Franchon Nails, a member of the Saint Simeon's Life Enrichment department, is in the "Transportation Biz". In other words she is our official driver. Using our buses and vans she transports residents from St. Simeon's to wherever they need to go like appointments, shopping, or errands. Franchon makes runs on Tuesday thru Friday in the afternoons and on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon. The official grocery shopping trip is on Wednesdays to Homeland at 31^st and Harvard. Residents sign up for rides on the sheet on the bulletin board by Paula Sampson's office.

This past year, St. Simeon's got a new bus, bought with the money the Auxiliary raised at Western Days two years ago. The residents really enjoy the new bus. They like having that "new bus" smell. It accommodates more residents (14 plus Franchon) and even two wheelchairs at a time. It is able to lift someone in his or her wheelchair onto the bus and then they can roll down the aisle to get to their seat. And the air-conditioning works!

The places that she has driven to that she enjoyed the most were to see the Azaleas at Woodward Park, the Day Lilies at Cleo Cox's gardens, and Wild Birds Unlimited at The Farm Shopping Center.

Franchon is very comfortable with driving. In fact she enjoys it so much the residents think she must like to drive all the time but when she is not working here she usually doesn't get behind the wheel. She enjoys the close contact she has with the residents. It is a good opportunity to get to know them better.

An entirely different responsibility that Franchon had last Spring in helping us get ready for JCAHO was to verify that all MSDS products Life Enrichment uses were covered in the MSDS Book. For any product missing she wrote a letter to the company asking for the MSDS sheet. This included everything from crayons to glue to nail dry for fingernail polish.

A new job that Franchon has had for three months is when there are families who are considering having someone come live here and need to come on Saturdays (when our Director of Admissions is not here) to visit, Franchon will provide scheduled tours for them. Sometimes they have flown in from out of state and the weekend is the only opportunity they will have so it is a big help to them. One Saturday she did three tours! And, best of all, every family she has shown around now has someone living here.

Franchon was born in Tulsa; her dad was in the military and moved her family to California when she was seven-years old. She was the middle child with a sister ten years older and a brother 18 months younger. She went to Del Paso Elementary School and Grant High School in Sacramento. She later attended Sacramento City College and California State University of Sacramento.

While in college in California, Franchon had a most interesting job. She worked as an elevator operator at a nuclear power plant. The elevator went underground and sometimes would just stop and couldn't move. She would be stuck there, closed in, for an hour and a half or so. The first time she almost panicked but she learned to relax and breathe easily and think positive thoughts and eventually got used to it. Maybe that's why driving a bus seems so stress-free by comparison!

In her third year as a criminal justice major (she wanted to be a criminal attorney and help people who could not afford an attorney) she decided she wanted to do something entirely different. She left the university and went to Bauder College for Fashion Designing. Here she was learning how to design clothing when her father had a stroke and she was needed back in Tulsa to assist her mother with his care and the care of her grandmother.

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