An Everyday Hero Reflecting on the Enduring Promise of America, Part 2

SPEAKER 01 : 0:00

Hello, everyone. You’re listening to Family Talk, a radio broadcasting ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Dr. James Dobson, and thank you for joining us for this program. Well, welcome once again to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh with a question for you. Did you know that most of the bread on your grocery store shelf is controlled by just two companies and one of them is not even U.S. owned? Well, after COVID exposed just how fragile America’s supply chains really are, one man decided to do something about it. His name is Dave Owen, former lieutenant governor of the state of Kansas. And on today’s edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, we’re going to hear a continuation of a conversation Dave had with Gary Bauer, our senior vice president of public policy here at the Dr. James Dobson Policy and Culture Center. In addition to being Kansas Lieutenant Governor back in the 1970s, Dave Owen also served as Bob Dole’s campaign chairman. He’s a lifelong man of faith, and he shared his remarkable journey from a small-town baptism to the halls of government to taking a tech company public on NASDAQ. That was on our last edition of Family Talk. On today’s program, Dave will explain why he co-founded Golden Waves Grain, a mission-driven company working to return America’s bread supply to America’s hands. Plus, Dave will also make the case for why Christians simply cannot afford to stay on the sidelines in civic life. That’s coming up on today’s edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk with our guest host, Gary Bauer.

SPEAKER 03 : 1:43

Well, welcome back to Family Talk. Great to have Dave Owen with us again today. Dave, welcome back. Really appreciate you spending some more time with us.

SPEAKER 02 : 1:52

Well, thank you, Gary. It’s a pleasure. And I’m just delighted to be back with you today. OK, well, let’s get right into it.

SPEAKER 03 : 1:58

You continue to work on Senator Dole’s Senate campaigns. And were you involved in his effort to the presidential race, too?

SPEAKER 02 : 2:07

I was up until the very last one. I was very central to all of those races. And matter of fact, probably my most intense campaign with him was when he was picked to run with Gerald Ford in 1797. But we I was very central. I was the assistant to Senator Bob Griffin on the floor. He was Ford’s campaign chairman on the floor. So Senator Griffin came up and wanted to. Kansas was on the front row because of the whole. So Senator Griffin wanted to be up there. So we sat side by side through the whole thing. And. But I was very instrumental in that. And then as the convention came to a close, Stu Spencer was up on the podium and we could just kind of look up at the podium. And all of a sudden I saw him doing this. And so he said, come up. So I went through the door underneath the podium and went in the backstage. I didn’t come on the stage, but Stu said, you know, you seem to be the guy closest to Senator Dole. So We need you to run the vice presidential part of this campaign and be the liaison with the campaign and the president, President Ford. So that’s what I did through that Ford Dole campaign. Wow.

SPEAKER 03 : 3:31

So, Dave, you know, one of the things Christians have been divided about, this used to drive Dr. Dobson crazy. And when he would get upset about it, he would call me and we’d get upset about it together. But it was, you know, we would run into pastors and pastors. just fellow believers who had convinced themselves that as Christians, they should stay out of government and out of politics because that was dirty and it wasn’t, you know, a godly thing to do. And of course, if Christians all did that, then the people that were making all the decisions about governing us would not be the right people.

SPEAKER 01 : 4:11

So—

SPEAKER 03 : 4:12

Dr. Dobson, for years, and the James Dobson Family Institute today is committed to pushing the idea of Christian citizenship. From everything I know about you, all of your opportunities in public life, your faith was always right there driving you, leading you in the decisions you made. So What would you say to our listeners that might be absent without leave in this battle that we’re in in our country about whether we’re going to remain one nation under God or not?

SPEAKER 02 : 4:47

If we are going to remain one nation under God, Christians have got to get involved because we see it at every level. We see it here in Arkansas. Christians and hunters, this is something I came across. Christians and hunters are the worst at getting involved in voting. Why, I do not know. But it’s resulted in our community of the just real liberal people taking over our government at every level, school board, city politics. We’ve got to change that because if there’s any hope for us going forward, Christians have got to get involved in the political arena.

SPEAKER 03 : 5:25

I don’t want to get you in trouble, Dave, but the church that you’re a proud member of now, does your pastor understand this need for the congregation to be active citizens?

SPEAKER 02 : 5:37

Absolutely, and he is very encouraging from the pulpit. I mean, he obviously tries to be even-handed about it, but he is a strong believer in involvement in politics for Christian people and encourages in every way possible. That’s great to hear.

SPEAKER 03 : 5:54

We need more pastors and priests and rabbis, faith leaders of all kinds to do that. I was under Secretary of Education for a couple of years under Reagan, and we were seeing it In textbooks even then, I mean, the textbooks have been rewritten to take Christianity out of the founding of America. And, you know, the Bible was the most widely read book in the colonies before the revolution. So it’s just interesting. It’s a tragedy that it’s gone this far where many children are being taught that America had nothing to do with Christianity. In fact, Christianity and religion is supposed to stay out of all of this. That is the exact opposite of what our founding fathers thought.

SPEAKER 02 : 6:42

Yeah, I would agree. And, you know, the opponents to that use that as their explanation of why people should stay out of politics. And so what we have, what’s happened is the wrong people have then got involved in politics and taken over our government at many levels.

SPEAKER 03 : 7:02

So, Dave, are you past your running for something part of your life? Because you’re exactly the kind of guy with this experience, you know. You want to make any kind of announcement today?

SPEAKER 02 : 7:14

I think I’m through with that. But you know this. Once you get hooked on it, you can’t let it go. And I still stay very involved. And currently, Laura and I both are helping. One of our friends run for governor of Kansas, a businessman who’s never been involved in politics before, but has written a lot of checks to others and finally just decided, why not me? You know, somebody needs to do something here. So we’re really proud of Philip Sarnicki, who’s running for governor in our state.

SPEAKER 03 : 7:47

Fantastic. Dave, since this is the James Dobson Family Institute, do you recall when you first heard about Dr. Dobson and did his writings and speeches have any impact on your own family?

SPEAKER 02 : 8:03

I think the first time that I became aware was I had a really good friend, John Erickson. John was a great athlete himself. He was the general manager of the Milwaukee Bucks when they signed Lew Alcindor. Kareem became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But then he was hired to be the president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. And that’s when we got connected. And he’s the one who first directed me to Dr. Dobson. So I began following his writings and so forth at that time. Then I spent 16, 18 years on the board of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes here in Kansas City working with John. used in the right direction in our city.

SPEAKER 03 : 8:49

Well, that’s fantastic. And, you know, we see today the influence that sports figures, both at the college level and at professional sports, can have by being honest and open about their Christian faith, can have a tremendous influence on other young Americans who are searching for the meaning of life. So, you know, I touched on this briefly when we began, but you were quite the athlete, right? Was it Ottawa University in Kansas?

SPEAKER 02 : 9:20

Yes. Ottawa University is just about 40 minutes south of Kansas City. And I I grew up in the Oberlin Park Baptist Church here, and there was a very close relationship at the time, the American Baptist Convention, with the university. And so it was almost like that was the only place I even thought about going. And I had a great career there in both basketball and track. I was elected to the Ottawa University Athletic Hall of Fame and became the president. I’m still very active with that program.

SPEAKER 03 : 9:56

We have a board member that is deeply involved in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. And it seems to me that there’s a quickening going on. I mean, just in the last year or so, whether it was the basketball March Madness or some of the Olympic events, And then this is not athletics, but it’s an example of somebody in the public eye using it for our faith. One of the Artemis astronauts was very open earlier this year in sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ. So athletics involves leadership. So it does provide a wonderful opportunity for men and women that follow the cross, doesn’t it? It does.

SPEAKER 02 : 10:52

and the influence that it has on little kids is just really, really big.

SPEAKER 03 : 10:57

Yeah, that’s very true. People might be wondering why we’re going to be talking about bread, but I mentioned in the introduction that you’ve got this great new company. I don’t know if it’s real new or been around for a while, and I don’t want to misdescribe this, but What’s motivated you at least in part is that we used to as a nation be able to buy the things that sustained us from people in our local community. So we knew the people that grew the wheat, that made the bread, and we knew the guy running the local store. And then as time passed, those things became bigger entities and the little guy kind of got pushed out of the way. I think one of the things you have said, talked about is that there are two gigantic companies that control virtually most of the bread supply that we take for granted. in America. And so I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but am I right that the purpose of this company is to try to connect again the whole process of making bread and having a connection between the people that make it and the people in the communities that are buying it?

SPEAKER 02 : 12:15

That’s exactly right. And, you know, the you described it perfectly that, you know, back in the day and a lot of it was just because it had to be that way because bread wouldn’t last very long. So you had to mill it and bake it in a community and then distribute it locally to people so that it would last long enough. And just to go back just one second, the reason that something like this kind of struck a nerve with me was when I was lieutenant governor, one of my duties was as head of the Economic Development Commission for the state of Kansas with a mission to create new businesses in the state and create jobs. And this is dead center for that. We’ll be hiring 141 people out there in northwest Kansas. That’s a big deal. Wow. But to further describe what it was all about, four of us were just sitting around the table out at the golf course in Goodland, Kansas one day and got to talking about, you know, you got the greatest, the best wheat in the world is grown right here within this northwest Kansas area and Colorado and Nebraska, the tri-state area. and yet there’s no mill there’s no bakery out here and so we got to thinking about the way bread is distributed now and what happens is you mill somebody mills the wheat the farmer ships the wheat to a storage facility somebody buys it and then they may ship it two or three other places before it ever gets to a mill to be milled into flour Then that gets shipped to a bakery and it might go through, the flour might go through two or three spots before it ends up in the bakery. And then the bakery bakes the bread and then jobbers come by, pick up the bread and take it to the individual grocery stores. Well, that’s a lot of moving around of the raw product. So what we came up with was we’ll build a commercial bakery supported by They’ll deliver it to our facility. We’ll mill it into flour, blow it over into the bakery, bake it into bread, put it on trucks and take it to a distribution warehouse in Kansas City. have it then delivered to the grocery stores right along with everything else that they deliver to their members. Well, that takes almost, I don’t know, 18, 20% out of the cost of a loaf of bread when you eliminate all that middleman and delivery system. And we can get, you know, the other program probably no telling how long it takes to get the bread on the shelf. But our case, from the time we bake it into bread, it should be on the grocery store shelf within three It’s just turning the whole thing upside down because this whole system hasn’t changed for 100 years and we’re disrupting the system.

SPEAKER 03 : 15:05

Which is a good thing to do because as we’re learning, sadly, in various emergencies, there’s all kinds of problems and the things that we’ve taken for granted. We could spend a long time just talking about how the trade relationship that developed between the United States and communist China really started in earnest in the year 2000. And that ended up resulting in the closure of like 80,000 American factories worldwide. And the decades that followed and all because we wanted to get stuff cheaper. But then we needed that stuff. And we’re relying on somebody that currently is not really a friend of the United States. So doing the more and more home here at home from our food to our medicine seems to me to be a very wise thing to do.

SPEAKER 02 : 15:56

Yeah. You know, you mentioned something earlier about the owners of the bread companies that we use in our country. One of the companies is owned by an investment firm in New York. The other one, and I think this is a national security issue, the other huge bread company. there isn’t any reason that we can’t be baking our own bread in the United States of America.

SPEAKER 03 : 16:19

Yes. So this model that you’re starting out with in Kansas, do you envision this something that then could be duplicated in other parts, particularly in the Midwest, or what’s your ultimate goal here?

SPEAKER 02 : 16:34

Yeah, we’ve already been contacted as people have learned about this and asking us if we could duplicate this in other parts of the country. We definitely plan to do that. We can easily, once we get the first one operating, we can easily duplicate it just about anywhere.

SPEAKER 03 : 16:50

Well, that’s exciting. I mean, you already took one company public, right? That tech company.

SPEAKER 02 : 16:56

Yes, I have. We did. We took a company that back when we first, again, it was kind of like this. We discovered that police cars were still using VHS tapes in the trunk of the car to record their video. So we designed the first digital in-car video system for police cars. And as you mentioned earlier, we were successful in taking that public on NASDAQ and sold our product all over the world, really.

SPEAKER 03 : 17:22

You know, Dave, I’m one of those people, I guess it’s a sign of age. You know, I yearn for the simpler time that used to be in America and a better sense of community. Almost every day you see another story about people they don’t even know their neighbors. You know, they’ve lived next door to somebody for five years and never done any more than, you know, wave and that’s it. I came across a story the other day. I think it was a recent one. It was an article or an essay that you wrote about an earlier time in America when a flower sack could become a dress. And I found it to be a really moving story. Would you mind explaining what I’m referring to?

SPEAKER 02 : 18:08

My grandfather, I was born in a little town in Arkansas, southern Arkansas, and my grandfather, he was quite the entrepreneur. He had a He was the justice of the peace. He was the postmaster. But part of what happened, I worked in the store when I was a little kid, and women would come in looking for the flour sacks when they were delivered because they would take those sacks and make them into dresses and clothes. during World War II. And things were tight. tight. So the one company I remember in particular, Dixie Lily Flower, they just did a tremendous job of coming up with patterns that the women just loved.

SPEAKER 03 : 19:04

And so they actually decorated the flower sack because they knew that people on really tight budgets, this was a way to help what they were doing in order to pinch a penny until Abe cried out in pain and save a

SPEAKER 02 : 19:24

of their existence and so to get a sack of flour that you could then use the sack for something else was just and you know that’s as you mentioned earlier that’s what I call connecting in your business connecting with your constituents your customers and serving their needs and more than just selling them something and I commend the companies that recognize that at that time and and did that. That was pretty tremendous.

SPEAKER 03 : 19:56

You know, Dave, one of the explanations for Dr. Dobson’s success, the main explanation, of course, is that God blessed his ministry. But multiple people, I mean, this happened over the years. People would tell me, even when Dr. Dobson wasn’t present, that when they listened to him over the radio, he sounded like their grandfather or their next-door neighbor or the guy they knew down the street. He had this ability to make every mother and father feel like he was talking directly to them. And I think that’s the same kind of thing we had when in a simpler time in America, you know, when you knew the businessman down the street, he wasn’t going to sell you a junker of a car because you’d see him in church in a couple of weeks and you were going to hear he was going to hear from you. Right.

SPEAKER 02 : 20:47

So.

SPEAKER 03 : 20:48

Everything we can do to restore those connections in America, I think, is going to be good for our future.

SPEAKER 02 : 20:53

I totally agree. You know, because of my—I’ve lived a long time. I had the opportunity to be around when people still drove horse-drawn wagons to town to get their groceries. I picked cotton by hand, you know, took it over to the gin and watched it being ginned into— realize what it was like.

SPEAKER 03 : 21:16

Yes. Yeah, we love the new technology and so forth and the conveniences, but we’ve got to be able to rediscover that even with all of our gadgets and staring at our phones. We need to look at the guy across the table or the lady across the table or the child sitting there that needs guidance at dinnertime. And that’s, of course, what Jim devoted his ministry and life to was getting families to do that family time together. Let me close by asking you, are you an optimist? I mean, obviously, as a man of faith, you’re an optimist about how it all ends up. But what about America? Are you an optimist or a pessimist about whether our best days could still be ahead of us?

SPEAKER 02 : 22:01

I’m totally an optimist, and our best days are ahead of us because I see, as you mentioned, I see an awakening taking place amongst young people, and that’s where it has to start. And I think we’re in for the best times of our lives going forward. I really do.

SPEAKER 03 : 22:17

Well, that’s a great note to end on. Dave Owen. Dave, you’ve been an everyday hero through your entire life, your public service, your work in business, your work in your community and in your church. We need a lot more men and women like you. And I know if Dr. Dobson were here today, he would probably want to talk to you for another couple of hours. So God bless you for all that you’ve done. And it’s been a real pleasure to spend some time with you.

SPEAKER 02 : 22:46

Thank you so much, Gary. Thank you.

SPEAKER 01 : 22:52

Dave Owen is proof that a life built around faith and service never runs out of things to do. You’re listening to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, and we featured Gary Bauer’s conversation with Dave Owen, co-founder of Golden Waves Grain, a man who spent a lifetime putting his convictions into action. If you missed any part of today’s broadcast, you want to share it with a friend or to learn more about Golden Waves Grain, visit jdfi.net. And also keep in mind, Gary Bauer, our Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the Dobson Policy and Culture Center, writes a weekly blog for JDFI.net. He also hosts a twice-monthly podcast called Defending Faith, Family, and Freedom. To learn more about Gary’s podcast and blog posts, go to JDFI.net as well. The Dr. James Dobson Family Institute exists to preserve and strengthen the institution of the family, to share the gospel of Jesus Christ, and to stand firm for the sanctity of life, religious freedom, and righteousness in the culture. That’s the mission Dr. Dobson gave his life to and it’s one we are committed to carrying forward. And if that mission matters to you, I know you’ll be happy to continue to pray for us. We also invite you to come alongside us with a financial contribution of any amount. Every donation helps us reach more families with biblical truth and practical wisdom. You can give using a credit or debit card when you go to jdfi.net. You can call in your contribution. A member of our constituent care team will be happy to receive your call when you dial 877-732-6825. That’s 877-732-6825. And keep in mind, we still love to receive your cards and letters in the mail, and you can put your check inside an envelope addressed to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, P.O. Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado, the zip code 80949. By the way, when you write to us, make sure you also include a note as to how you consume the media, as they say. Whether you listen on a radio station, give us the city and call letters at that outlet, or if you’re listening to us online. Again, you can write to us at Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, or just use those initials, JDFI for short. P.O. Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 80949. Well, I’m Roger Marsh. On behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for spending time with us today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. The freedoms we enjoy today were hard won by those who came before us, and it’s up to all of us to protect them. Here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we’re committed to defending religious liberty and the timeless values that shaped our nation. We equip you to stand for godly principles in your own community. So thank you for partnering with us to protect faith, family and freedom for future generations.