Jimmie Breedlove -‐ Total One-‐Eighty
(See 3 photos at bottom)
Jimmie Breedlove can still see the scene from when he was
only five and his late alcoholic father drove down a dirt and gravel road in a blue
and white pickup away from the farmhouse and his family in Wisconsin.
It was the beginning of a long slide that included a brief
stay at an orphanage, doing drugs as a teen and a nearly two-‐year
prison term in his early 20s.
A self-‐described scrawny kid, Breedlove
can’t remember exactly how many times he was beaten up as a child, only that he
used to hide in the bathroom during recesses at school until a playground monitor showed up.
And now?
“Total 1-‐80,” Breedlove, 38, said
about the degrees of change in his life. “I’ve got a wife, kids and a passport. Life is good. I don’t have the
man pressuring me.”
For a while he was working for a company that applies signs
and graphics to automobiles. Then he decided he wanted to be the one who
came up with content for the designs. These days the only pressure he feels is
what he puts on himself while attending Salt Lake Community College’s new
Center for Arts and Media, at first studying graphic design and then moving
into photography.
Now he works for the SLCC campus newspaper The Globe as a
photographer in the new center while working toward his Associate’s of Applied
Science with an emphasis on photography.
Although he’d trade some of the wrong turns he took in life,
he doesn’t shy away from talking about his past with just a hint of pride for
having survived. Breedlove concluded, “If it helps the next person out.”