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PATRONS | Spring 2018 24 PATRONS | Spring 2018 24 ATRON PROFILES from California and Kentucky to Hong Kong. e company has come a long way since Bo and Josh's grandmother Ethelyn started the business 64 years ago. Recently divorced with $10,000 to her name, Ethelyn packed up her family and moved from Omaha to Oakland to make a fresh start. ere, she went to work at a toy store. Drawing on her experience watching her father start and run the first supermarket in Omaha, she soon came to realize running her own store was in her wheelhouse. In 1954, she opened a toy store on Lakeshore Avenue. She eventually began selling school supplies to local nursery schools and discovered a higher calling—serving teachers. Ethelyn's children, Mike, Charlie and Saranne soon began working at the store with their mother. After reaching adulthood, Mike and Charlie joined the business full- time. Because both loved living in Southern California, the business eventually moved to Carson in the mid-1970s, expanding into product development and manufacturing. e company has since evolved to producing indoor and outdoor classroom furniture for preschools and elementary schools, as well as a broad range of school supplies and learning tools for teachers and parents. "My grandma put us in a really neat industry," says Bo. "My father and uncle did an unbelievable job growing the business and building a really sound infrastructure." After graduating from the University of Arizona, Bo began working at the company alongside his dad, Mike. A visit to Lakeshore's retail store in Pasadena would prove fateful to Bo's future, and also to a young store manager named Dawn Herman, who had just experienced the most successful store opening in the company's history. "My father and I said, 'We need to find out what she is doing differently so we can replicate it in our other stores,'" Bo says of the meeting and store tour. Impressed with her management skills, Bo's dad promoted Dawn to be Lakeshore's district sales manager and later to be director of sales. Bo says although he "absolutely fell for Dawn immediately," it wasn't until a few years later they began dating and then became engaged. With plans in the works for a wedding with a guest list of 400+ employees, Dawn would receive unsettling news about her health. At age 30, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. e diagnosis came with other devastating news. "ey told me I was going to go through some pretty gnarly chemo and that I was not going to be able to have kids," Dawn says. With Dawn scheduled to begin chemotherapy in just a few days, the couple cancelled their big wedding and ran away to Las Vegas to get married. Despite being "so scared about all of it," Bo quickly became an instant expert on breast cancer, picking up Susan Love's "e Breast Book" and reading it cover to cover that night. "He interviewed surgeons; he was very active in finding out what the treatment was going to do. He got really involved," Dawn says. "roughout our first year of marriage we were both bald. He shaved his head so we could be bald together." Bonded rough Commitment Both witnesses to the failed marriages of their parents, the couple survived their challenging first year of marriage aligned in THE KAPLANS: KAYLA, TAHANI, BEN, BO, MAX, GRACE, DAWN