Norma Van Camp enjoys her role with Fairfield Arts & Convention Center

FAIRFIELD — Norma Van Camp is the facilities manager at the Fairfield Arts & Convention Center, where she has worked for the past eight years.

Van Camp started out as a part-timer cleaner at the FACC around 2015. She was hired after meeting then FACC Executive Director Rustin Lippincott in 2013 when RAGBRAI came through Fairfield. Van Camp impressed her boss so much that within six months she was asked to join the arts center’s event staff. Van Camp said she enjoyed that kind of work, and she liked that every day was different because there was always a new event to set up for, whether it was a wedding, a conference, or a concert in the theater.

Three years ago, Van Camp became the center’s facilities manager, so her responsibilities expanded to include lining up contractors, ordering supplies, training bartenders and fixing whatever needed to be fixed in the building. She said her biggest challenge is keeping up with computers.

Van Camp started working at FACC after taking some time off to relax and focus on quilting, after her prior job had given her almost no time to herself. Before moving to Fairfield in 2011, Van Camp was working for a company that made car parts called Metavation in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. She was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The grind was getting to her. Van Camp’s girlfriend was also working for Metavation, and the company asked her to relocate from Michigan to Fairfield, to train at the foundry the company had purchased.

Before moving to Iowa a little over a decade ago, Van Camp had spent all her life in Michigan. She grew up in the cities of Battle Creek and Cold Water. She worked at a car wash and detail shop, and became assistant manager there even while still in high school. Van Camp said she didn’t have any clear ideas about what she wanted to do for a career, and was just looking for a job to help support her family.

Van Camp found herself working in the manufacturing sector after high school, and wound up spending 20 years in the field. She worked for a company called House of Raeford, a poultry plant that processed food for Tyson Foods, among others. Van Camp was one of the cleaners, a job that carried enormous responsibility given the amount of food that the facility processed. A member of the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration performed swab tests at the plant every day.

“That line of work was very busy, and there was a lot of responsibility. If the job wasn’t done correctly, you could make millions of people sick,” Van Camp said.

After her time in manufacturing, Van Camp went to work for Acorn Windows. However, she could see the business was going downhill and decided to jump ship and begin a new career in the automotive industry, working for auto parts manufacturer Hutchinson for eight years.

Van Camp said she’s learned something from all the jobs she’s had in her life, and is glad to be in her current role at the arts center.

“I’m interacting with a wide variety of people,” she said.

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Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com

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