April 2008
Love Struck Twice
by Karen Boehler
Judy Wagner’s story reads like a Lifetime channel movie. After divorcing her rock musician husband, a young rural woman rises through the ranks of corporate America while raising her two sons. Finally, years later, she gives it all up for true love in a small town.
But while it may read as something scripted, the Weed resident’s life story is fact not fiction. At age 26, Wagner divorced Alice Cooper’s guitarist and songwriter Richard Wagner, and moved with her two young sons back to Michigan, where she was born. She got a job as a clerk-typist at a local television station.
She quickly advanced, moving to another station as promotional director, then to an advertising agency in Detroit, where she became a secretary on the McDonald’s restaurant account.
She was eventually hired to do public relations/marketing for the hamburger chain in Michigan and Ohio. Because she didn’t have an education, Wagner says she sometimes felt like she was being chased. "Like somebody was going to expose the fact I wasn’t educated in high school. That I didn’t know what I was doing. But I just tried to keep one step ahead of the devil, if you will."
And she did. She won a national award from McDonald’s for the programs she initiated. But the job required a lot of travel, and she was still raising her two sons alone. One day she decided she’d had enough, and resigned.
Still, she continued working in the burger business for double the money and working only eight hours a day. She did such a good job that she was offered a move to Chicago, but by that time she was tired of the business. She took a job in San Antonio, Texas instead, in a savings and loan, working accounts.
With her sons now grown, Wagner took stock of her life. "From $100 a week raising two boys to near six figures, successful, quote unquote, and scared to death I was going to get exposed for the fraud I was, and in truth, I wanted to put my jeans on, a flannel shirt, straw back in my teeth, and I wanted to feel the cold air and the cold water of a mountain stream on my feet. I wanted to see some of this country."
So she quit and sold most everything, and was about to embark on her journey when a friend asked her to take one final job, designing a logo for an area businessman. It became more than that, Wagner fell in love. She moved to Hobbs to be with Buddy Raymond.
"My whole life plan had gone down the tubes," she says. "I had fallen in love at a point in life where you have no business falling in love." She didn’t like Hobbs, and still wanted to see the country. Raymond told Wagner to go, and she did, but when she came back, he took her to Weed, where she again fell in love, calling the mountain community "a slice of heaven."
And she told him if he’d build a cabin there, she’d hang up her running shoes. He did, and she has. You can now find Wagner waiting tables and cooking at the Weed Cafe. "I’m very proud of working here. I love it," she says. "I think (the cafe) is the heart of the community. It’s about sharing." When she’s waiting tables, Wagner’s gregarious personality serves her well, as she gets excited to hear her customer’s stories while at the same time telling them bits and pieces of hers.
If you know anyone who’d make a good profile for this column—including yourself—let us know at sespinoza@enchantment.coop.
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