Family owned and operated businesses feel it keenly when they lose one of their own. It represents not only the loss of a family member, but also someone they worked alongside for years. On October 27th Temple Johnson Floor lost Frances Ione Sparks, the longtime matriarch of their company.
Although retired for many years, Frances and her husband Clyde first got involved with Temple Johnson when they moved to Oklahoma City from Tulsa in 1982. They came to support their son Jerry in his new business, and Jim, who was already there working with his brother. Both Frances and Clyde went to work at Temple Johnson and also invested in it.
Frances became the Office Manager, utilizing her business school degree in Accounting and Bookkeeping. Bryan Jones, her son-in-law and current owner of Temple Johnson, and his wife, Janis, reminisced about how different things were then, before the computer.
“At the beginning, she was always writing down numbers on the backs of envelopes, scraps of paper, you name it,” Bryan said. “Her scribblings would fall out of old files. There wasn’t even a set of books when she started out.”
“And she always used a pencil, never a pen,” Janis added, “because she had to be able to completely erase any errors, so they wouldn’t show.”
But even if her numbers and early scribbles didn’t always make sense to others, Frances was systematically organizing and setting up the accounting structure of Temple Johnson Floor. It has proved to be a solid foundation that still serves the company decades later.
Like any business, there were trying periods. “Frances held things together through good times and bad,” Bryan noted. “Nearly everybody had some bad business times during the 80’s in Oklahoma.” The family credits her with saving the company through some of its rough years.
Frances and Clyde always answered the call whenever their kids reached out. She extended the same support to Janis and son-in-law Bryan when he bought Temple Johnson in 1990. By then, Frances had her own niche in the daily operations, and, she let it be known, it didn’t include being a “front” person. She could never quite be at ease as a salesperson, or even greeting the public.
“That wasn’t her thing,” Bryan explained. Her demeanor in the office was always cheerful, but “even taking the pressure of answering that rare phone call, when you end up getting screamed at, made her too nervous, even though we explained to her not to take it personally.”
What Frances loved was to balance the books and to manage the accounting, and she took great pride in it. The only time anyone remembers her showing a temper was if someone hurt her kids. Then she could be as fierce as a mother bear. “If you were hers, you could do no wrong,” Janis said with a grin. “She would defend you, no matter what.”
Her professional love of numbers carried through to her personal accounts. “If she found she’d made a mistake in her checkbook, for example, Frances wouldn’t just correct it with the new balance,” Bryan said, laughing. “She would go back up to where the mistake was made, erasing every number back to the starting point.”
In her private life, Frances was an avid gardener, known for her beautiful flower beds and landscaping. She was also an accomplished seamstress and knitter. The blankets she created and passed down are treasured by her family. She was also involved in church work and its outreach. Special baby blankets she made to be distributed through the Children’s Hospital are appreciated every day by many who may have no idea who Frances Sparks was, but are touched by the legacy of her big heart.