Finding balance

~Wilferth combined businesses, family, community

Retired retailer Judy Wilferth, seen here with her beloved black Labrador retriever Lucy, built a successful business career in partnership with her husband, F.R. "Rock" Wilferth. She said family came first as she built her businesses.

At a time when women were asserting themselves in the workforce and working to achieve their own success in business, Judy Wilferth didn't find discrimination or resistance as a businesswoman the way some women did.

"If it was there, I didn't see it," Wilferth said. "I was not looking for it."

In 1973, she and her husband, F.R. "Rock" Wilferth bought a retail children's clothing store, the Children's Bazaar. She managed it, and would eventually also manage Boys' Corner, Sandy's -- a women's clothing store -- and out of the retail realm she was manager of The Crossroads shopping center until they sold it in 2001. They sold Sandy's in 1999 and the two other stores in 2000.

While she was manager of the Children's Bazaar, she expanded a 1,200-square-foot store in West Park Village, then later moved into a 7,000-square-foot location at Crossroads Shopping Center. She staged fashion shows with local children as models, and used those models in a national catalog advertising children's clothing from Cape Girardeau.

It helped that she was in a business that sold mostly to other women, she said. As a young mom herself, she knew what young mothers wanted in children's clothing, and as a businesswoman she knew how to market the products. She gives much of the credit for her success to her husband, who backed her in every way, and to her employees, whom she said she trusted explicitly to run the store whenever she wasn't there.

"It worked well with my family," she said. "I only worked when I took the kids to school, and I came home when they got out of school."

That also left her time for other family activities and community work. Through it all, Wilferth said, her husband offered strong support.

"It takes a strong man to be married to a strong woman," she said. "He definitely is a rock."

Wilferth also had dependable employees.

"I had the best employees in the world," she said. "My employees all had keys to the business. If I couldn't trust them, who could I trust? A lot of people hire down rather than up. Maybe they don't let people's best come out -- and they lose. I had great employees who did a great job at work and enabled me to have time away from work."

A graduate of Southeast Missouri State University, Wilferth taught French and English, then had four children in five years before she got into the world of business.

"It seems like another life when I look back on it," she said.

Along with managing the retail stores, staging children's fashion shows, and raising her family, Wilferth found time to be active in the Chamber of Commerce, becoming the first woman on the chamber's board of directors and first female board chair.

"And they all survived," she quipped.

Wilferth sits on the Saint Francis Medical Center Board of Directors, and is a charter member of the Southeast Missouri University Foundation. She was chairman of the foundation board when the first capital campaign raised $28.7 million, a portion of which helped build Robert A. Dempster Hall to house the Harrison College of Business.

Along with the hard work came recognition, including the Zonta International Woman of the Year award and the chamber's Rush H. Limbaugh Award.

"On committees I did not concentrate on being the only woman, but on what our goal was," she said.

Wilferth and her husband of 46 years are retired now, but remain active in community and church work and in restoring the 200-year-old family farm where they raise cattle. One son, John, is, as she says, "in heaven." Wilferth's other children, Jill Smirl is a mother of three living in Colorado; Jim Wilferth is self-employed in Cape Girardeau, and Joe Wilferth teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and was named one of six University Foundation Fellows.

Wilferth looks back at her career and counts her blessings.

"I was with my employees five days a week," she said. "They were family too. I miss most the people I worked with and the customers who became good friends. It was a good time for us, a good adventure."