Helping others find prosperity is Utahn's joy

PROVO — When Stephen W. Gibson sits around the Thanksgiving Day dinner table with his family and goes through the traditional ritual of saying what he's thankful for, he typically skips right past the day he retired at the ripe young age of 52, financially set for life.

What he's most thankful for is what happened next.

Snared securely in the grip of prosperity after selling his business in 1993, he stopped worrying about making money and started worrying about somebody else making money.

Fifteen years later, he calls it a transition that "other than my family, means as much to me and has brought me more joy than anything in my life."

Gibson's story starts out typically rags-to-riches.

His first job after college and a stint with the Air Force during the Vietnam era was working for the Church News supplement of the Deseret News.

Newspaper wages. Can't get much more bottom than that.

But the urge to be a businessman overcame the urge to write, so he soon left journalism behind and became an entrepreneur.

One business success led to another to another — until that fateful day 15 years ago when a national company bought out the medical oxygen business Gibson owned in Colorado.

The check had so many zeroes he thought he was playing in the NBA.

Gibson did what most of us would do. He announced his retirement and bought a new car. In his case a 1993 Buick Riviera (which he still drives).

In the meantime, his wife, Bette, took a job teaching at BYU in Provo, so Steve moved with her to Utah, perfectly content to do nothing.

The contentment, however, was short-lived.

It ended, as Gibson recalls, "after just a few weeks of making beds and washing dishes while she went to work."

That's when his second career began. In 1995 he signed on for a trip to the Philippines with a do-gooder group called Enterprise Mentors International.

There he was introduced to the most sobering sight of his life:

Poverty.

Everywhere he looked, from hungry-looking people showing every rib to cardboard houses in the gutters to ubiquitous beggars on the street corners, he saw poor.

"I'd been immune to that kind of poverty," he recalls.