.

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.

And John Bethel aka Johnny Piedmont wouldn't have it any other way.

It's nice, like it's just it's nice, like you feel like you belong somewhere.

The only thing he's got to be careful about is driving, because those New York City habits of his die hard.

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.

For on the job, I'm Avery Thompson.