When we moved to Florida, we met Scott and Kristin Sampson. Scott was a faculty member in my department with a background in operations management. Annette and I first met them during our visit to Tallahassee to check out the MIS PhD program.
Scott had been at FSU for one year before we moved to that area. As we were relatively close in age, shared family status (they had two children the same ages as Jamie and Tanner), and were members of the church, we connected well with the Sampsons.
They invited us to dinner several times during our first two years in Tallahassee before Scott took a position on the faculty at BYU.
We often watched their kids while Scott and Kristin traveled to Orlando to the temple, and they watched ours when we made the trip. We also swapped babysitting for date nights and stayed at their house a couple of times while Scott attended academic conferences and took Kristin with him.
Early in our friendship, they told us about a young couple who had helped them with babysitting and temple trips while they were in graduate school in Virginia. They wanted to “pay it forward,” so several times Scott and Kristin paid for Annette and me to stay overnight in Orlando during our temple trips rather than making the long round-trip drive in one day.
The Orlando Temple is about a five-hour drive each way from Tallahassee, so a temple trip day could mean ten hours of driving and four hours in the temple, alternating shifts watching the kids. Their generosity meant a lot to us in those early years. That simple kindness became a model for us, and we have tried to use the same pay-it-forward approach ever since.
Scott was the stereotypical absent-minded professor, brilliant in his work but sometimes forgetful in everyday life. Early on in our friendship, he gave me a ride home from the university. We were heading to the Sampsons’ house for dinner, and Annette was going to meet us there.
When we got into Scott’s car, he carefully set his watch timer and wrote the date and time in a small notebook. Then he explained that he was doing a motion study to determine the optimal route home at different times of day, so he recorded each commute. I could not help but think of Frank Gilbreth, the Cheaper by the Dozen author and motion-study pioneer. This was before cell phones or GPS devices, so Scott was manually logging and optimizing his routes. I never did learn the results of his study, and we never talked about it again. It was simply one of those projects sparked by pure curiosity.
We have stayed in touch with the Sampsons over the years, exchanging Christmas cards and family updates. When Jamie, our oldest, first went to BYU, Scott and Kristin invited her over for dinner to reconnect with their son Brad, who was about her age. It turned into a somewhat awkward evening, but it was thoughtful of them to reach out.
Looking back, our friendship with the Sampsons blended faith, family, and a touch of Scott’s analytical curiosity. They made our years in Tallahassee richer, and their kindness has stayed with us ever since.
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