Dow Jones has been on a few wild swings lately, but that's nothing new to his wife, Katy.

She's grown used to people asking her husband, "So are you up today or are you down?"

"Don't you feel guilty for taking half of my retirement?"

"When will you be making a big comeback?"

"I suppose I should have been a stockbroker," says Dow Jones with a grin, "but then I'd be in big trouble right now. With a name like mine, it's just a lot easier to follow your heart."

Once an ambitious marketer in the high-tech industry with a salary to equal his frequent flier miles, Dow, 43, is content these days to work closer to home in Sandy, running his new car wash empire and spending extra time with Katy and their five children.

His old co-workers are surprised when they learn that he now owns Utah's Firehouse car wash chain, but Dow Jones says that sudsing cars is a lot more fun than being stuck in a far-away hotel with a laptop and lousy room service.

"I go to work every morning like anybody else, but I feel incredibly fortunate," he says. "The other Dow Jones might be on a terrible roll, but life for me right now is pretty wonderful."

Curious about whether Dow Jones really is an average guy, I recently caught up with him over a Free Lunch of turkey sandwiches and tomato soup at the Paradise Bakery Cafe in Sandy, a few blocks from one of his car washes.

Raised in Salt Lake City's Harvard-Yale neighborhood (where else in Utah would you expect to find Dow Jones?), he says that he received his unusual moniker because his dad, a financial advisor named Reid Jones, decided to win a bet from his friend, Dow Finsterwall.

"They were golfing one day and Mr. Finsterwall said, 'Hey, you should name your son after me,'" says Dow, "but he bet my dad that he wouldn't do it."

Unfortunately for Finsterwall, Dow's mother, Barbara, had a keen sense of humor.

"She was happy to go along with it," he says, "but my big sisters insisted that my middle name be changed from Winston to Weston. They didn't want me to be named after a cigarette." He pauses and smiles. "An industrial average, though, was OK."

Dow has had a lot of fun with his name over the years, playing along when people ask whether he's having an "up" day or inquire about his sister, Nasdaq, and his brothers, Standard and Poor.

As the youngest subscriber ever to The Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones Inc., the newspaper's former owner, gave him a free subscription after he was born), his childhood scrapbooks are filled with big headlines: "Dow Jones Soars!" "Dow Takes a Nose-Dive!" "Dow has the Worst Year in History!"

"It's been an interesting name to live up to," he says, "especially when I was dating. My wife's parents struggled with it at first. I'm sure they thought, 'What? You're going out with a guy named Dow Jones? You're dating the stock market?'"

After he and Katy married and started a family, they couldn't resist passing along Dow's name to their oldest son. He goes by Weston now, "but now that he's 17, he's thinking about using his full name," says Dow. "I'm telling him, 'Go for it — you'll never regret it. It will open doors wherever you go.'"

When your name is Dow Jones, he says, "you can't help but be an optimist."

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