JR Manning

As you already know, my friend, Paige Birgfeld, from Grand Junction, Colorado, left her home on June 28, 2007 and hasn’t been seen since. All of us who knew her were shocked to learn that she had been leading a secret life, which may or may not have had something to do with her disappearance.

You can read more about her and her story by following the links on the right side of this column. Even more stories about Paige can be found in her special forum on a website called Help Find The Missing. The links are below.

Next Tuesday, June 10, her story will be featured on CBS News 48 Hours. The program has been under development since February, and CBS has been following her story since the beginning. (She has also been featured on NBC’s Dateline and ABC’s 20/20.)

The program will air on June 10 at 9:00 EDT / 8:00 CDT. Check your local listings.

IMPORTANT LINKS:

Help Find The Missing: Main Site Entrance

Help Find The Missing: Paige’s Forum

Help Find The Missing Blog: The Amazing Double Life of Paige Birgfeld

Help Find The Missing Blog: The Untold Story of Paige Birgfeld

Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends out there.

It’s a bittersweet Christmas for the family and friends of Paige Birgfeld. As we reported to you some months ago, Paige is a friend of ours from the direct selling industry. She left her home at 10:30 PM on June 28 and has not been seen, or heard from, since. She has been profiled on ABC News. Her case aired on America’s Most Wanted. Hundreds have searched, unsuccessfully, for her. She remains missing.

Her parents are distraught, left behind in Colorado. Paige’s three children were ripped from their grandparents by a magistrate and custody was taken away from Paige’s parents and granted to their father, Paige’s ex-husband. The children are living with him, in Pennsylvania, and have no contact with their grandparents, we cannot tell you why that is. You can speculate why that is and probably be correct.

Paige Birgfeld
Paige’s story is, sadly, not an unusual one today. Hundreds of people are missing around the country. You hear about the high-profile cases, like Stacy Peterson or Natalee Holloway, which is a good thing, but for every Stacy and every Natalee, there are hundreds more cases that you never hear about.

You can read about Paige at a new site called Help Find the Missing. Log on (follow the link to the left) and look at the list of Missing people to navigate to Paige’s page. One thread lists all of the relevant media stories about her and her case. While you’re there, look over the other missing people. Who knows, you may have the one missing piece of information that is needed to bring someone home.

It’s up to us. Merry Christmas to you all, and please, remember Paige and her family today as you are surrounded by your own loved ones.

My friend, Paige Dixon, aka Paige Beigler, aka Paige Birgfeld, of Grand Junction, Colorado has been missing since last Thursday. She took a phone call at 10:00 PM, left her 3 kids with the live-in nanny, went out and never came back. More disturbing, is that her car was found on Sunday night, fully engulfed in flame. Before you jump to conclusions, there have been a rash of vandals burning cars in the area. A car appearing to be abandoned for three days would be a tempting target.

An investigator from scaredmonkeys.com is also on the case and has done yeoman’s service in turning up evidence in this case.

Paige is (note the present tense) a Pampered Chef consultant, and there is an entire community of PC Consultants that are beside themselves with concern and worry for Paige.

Why three names? Paige, a single mother, has been married twice.

This is very disturbing - it’s the kind of thing you see on television. It’s the kind of thing you see in movies. It’s the kind of thing you read in books. It’s not the kind of thing that happens to someone you know - but obviously, it can.

The featured event of the year for anyone in a home-based business is the national conference held by the business owner’s partner. For Mary Kay Consultants, it’s the gathering in Dallas that everyone looks forward to. For those of us who are Independent Consultants with the Pampered Chef, it’s the national conference in Chicago every year.

This year, we attended the conference in the second wave of consultants. Second wave? There are so many consultants who attend conference that there are actually three conferences, all identical, and we’re all divided into three groups. We were in the second group this year.

There is so much that goes on at conference, from seminars to the introduction of top performers to the announcement of new products. It’s an intense three days!

For us this year, the highlight of the conference was visiting the stunning facility that we refer to as the Home Office, in Addison, Illinois. The facility is right off Army Trail Road (for those of you who are familiar with the greater Chicago area) and it is actually visible from I-355. It was fun to meet some of the home office staff, especially as The Kitchen Guy. There aren’t that many men who are “Cheffers,” so we were kind of a novelty in our tour.

But something in our tour was missing.

The Pampered Chef has been in business for 26 years now. It was the brainchild of Doris Christopher, who started this multi-million dollar operation, with her husband Jay, in the basement of their suburban Chicago home all those years ago. It has grown into one of the most successful direct marketing companies in the world and is certainly one of the most respected.

Doris built the business around the concept that family dynamics are much improved if the family dines together around the family table and discusses life. She remains committed to that concept, no matter how large the business grows. (All us consultants are a little too familiar with “The Boss.” We all refer to her as “Doris,” like she’s our best friend. In a way, she is our best friend, because she gave us all the same opportunity. Forgive us for addressing her in the familiar form, as if she’d know us if we met on the street.)

Along the lines of the family dynamic concept, Doris and Jay Christopher, along with the Pampered Chef, began a family resiliency program at the University of Illinois in February of 2000 through a gift of $500,000.00. (Doris is a grad of the U of I.) The program funds graduate student fellowships in Human and Community Development, funds research grants, and hosts a lecture series on family resiliency that is open to the public. (You can read more about it at http:// www.familyresiliency.uiuc.edu/news/news.html )

More recently, through a most generous gift of over $11 million, a special facility was built on the campus to house the Family Resiliency Program as well as to provide a laboratory to study family dynamics. It is a stunning facility, as you can see in the photos.

The missing item in my home office tour was a visit to the facility in Champaign. Luckily, my “other job” took me to Champaign last week. I took advantage of that stop to make my pilgrimage to the site, just two weeks after the National Conference in Chicago.

Did I go in? Of course not. The folks there are working. It would be like you walking into a busy facility somewhere and demanding a tour because your uncle’s brother in law hung the wallpaper in the rest rooms. No, I only convinced a passing student to take a photo of me next to the sign, to prove that I’m one of (probably only a few) consultants who have actually seen the facility first hand.

It is a beautiful facility, isn’t it? Of course, it’s still in Illinois. It’s an unwritten law in Illinois that once a facility is completed and landscaped, someone has to tear up the street and wreck the new sidewalks.

Just the same, this is a stunning facility and a most interesting program that has been started at the U of I. Best of all, it all started, 26 years ago, in the form of a dream that took shape in a basement. Every family should do as well.

Thanks, Doris.