Meet Team Fred: Julie and David Frederiksen (Olivia, 19; Zoe, 14; Evie, 9)
“Is that really y’all?”
Julie and I get this question a lot when someone new enters our home and sees the weathered-looking, decades-old picture of two beach-bound, school-aged kids on our wall of family photos. We chuckle, and assure them it is, in fact, us.
The place (beach) is Hilton Head Island, and the year is roughly 1978 – which makes me, the one pointing and waxing poetic, eight years old, and makes Julie, the one looking somewhat skeptically at my pointing and waxing, six years old. Yes, our romance dates back that far.
My dad (Rev. Victor Frederiksen, rector here at St. Paul’s 1996-2006) had been assistant rector at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Charlotte, NC, in the 70s, where Julie’s dad, Dr. Jerry Lane (a psychiatrist), attended, along with Julie’s family. Dr. Lane helped oversee my dad’s pastoral counseling efforts, and they became close friends. Naturally, our families became quite close, too, even going on family vacations to places like, well, Hilton Head.
Fast forward two-plus decades, and Julie and I reunited as young adults at Camp Trinity on the Emerald Isle serving at a diocesan youth event. We became enamored with one another over the long weekend and eventually got engaged (more or less the following week).
From there it was on to Little Washington, NC, and Boston, MA, until making Wilmington terra firma in 2002. Not long after came Olivia “the artist” (now 19, a freshman at VCU in Richmond); then Zoe “the academic” (now 14, a rising ninth grader at WECHS); and Evie “the environmentalist” (now 9, a rising fourth-year at Island Montessori).
Julie, a neuro-psychiatric nurse practitioner, owns her own practice, and David is a working writer with backgrounds in teaching, publishing and advertising. We’re so excited to be here at St. Paul’s (again) and thank you for such a warm welcome!