A Cynthiana native is taking over a well-known shop, Major Dads, with the help of his brother and a couple of close friends. He hopes to strengthen ties with the community and offer a helping hand wherever or to whomever.

Donald Jewell stepped away from reorganizing the shop to talk to The Winchester Sun about making his dream come true, a passion for the military and his love for helping others.

Winchester Sun: How did you get interested in the store?

Donald Jewell: I have known for a long time I wanted to have my own business. It’s something my brother and I had talked about for a lot of years, and Joseph he came along the last few years.

I’ve known the previous owners Greg and Denise Yates who are wonderful people. They’re like a second family to me because I’ve spent many a time over here, many, many hours in a day just hanging out with them, talking to them.

When they decided that it was time for them to move on to something else, they actually approached me. I came in here one day to buy a hat, and they approached me and made an offer.

They were like ‘Hey, we are going to get out of this and we would like to see it kind of stay in the community and stay open,” and things of that nature.

They said, ‘We thought of you first’ because I talked to them myself about wanting to do my own thing because I felt like a lot of times in other places that I’ve worked I was handcuffed with being able to use my creativity, with being able to use my ability to think things through relatively quickly and come up with some really neat ideas on how to do things.

I jumped all over it, and we hit the ground running.

WS: What did you do before this?

DJ: “I worked for a lot of years in a call center environment. My last gig before I came here I was working at Camping World of Georgetown as a parts counter specialist. It was a different version of customer service.

I worked at Walmart for three and a half years, Gordmans for two and a half years, all the while working at Xerox during the day and I worked at these other places at night.

I just got tons of customer service experience, and this is my dream of what I wanted a business to be, where it would be customer based.

I like talking to people, I like having that interaction, one-on-one with a person.

I love doing it over the phone, but it’s different. Because you can’t see if that person is genuine with their reaction on the other side, whereas in person it’s hard for you not to let me see how you feel.

That’s why I like face to face, the brick and mortar type environment more than I do the online stuff because you don’t get that interaction.

To me, you can’t build a strong enough community if you’re not engaging on a regular basis with the community you’re a part of.

WS: What are some ways moving forward you want to build with the community?

DJ: “There are several different ideas we have talked about. I’m going to continue a tradition that Denise and Greg started, and they do a lot with their ROTC program, they have different competitions throughout the years, and they go to these competitions, they sell their merchandise at these competitions.

I’m going to work closely with leadership in the community and see what I can do to help improve the community. If that’s me working and doing some volunteer work for the community, I’ll do it, if its donating merchandise, money, time or whatever. Whatever the community needs, that’s what we’re going to let them know we’re here for.

WS: How many years did you serve in the military?

DJ: “Thirteen and a half years, all active duty.”

WS: What inspired you to go in and do that?

DJ: I have known that wanted to be in the military ever since I was about 6-years-old. I was a huge G.I. Joe fan growing up, and that played a huge part of me becoming G.I. Joe in real life.

There were only three things I ever wanted to do in my life: be a soldier, be a firefighter, and be a minister. When you think about those three, you’re always helping other people. And that is something that I always knew I was meant to do; it’s what I was created to do.

Junior high was when I started to get that itch because it was when we started studying more about the history of the military, and then I got into high school, ROTC, that just helped to fuel the fire even higher.

The summer after my junior year, I went into the DEPTH program, which is the delayed entry program, where I enlisted in the Army, but I couldn’t go for a year.

I graduated high school May 30 and June 2 I was in boot camp.

So, I didn’t wait. I knew where I wanted to go, I made my mind up relatively quickly, and I kept that path.”