On any given day, when Johnson Branch Unit Assistant Office Manager Julie Loveless is not in the office handling business duties, she uses her lunch breaks to disconnect from her computer screen, step outside or even walk the trails.
If you look closely through the tall trees in the wooded area, you might find her sitting peacefully on a wooden picnic table, reading her book during her lunch break.
“It's nice to just sit out and hear some wind and read at my own pace, too,” Loveless said.
Her favorite genre is horror. As an avid reader, she enjoys sitting outside with a book as part of her lunch routine, which brings her great peace and fond memories.
“I can remember sitting in the living room growing up with my mom and us—just popcorn, and she only wanted to watch scary movies in the dark,” she said. “… We were waiting until the sun set, until it got nice and dark, where we could just turn all the lights off and watch the TV.”
That’s why horror is her go-to.
“So, I have those connected memories when it comes to horror stories, and I think that's part of that, where to me it's that thrill,” she said. “I get that excitement, and it's like I did when I was a kid, so it connects back to that, and it gives me joy.”
Growing up in a different era without a mobile device gave Loveless a great sense of exploration in the world around her, riding bikes and climbing trees, as she recalls.
“We grew up in that environment, and I think that was something that I had inside me,” Loveless said. “I took a very nerdy route when I joined in the military and I started doing the computer stuff, and I lost a lot of that spirit of play, of enjoying just the calm and stillness that's always around us. But we just kind of get so wrapped up in whatever is going on in our world that we forget there's a whole world around us, and I missed that.”
Before she joined JB, Loveless served in the Air Force for a full 20 years from 1998 until 2018.
Coming from a family with military roots from her dad to her grandmother, she has an immeasurable sense of pride in serving.
During her time, Loveless quickly rose through the ranks, which opened doors to new opportunities and extensive travel.
“We went around the world and did evaluations at other units to make sure they were doing their stuff right,” Loveless said. “They call it standardization evaluation.”
After retiring in 2018, Loveless took time to address health issues, and then the pandemic occurred.
She decided to move North to a home in Sanger around 2022 to 2023 to be closer to her two siblings.
After all the dust settled, she was left with a lot of time to reflect on her life's trajectory.
“I was like, nope, I'm too young yet,” Loveless said. “There's still more I've got to do.”
While looking for jobs, she asked herself a series of questions to figure out her next step.
She thought about what she wanted to do, which led her to want to keep her main skill sets she learned from the military sharp and active.
It helped her eliminate jobs she felt weren’t a match for her.
When the assistant office manager position became available and she arrived at JB, she knew this was the place for her, thinking to herself, “If this is going to be my job every day to help manage this, then yeah, I can see myself doing that,” she said.
It gave her what she was looking for: to be part of something bigger and to have a purpose after retirement from the Air Force.
She has been working at JB for over a year, alongside other military staff.
“She works great with the customers; she works great with the staff,” said Robbie Merritt, Ray Roberts Lake State Park superintendent. “Always a smile on her face, no matter what’s going on. [She] can work through the tough stuff that happens in headquarters pretty easily.”
He also complimented her organizational skills.
“She’s done wonders helping us organize our paperwork over there, our fiscal controls,” Merritt said. “… Just all around been a great asset to us.”
With this newfound connection, Loveless has no plans to leave.
“We have that same mentality,” Loveless said, “We understand a structure. We understand a chain of command. We respect each other. We have that camaraderie that we do in the military, too. And that seeps out from us to all the people that are not military. They don't know it, but that's how the military is, and so they feel that sense of connectedness.”
The staff often meets after hours for team bonding or just to hang out and spend time together.
“We've all really got that military sense of you grind when things need to get done and you have fun and you play when it's time to play, and we know the difference,” Loveless said. “I hope we keep all this military camaraderie going for all the rest of the people that come here.”
