HGTV's Karen E. Laine addresses 'Character by design' at the Lincoln Heritage Museum

 

[September 23, 2023] 

Saturday, September 16th, Karen E. Laine with the HGTV home improvement and renovation series Good Bones was a special guest at a casual discussion at the Lincoln Heritage Museum. Laine was in Lincoln for the weekend with two public appearances scheduled, the one on Saturday, and a second meeting on Sunday promoting the 2024 Workcamp for Lincoln project.

At the Lincoln Heritage Museum, while Laine may have been the television celebrity on hand, her little dog Adelle was undeniably the star of the show.

Laine commented on Adelle saying that while the dog is cute and entertaining, she is a service dog trained to assist Laine at the onset of a seizure. She said some people think Laine just brings the dog for the fun of it, and while Adelle is fun, she also can sense ahead of time when Laine is about to have a seizure and issues a warning to her owner.

Laine also commented, saying that sometimes people approach her with an attitude of “who do you think you are Paris Helton?” She said she might like to be Paris Hilton, but the fact was that Adelle had a job to do and she was good at it. She said that sometimes it would be nice to reply that it is not a good comment to voice to a person with a disability. But, she said, you can’t know when someone is having a bad day. They aren’t happy or perhaps they wouldn’t be mean, so she shrugs it off thinking that for whatever reason that person was having a bad day.

Laine was brought to the museum by director Ron Keller, who had met her when she was in Lincoln two years ago for the Workcamp. The topic of the day was “Character by Design.”

Laine arrived at the Museum as her “Mary Todd Lincoln Character” and explained that she loves to wear costumes. She said she has a collection of outfits, some she may never wear, but she does love them.

Laine said because the topic of the day was Character, she had brought photos of her being a character with a different meaning. She talked about the outfits she has and does wear.

Keller had noted that Laine had come to the museum free of charge and Laine countered that she could never turn down an opportunity to wear one of her costumes. And that it also spoke to the “power of Ron Keller.”

Keller said that the conversations on Character talked about how to build good character because we “assign ourselves and design ourselves to be individuals of character.”

Keller reviewed Laines’s biography including her law degree and practices and her work with her daughter Mina on the series Good Bones, as well as being a business owner.

He said that Laine fit into the character of Abraham Lincoln because she was a person who was “a positive, energetic, genial, talented and learned individual who approaches life with integrity and a constant desire for discovery.” He said that she is who she is in person and on television, always genuine.

Laine said in her law practices, she had a favorite thing to do and that is to help those who are taken advantage of by unscrupulous businesses and tradespeople. She told a story of how she had a client who had hired a car refurbished and received a quote of $10,000. However the bill came to more than $30,000 and the client was too nice to say no to the overcharges and was just paying them. Laine said that the business had possession of the car, but she had told her client that they would go and ask to take the car out for a test drive. She said the ultimate goal then was to have the client drive home in the car. The trick had been successful, and once the car was no longer in the business owner's possession, she came clean that she was an attorney that had a nice little stack of charges that could be doled out. She told the businessman that she was providing him with a very inexpensive lesson in law, and it ended at that.

Laine said a word of advice is to do what can be done to settle issues out of court. She said that legal fees will outweigh the win, so it is almost always in the client’s best interest to settle out of court.

Laine and her daughter are working in the Indianapolis Indiana area, seeking out derelict homes in struggling neighborhoods, buying them, redesigning them into desirable homes in the community that they then sell. The goal is to uplift the various communities in the city that are run down.

Laine talked about her collection of stuff she retrieves from those homes and how she reworks them and turns them into pieces of art for the homes they are renovating. She said sometimes the art goes with the home when it sells, but sometimes not.

Laine spoke about her last visit to Lincoln to work with an all-girl crew in the workcamp for Lincoln projects in 2021. She said that she stayed in touch with the girls and knows all about what they are doing now from their social media pages.

Talking about the topic of the day, Laine said that she sees herself less as someone of character and more of someone who is a character. She loves fun and gets a kick out of doing the unexpected. She has taught herself to do a number of trades including creating a deer skin coat literally from scratch. She said she had learned to clean and tan the hide, then made her coat. When asked how she had learned this technique she quipped that you can find about anything on the internet.

Laine said she had brought a list with her of descriptive words that make up character. But before going to her list she wanted to hear from her guests, what did they think builds or creates an image of someone with great character. The answers from the room matched many on Laine’s list.

Hard work, honest, being true to your word, being honorable and compassionate were a few. Bravery was one that Laine commented on, saying yes, living life requires a certain amount of bravery, not being afraid to do things or facing the fear and overcoming it in order to become a better person is a part of building character. She also said that one should have “selective fear” be brave enough to try new things, until those are things that you know will cause harm to yourself and others, such as doing drugs. She said it is good to have a fear of doing drugs.

Laine said one of her favorite movies was Defending your Life starting Meryl Streep. She said that the whole point of the movie is that “our job in this life is to let go of our fear.” She said there are a lot of things one can be afraid of, but you need to work through those fears. She said that she personally has a fear of high places, and she has had to work through it, until finally she got to the point that she felt she could ride on a ferris wheel.

Laine said that discernment was a big part of character, where you work through a scenario and weighing the pros and cons to make a decision.

Perseverance is part of building character. She said that it is different than being stubborn and you have to also realize that pushing forward has value but sometimes you have to come to the point of knowing you are pushing forward out of stubbornness. She talked about a house she and Mina were looking to buy for a flip. The house had potential, but at every turn the pair encountered obstacles and difficulties. They continued to push through and kept trying to get the house until they got to the point that they had to stop and look at why. Were they doing this out of stubbornness and was it actually time to let it go and move on?

A book that Laine enjoyed was “A team of rivals,” by Doris Kerns Goodwin. The book, about Lincoln, caught Laines’s attention because it demonstrates Lincolns ability to work through issues and come up with solutions. She said that it came from perseverance, but also being flexible and knowing when to change course, staying always true to his core values.

Laine said another thing to consider is how is character developed? In her summation, she said that most of the time character comes from diversity. Do you rise above the diversity, or does it take you down?

She and the group talked about building character in children. Laine said that she has seen young kids that were really in a bad place in life, but they have overcome it. Where did that resiliency come from, most of the time from one caring adult. She said that is all it takes, one person who will let that child know that they are being seen. Kids in distress often feel invisible, like no one sees their hurts or their struggles or cares about their survival, but one person can make all the difference in that child’s life. A show of kindness to a child can change that child’s life.

An audience member remarked that kindness is no longer in fashion in our society. The audience, which was majority female, added to the comment, talking about being ignored in hardware stores and lumber yards when they are seeking to make purchases, people being rude for no apparent reason and much more.

Laine said that she believes in ‘giving grace’ to all people. She said that being kind, and forgiving is a better way to go through life, and that there is nothing to be gained from rants. She noted that we don’t know what another person is going through, but we can know that if that person is nasty, they are probably not happy themselves, and whatever is making them unhappy is being reflected in their attitude toward others.

An audience member asked what some of Mary Todd Lincoln’s notable qualities were that displayed character.

Keller answered saying that Mary Lincoln believed that all people were the same. She spoke her mind, saying what she thought out loud and letting others decide what to do with it. Mrs. Lincoln is often portrayed as the person with mental issues and emotional issues by historians, but Keller said she was also intelligent, and had many meaningful conversations on important political topics with her husband. And, that he had great respect for her opinion.

Throughout the afternoon, the topic of the Good Bones show came through from time to time. Laine was asked about her partnership with daughter Mina in the show. She said that she felt the two offered two different perspectives that worked well together. She said she admired her daughter’s ability to walk into a filthy, run down, house and envision it as a home. She could in a split second reimagine a floorplan and make it work, while Laine was a little more reserved and took a little more time to see the vision.

Asked if there was another HGTV home improvement show that inspired her, she said she didn’t watch a lot of television, but she would say that one team that she does respect and admire are the Property Brothers. She said they have a mission of making life better for the homeowners they work with, and that is the best vision and goal to have.

Several people in the audience said they had seen all the Good Bone shows, and some multiple times. They talked about specific houses and work that had been done.

Laine had mentioned a time or two that she lived in a neighborhood in the Indianapolis area that was not sophisticated. She was asked why she chose to live in the area she does. She said that she lived there because of the people. She said it was one of those areas where it was mostly blue-collar workers with their families. They were people who watched out for one another. If someone in the neighborhood had a need, the neighbors came together to help out. She said it was the kind of warm, neighborly, community feel that she wanted in the place where she lived, and she had found it.

She shared a lot of pictures and talked about the day that daughter Mina had called her “wildly unpleasant.” She said she owned that characteristic and had made a shirt that said wildly unpleasant on it and wore it to the set the next day. She added that the phrase caught on and there were a number of wildly unpleasant shirts out in the world now.

As the two hours came to a close, Keller said that though Laine had come to the meeting free of charge, he wanted to give her a gift to remember the occasion. He explained that outside the building there is a statue of Lincoln walking and reading, exemplifying his desire to learn. He presented to Laine, a smaller replica of the statue as a thank you gift for spending time at the Lincoln Heritage Museum.

Even though the day officially came to a close at that time, guests lingered to speak one on one with Laine for several minutes afterward.

Laine would on Sunday then make an appearance at the afternoon kick-off event for the 2024 Workcamp for Lincoln. She told the guests at the museum that she was saddened that she would not be able to come in 2024 and help, as it had been a rewarding experience and one that she would very much have liked to repeat.

[Nila Smith]