When Julie O’Keefe was a junior at Pawhuska High School, one event on one single day changed her life.

The school hosted a career day, and Nan Drummond, proprietor of a Pawhuska store called The Prairie Flower, came to speak. Drummond had majored in fashion merchandising, and her talk was inspirational.

“I was 16,” recalls O’Keefe. “I went home and asked if I could get a job.”

Morgan Hays, the grandfather who raised her with his wife, Betty, assented. He dropped her off in front of The Prairie Flower with only five words of advice. “Just use your good manners,” he said.

She did, and she persuaded Drummond to hire her. She washed windows, did odd jobs, and eventually worked her way into stocking and jobs that required more responsibility.

“That one person that one day took me all the way around the world,” O’Keefe said.

Now, O’Keefe and her business partners are hoping to do the same thing for a new generation of Pawhuskans. Last week, the board of the Pawhuska Business Development Center, approved  O’Keefe and her partners, Danette Daniels, Celeste Beaupre and Roxanne Bailey, as the first major tenant at the building commonly referred to as the business incubator.

When NDN Manufacturing starts up – as soon as some modifications are made to its 5,000-square-foot bay – it will immediately hire 20 people in the first new manufacturing jobs to hit Pawhuska in several years.

O’Keefe and her partners already have a solid client base to buy the products they will make, including candles and T-shirts, the former for U.S. Marine Corps base exchanges and 164 airport stores called America!, the latter for the U.S. Army.

They also have a solid base of experience. O’Keefe has spent her career since graduating in 1985 from Oklahoma State University – like Drummond, with a degree in fashion merchandising – in the mass production of products for retailers like the Horchow Collection and the hotelier Marriott. Beaupre, who plans to move from Virginia to Pawhuska for a year, is a former training coordinator for AT&T who will train locals for jobs and hopes to attract high school students to training courses and future successful employment. And Beaupre’s daughter, who stands willing to help, is a successful marketer for Target and other companies. O’Keefe and Daniels are also the co-founders of The Cedar Chest in Pawhuska, which sells custom Osage clothing and other Native American goods. O’Keefe’s work has long involved taking, for instance, an item found in an antique store, then turning around and finding someone who could make 10,000 duplicates of it. Outdoor benches, toilet paper holders, a sofa – anything.

“It’s all just widgets,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if its soap or a sofa.”

O’Keefe and Daniels are both Osage, and use that and the fact that their goods are made domestically to get government contracts.

“It’s all American made,” she says. “It’s hard to find manufacturing in the United States and the military wants to buy American.”

And the military, like any other large groups, pretty much buys everything the rest of us do: Families buy special candles when service members come home from their deployments, they use soap, of course, and the Army goes through a huge number of those ubiquitous T-shirts with US Army and its logo on the chest. Soon to be made not only in America, but in Pawhuska, America.

After the candle-making and T-shirt silk-screening operations are set up in Pawhuska, NDN Manufacturing also expects to start a third prong of manufacturing in Pawhuska: A cut-and-sew clothing operation. “We’re still getting machinery for that,” O’Keefe says.

The company’s inspiration is simple, borne of O’Keefe’s love for her hometown and sadness at seeing it decline since the 1980s.

“Our main goal is to bring business from the outside in,” she says. “I think Pawhuska needs a jolt as far as bringing in business. It could be a really cool thing for the town.”

“Grandpa (Morgan Hays) was city manager for 30 years. When I was growing up, Pawhuska had taxis, dress shops, a carpet mill. It was a busy place, but when oil fell, the market eroded to what it is today.

“Those pieces need to be picked back up because this is still a nice town. We have an established community that needs someone to pay attention to how to grow it and to stick with it for 20, 25 years.

“When they say it takes a village, they mean it.”

Success also takes imagination, thinking and dreaming outside the box – something that has been a constant in O’Keefe’s life even when she was growing up in Pawhuska.

“My Barbies were always living in castles and swank places,” she says. “I made the places up back then but now I’d tell you it was New York.

“And I played a lot of dress-up. Every kid should have a dress-up box. My friends and I would take my aunt’s old formals and go play dress-up in the Chinese Gardens, where we’d have tea parties and go on dates with ‘movie stars.’”

She hopes, with NDN Manufacturing, to instill some of that creativity back in Pawhuska, bringing some old way to today, to spark others as Nan Drummond sparked her.

When the company starts hiring, its personnel aims are pretty simple and it will cast a hiring net from Bartlesville to Tulsa to Ponca City.

“We’re interested in people who are really interested in learning some skills,” O’Keefe says. “And not just young people. We’ll hire elders, too.”

This article was originally published in The Bigheart Times and is used with permission.