Wilba Thompson said she and her husband, Bob, have occasionally thought about retirement, but they just have too much fun working.
Following a work history of sales experience, entrepreneurship and marketing, Thompson — along with her husband — currently works as co-director of the Fairfield Bay Conference and Visitor Center.
“We were thinking, ‘Someday we’re going to retire for real, but — oh well — this sounds like fun,’” she said.
The Fairfield Bay Conference and Visitor Center — formerly known as Our Towne Conference and Visitor Center — is decorated with local art and is the location for weddings, reunions, seminars and other functions. Music shows and theater performances are consistently on the calendar, and members of the community utilize the center as a space for regular get-togethers.
After being closed for 11 years, the center went through a major renovation in 2013. Fairfield Bay Mayor Paul Wellenberger envisioned a rejuvenation of the center, and he approached Thompson and her husband about running the center if the city could get it back in operation.
“We wanted to do this for the community,” Thompson said. “This is a work of love. This whole community came together to bring this building back. People scrubbed floors. People came and painted. They cleaned the bathrooms. Whatever they needed to do to get this place up and running, they did it.”
Thompson is no stranger to running a business. Throughout her life, she has led several successful business ventures, and she said she is thankful for a chance to make an impact in her community.
“We just came aboard to be the goodwill ambassadors and to market this place and to sell it so we could get it back working again,” she said. “That’s what we do — just another walk along the yellow brick road.”
Thompson was born in Searcy. Her father was a part-time minister and an insurance salesman, and he moved the family to Heber Springs for a short time when Thompson was a child.
“He preached every Sunday somewhere — Oil Trough, Bradford, all of these little towns — and worked for the insurance company,” she said.
When Thompson was 11 years old, the family was transplanted to a small west-Texas town called Texline, where Thompson spent her teenage years.
“It was a totally different place — schools, lifestyle, everything,” she said. “[My dad] had decided it was time for him to be a full-time minister, so that’s where we went. I had a lot of experiences there I wouldn’t have had anywhere else. I learned to ride horses. I got to ride in the roundups and go out on the ranches and do things that I would have never done had I been raised in Searcy. I would have been the city girl.”
After graduating from high school, Thompson attended Lubbock Christian College — now Lubbock Christian University — then moved back to Searcy to attend Harding University.
For several years, Thompson was a stay-at-home mother, and her first husband moved the family around from Tennessee to Texas. After Thompson and her husband divorced, she raised her children in Heber Springs and eventually made her way to Fairfield Bay to sell real estate.
In 1990, Fairfield Communities Inc. — the company that established Fairfield Bay as a recreational community — went bankrupt. Thompson was encouraged by her friend Ken Likeness — who she would later marry — to stick around and join a business venture.
“He worked at Red Apple Inn — I didn’t know him then — and he had made a bet with another gentleman that you can sell anything if you market it well,” Thompson said. “They hired ladies and made these 36-inch rag dolls. They called them the Apple Collection, and Ken designed the faces on them. They stored them — they never did anything with them — so when all of this happened with Fairfield Communities, he asked me if I thought I could sell dolls. I said, ‘Possibly,’ so we drive to Heber Springs to this storage building that was just packed with these dolls. Then we open another storage building, and it’s packed, too.”
Thompson agreed to help sell the dolls. She loaded her car full of dolls wrapped in plastic and headed to Searcy, where she went door to door selling her inventory.
“Everyone was nice to me,” she said. “When you open the door and see a lady standing there with a doll on each arm, what can you say? You can’t be ugly.”
After a successful day in Searcy, Thompson decided it would be worth it to try and sell all of the dolls. At first, she and Likeness sold the dolls in a booth at a craft market in Damascus. Then, following Likeness’ marketing train of thought, Thompson suggested they make the dolls into official collectibles to try and entice buyers to purchase multiple dolls.
“We had 13 different dolls,” she said. “I called the secretary of state’s office and asked how to go about [making them collectibles]. They explained to me I had to do paperwork, and then every doll had to have a number. … I had the ladies from the Baptist church here come to my house, and they sewed a number on an ankle of every doll.”
At that point, Thompson and Likeness opened a store in Fairfield Bay called The Apple Collection, where they sold the dolls on a regular basis. In the meantime, they decided they needed something besides dolls, so they developed a potpourri product called Heart Scent.
Heart Scent was made of scented wax hearts in heart baskets, and when the baskets were shaken, the wax would scrape off and release the scent. One day, Thompson was working in The Apple Collection, and a salesmen approached her about showing Heart Scent to his boss. She thought little of it and gave the man some samples, and two weeks later, Thompson got a call from the man’s boss, who asked her to bring her product to market in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“We had a good show that first time,” she said. “The orders started coming, and we were filling them. We had people at our house at night filling little plastic bags with hearts in them. … Then, when I was up there for a show, he told us we needed to make candles.”
Thompson said she was hesitant to take on candle-making, but she and Likeness gave it a shot. Their first attempts were not very good, so they reached out to Mel Broder in Mountain View, who taught them his craft.
“At first, we sold The Apple Collection and put that money into a candle factory,” Thompson said. “We built a little retail operation out there as well. We had that business for 19 years. At first we shipped out partly ours and partly Mel’s because we were trying to get it out.”
The business was Sunset Mountain Candle Co., and Thompson said they invented the tri-layer candle with three scents and colors. The plant started in Fairfield Bay and moved to Shirley when they needed more room for expansion.
In 2002, Likeness died, and Thompson said the business became overwhelming. Orders had already started dropping drastically after 9/11, and Thompson made the decision to close Sunset Mountain Candle Co. several years later.
Thompson married her current husband, Bob, in 2007, and after they closed the candle factory, they hit the road selling products to gift stores.
“That was another side of the business that I had not seen,” she said. “I had been in retail, and I had been the manufacturer, so now I was getting to be the salesperson. It was all fun.”
Back in Fairfield Bay, plans to restart the conference center started making the rounds, and in 2013, the Thompsons were approached by the mayor to run the center once it was completed. They have been co-directors of the Fairfield Bay Conference and Visitor Center ever since, and Thompson said she has enjoyed seeing it grow and change through the past few years.
“It’s fulfilling to see
something evolve,” she said. “And it is evolving. It has taken the whole community. It has been a true community effort.”
For more information about the Fairfield Bay Conference and Visitor Center, visit www.fairfieldbayconferencecenter.com.
Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansasonline.com.