Libby Sheard has found much to be grateful for over the years, from the idyllic childhood she enjoyed in Little Rock, a few doors down from the home she lives in today, to a job she loved and retired from earlier this month.
"I love what they do. It was the best job ever. I said that for 20 years. I couldn't quit saying that," says Sheard, who retired last month after 20 years as executive director of the Little Rock Realtors Association.
It was a job she did not know she wanted.
Stuart Mackey, a friend since childhood, called in 2003 to let her know that the woman who had served for 47 years in that position was stepping down. He thought Sheard might be a good fit for the job.
Sheard, at the time, was assistant to Karen Fetzer, executive director of Rotary Club of Little Rock.
"It was some of her work at Rotary that kind of caught my attention," says Mackey, then president-elect of the association's board. "Our previous director had given her resignation without a whole lot of fanfare or time and we were scrambling to get somebody in, and I realized that Libby had a good solid background and had done some work in real estate and was doing some work in association management. Both of these were necessary components for the person who was leading the Little Rock Realtors Association."
Sheard initially dismissed the idea. It was a big job, she protested, and she was not ready to go from the 30 hour-per-week schedule she had had for six years to full time.
"He said, 'Do me a favor and go to the interview,' and I said, 'Well, of course I'll do that,'" she says.
She spent little time preparing because she did not intend to be hired. But she got a call-back for the next day, and she was offered the job.
"She got in and brought some new stuff from her own place, worked with the stuff that was there already and moved us professionally forward to the nice association that we are now," Mackey says.
The job required travel for training and advocacy work, and made for some interesting stories as well. Mackey remembers hearing about Sheard's being in the U.S. Capitol as it was evacuated because of a plane flying erratically in the area.
"They rushed her out and literally ran her and everybody else about a block away from the Capitol," Mackey says, adding that Sheard had removed her shoes before the evacuation because her feet hurt from walking all day.
As the association's executive director, Sheard's focus was on helping Realtors around the state.
"We want well-trained and educated Realtors out there so that was always my goal, to make sure my Little Rock Realtors members were trained to the best of my ability," she says. "It occurred to me one day that a lot of Realtors in town didn't know about so many of the cool things we have here in Little Rock."
She arranged tours for small groups of Realtors in places like the National Center for Toxicological Research in Jefferson County, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, Arkansas Children's Hospital and the basement of the Clinton Presidential Center.
"I wanted them to know what their clients were coming to do. I thought, you need to be educated and you need to be able to say, 'Oh, you're coming to work at Children's Hospital -- I just took a tour there and it's a cool place,'" Sheard says.
She credits her mother, Sissi Brandon, with her appreciation of such things.
"My mom taught me, growing up, to be very aware of my surroundings," she says. "We always traveled by car for vacations and we would stop and knock on a factory door and ask if we could take a tour."
They would stop to picnic at historic cemeteries along the way.
"We would run around looking for our birthdays on monuments and we would be so tired after lunch we would sleep all afternoon," she says. "My mother and grandmother would always drive and my dad would fly to meet us because it would be a two-day drive to Florida or wherever and he would have to work."
THE WORLD OF BUSINESS
Her father, Doug Brandon, who ran Brandon Furniture and served two terms as a state representative and one as a senator, introduced her to the business world.
Sheard, the oldest of four, started going to work with her father before she was 12, answering phones, taking payments and filling out receipts.
"The gift dad gave me was forcing me to work there," she says. "I learned everything I took to Little Rock Realtors Association, as far as how to run a business. In all those 20 years -- however many months that is -- I balanced 10 accounts a month to the penny. I never gave up if I couldn't balance them because [my father] would never let me give up at Brandon Furniture."
Sheard met her late husband, Greg, during her senior year at Mount St. Mary Academy.
"We had two boy cousins from Dad's sister in Washington, D.C., both older than me," she says.
Sheard's father had arranged for the cousins to work for him and go to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
"I suddenly had two older brothers in the neighborhood and I got really popular," she says. "They were East Coast guys -- nice, cute and fun."
Sheard visited them at the university for their Kappa Sigma Island Orgy weekend, and they set her up on a blind date with Greg, the "safest, most responsible" guy they knew. By the time she left Little Rock for Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., in 1976, she was smitten.
"I found myself riding the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. bus from Columbia to Fayetteville for weekends to date Greg five or six times that year," she says. "Greg and I fell in love and I decided to move to UA and I graduated from there and stayed an extra year and got my master's in secondary education."
THREE-YEAR HONEYMOON
They moved as newlyweds to Canton, Texas, to revive a friend's neglected crepe myrtle farm. She worked as a long-term substitute within the three school districts in that area, each evening returning home to the farm.
"I gardened all of our vegetables," she says. "I would start dinner at 2 in the afternoon and everything would be made from scratch. It was a three-year honeymoon for us, and I kind of think that's why we did so well together, because we had that three years to be newlyweds."
After her father was diagnosed with cancer, she and Greg moved to Hot Springs so he could help with the family business.
"We had our two boys there and we had the best friends in the world there and it was just a happy life," she says. "Friday nights were, 'I have bacon, you have eggs, let's eat,' just neighbors grabbing what you have out of the fridge and the kids, kind of like our childhood, just running around and coming home after dark. We lived near the race track and when the babies would wake up from their naps I would put them in their strollers and we would stroll down the backside of the track and watch the horses run."
The boys were toddlers when the Sheards moved to Little Rock.
"Our house abuts the same sledding hill I grew up on," she says from the living room of the Heights home she bought with her late husband 34 years ago. "That's what sold this house to me. I love it here. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else."
PROPERTY MANAGER
Sheard had run a patio wicker furniture shop for a few years in Hot Springs, and as her boys grew she was ready to re-enter the working world. She mentioned as much to Dickson Flake at a cocktail party one night.
"I wasn't asking him for a job," she says. "I was really trying to figure out what I was qualified for. I had been a mom and I had run our family business, which might qualify you for a lot but in my mind, I didn't see that as experience."
Flake, though, told her to be at his office at 8 a.m. the next day -- with her resume.
"I said, 'Yes, sir,'" she says. "Then I ran home, typed up a resume and woke Greg up in the middle of the night to ask him what he thought about it."
Flake introduced her to Dale Cook, who talked with her about property management.
"Then Dickson came in and he said, 'Well, Dale, do you think y'all will work well together?' I looked at both of them and Dale said, 'Oh, yes, I want to hire her.' I looked at him and I said, 'I've got to go home and tell my husband I just took a job, because you just never turn down an interview."
She had worked as a property manager for Barnes Quinn Flake and Anderson for three years when the Rotary Club opportunity arose, followed by the one at the Realtors Association.
"It was a combination of the two -- property association management and real estate. I walked in feeling like, 'I can do this,'" she says. "Association management is kind of a formula. You all do the same thing, it's just about different stuff."
There were years when Sheard had to finagle ways to make that formula work.
"The recession was tough. We lost a third of our membership, and we're a member-driven organization, but we rallied," she says. "We cut the budget to the quick and we survived and we thrived and I saw that as an opportunity to grow our association in not a different direction but a bigger direction."
Sheard had to get creative in providing educational opportunities, host trade shows and hold meetings with shrinking budgets.
HOSTESS WITH THE MOSTEST
Her friend, longtime Realtor Kathe Sumbles, says Sheard's frugality was masked by her hosting skills.
"She was making sure everybody had a good time," Sumbles says. "She has always been a stellar advocate for keeping the reserves up and making sure the budget was balanced and at the same time still providing a high level of service for the agents at their events and that kind of thing."
Sheard also improved the way the association functions, Sumbles says.
"The office had lagged behind quite a bit and Libby had a real big job to catch us up. She did a phenomenal job of that and she was the perfect person to take that job at the time," Sumbles says. "It was a monumental job to bring the technology of the Realtors Association up to where we were beginning to function in our individual businesses."
Cathy Owen, chairman of Eagle Bank, has known Sheard since they were together in first grade at Our Lady of the Holy Souls Catholic School.
"People often say that they notice her big smile and she never meets a stranger, but they don't realize the business savvy that lies behind what you see on the surface," Owen says. "Being female, and she and I about the same height -- we are both vertically challenged -- so I think based on those things people underestimate her abilities until they have really seen her in action."
Sheard is grateful to the friends who supported her over the years, including Mackey.
"That poor man had to take calls from me 10 times a day just because it was so new and I had questions. I could write a business letter but I wasn't confident and I wanted to relay good information, so he would get on the phone with me, let me type it out and reread it to him," she says. "He was such a busy man to never once give me one iota of an inkling that I was bothering him."
Once Sheard accumulated some experience in the job, she returned the favor, mentoring newer associate executives.
She valued the bonds she formed with people through her work.
"People would come into my office and I got to know so many people -- and they appreciated what I was doing. That's a rarity nowadays," she says. "They voiced it and they offered suggestions. I told someone the other day that in this job you're a family counselor, a marriage counselor, a quasi attorney, a teacher and in my case at the office, a plumber."
Sheard says she will miss those connections, but she is looking forward to a few fun trips -- to see a friend in Montecito, Calif., one cousin in Panama City Beach, Fla., and another in Rehoboth Beach, Del. She hopes to go with family to the Pacific Northwest sometime soon as well.
She and Greg went to Seattle about 10 years ago after discovering that Todd Rundgren would be playing there.
"We fell in love in college to Todd Rundgren," she says, recalling how they bought a bottle of wine and food truck fare to enjoy during the show at Chateau St. Michelle Winery in Woodinville, Wash.
When Greg could no longer work because his cancer had progressed, their friends and family stepped in to help.
"They just built their own schedule and got together and between my mom, my sister and my girlfriends, they would call me and say, 'I'm driving today,' and they would pick him up, take him to the appointment," she says. "They would drop him off and he would go in and I would come down and go to the appointment with him and then there would be someone down there waiting for him and I would go back to work and they would take him somewhere or bring him home."
One of those friends was Jan Alman.
"We know she would do the same for us if we were in a situation like that," Alman says. "We're in a supper club group together because all of us like to cook and entertain and that's really fun, especially if the weather permits, to be on her back patio. That's her happy spot. I just enjoy being her friend. She's just got the biggest heart -- huge, huge, huge."
Both Sheard sons, along with their wives, returned home at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, working remotely and spending time with their father.
"The day covid hit Arkansas, we found out Greg's brain tumor had come back for a third time. It was six weeks after his second operation," she says. "He came through two surgeries great. He had no deficits -- he could walk and talk and eat and think and laugh -- but the doctor said the third time we probably wouldn't be so lucky. Greg made the decision not to pursue it any further."
Their son, Brandon, is an agent for Kelley Commercial Partners in Little Rock; Ben works for Toast in Kansas City, Mo.
Sheard worked throughout the pandemic, mostly in her office, guiding the association's membership through ever-changing covid-19 guidelines.
Her decision to retire this year did not come easy, but she felt it was the right time.
"I thought, 'I'm in a good place. I'm healthy, I'm happy.' I felt like it was time to get out, on a good note," she says. "I want to travel, I want to go to Hot Springs on the lake and see a friend on a Tuesday, just because. I want to clean out my house I've lived in for 35 years. I've lost all kinds of things in this house and I know they're here -- I just have to find them. I've started making dinner again and just enjoying having people over. Life is good."