Tune Into Health with Janna Blake-Allan

Back in 2014, my son James kept telling me about this amazing company. “This is the best job you could ever have,” he kept saying. “All you do is talk to people, and with all the radio interviews you’ve done, you would love it!”

At the time, I didn’t really need a job. I had a show on a radio station in Centralia, Washington, but my son thought I should have a job that was closer to Portland.

But the next year, my husband got sick and he passed away soon after that. Eventually, my son asked if I’d given any more thought to applying to the FPC position at Precoa. He is friends with Cory Dodge, which is how he learned about Precoa in the first place, so I emailed Cory and applied. I was hired in February 2016.

I loved working in radio, but I have to say that my son was right. This is the best job I’ve ever had!

I worked in radio for over twenty years as Salt Lake City’s first woman DJ and for several years after that at stations in Oregon and Idaho.

When my family decided to move to Vancouver, Washington in 2001, I contacted someone I knew who owned several radio stations to line up a job as a headhunter for a Portland-area station. Or at least I thought it was lined up. The job ended up falling through by the time we arrived in Vancouver, so I decided to focus on my family and our barbershop singing group.

I didn’t work in radio again until 2009, when my husband suggested I try to find a small mom-and-pop station nearby. He knew that I missed radio, so I started going around to a bunch of stations in Portland. I would write ads and do PSA recordings and voiceover work, and then I found a small station in Centralia where I could do a Saturday show.

I did Saturdays from 12-6 p.m. for a year, and then they asked if I could also do a show on Friday nights. At first I said no because it was too far to drive there and back, but then I mentioned that I had an air mattress if they wouldn’t mind me staying overnight in the conference room. Soon I was driving up for Friday night shows, sleeping at the station, and doing my Saturday shows the next day.

Yes! Actually, one of the great things about our schedule at the FPC is that I have Friday afternoons free. I have plenty of time to get up to the station for my show.

FPC Planner. I call for the West region, and I handle a lot of the Aftercare and Stepping Stones calls. I come from a very large family—there are over 60 cousins on my mom’s side—and my first experience with death came at age seven, when my grandfather passed. When I speak with families who have recently lost a loved one, I truly understand what they are going through. I really enjoy being there for them and helping them. My main role is to nurture them, and I can sense when it’s too raw or too soon for them to set an appointment.

Absolutely. It always amazes me when I meet someone in their 40s or 50s who has never experienced the death of a loved one. If you have gone all your life without that experience, it affects you so much differently. It’s like you’re in a fog, like you can’t think straight. If they just had a Final Wishes Organizer, they wouldn’t have to think about what their loved one wanted or have to stress over it.

I really like talking to the Stepping Stones and Aftercare families. All of the calls we make at the FPC serve a purpose, and hopefully the families I speak with will set an appointment, get a Final Wishes Organizer, and get prearranged. But sometimes I’m on the phone for a long time because people just need someone to listen. I’m there to listen. It makes me feel good knowing I’m helping them.

I am still blown away by how amazing this company is. My son kept singing the company’s praises, so I knew it was supposed to be a great job. But after having worked in radio full-time for over 30 years, where you worried about getting fired at the drop of a hat—to have it be so opposite, a place where people truly care, is wonderful. The perks, the meetings, the amazing food, the work environment. Everyone is so kind, and I joked with one of my colleagues who I trained with that it almost felt like the Stepford Wives if everyone wasn’t so genuinely nice and positive. Everyone at Precoa truly cares!

Now that we’ve been working from home for so long, I really miss the camaraderie at the office.

I lived in Utah for over twenty years, but I was born in San Jose, California. My family moved to Anaheim, California when I was one, where I lived until my senior year of high school, which is when my dad died, and we moved to Utah so that my mom could be closer to our extended family. We visited Utah every year growing up, so I was familiar with it.

Anything to do with music, really. Growing up, my family performed in a rock band, and, later, I sang in a few rock bands. I am the choir director at my church, and I used to DJ weddings before we were all quarantined. When I worked in radio, I did a lot of emcee work too—I’ve written and recorded 1000s of commercials—so I’m hoping to get back to anything to do with singing, music, and performing.

Musicals are usually my favorite, but I also really love Back to the Future and anything to do with time travel. I haven’t seen all of the time travel movies out there, but most of them. The whole concept of it fascinates me. I would love to be able to travel back in time!

I need to start playing piano again. I haven’t played for so long, and I would need to get my piano tuned, but I would love to get back into it. When I was a teenager, I used to play after school for hours. I would play through every song I knew once, then go through the day’s lessons, and then I would spend at least an hour making stuff up. I miss that.

How to eat fewer processed foods and more natural foods. I used to have to drum up business to get interviews for my radio shows in Salt Lake City, but for some reason starting in 1994 people were lining up to get on my show. One of these was a doctor who was giving a seminar on the vegan diet at a Jewish Community Center in town. On the day of the interview, he actually called to cancel because there was a flight delay, but I made arrangements to have him come into the station the following day. When we did the interview, I was already close to being vegan and was learning a lot about health. But I was so impressed after the interview that I told my husband we needed to attend his seminar. We did—we even brought the kids with us—and at the end of the day, we went home and became vegan.

It was, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Before I was born, my parents owned health food stores in Southern California. They had sold the stores by the time I was growing up, but my father still distributed juice machines and sold health products. By age 10, I knew more about health than most adults, and I feel very blessed to have had that background. It ended up fueling my passion. 

One of the reasons I believe healthy eating is so important is because if you feel good, you tend to be kinder to others. You’re not tempted to be ornery or rude or do things that are mean. It becomes easier to live the golden rule.

These days, my diet is mainly plant-based. I still go to seminars and conventions like Portland’s VegFest, and sometimes I’ll teach classes at Whole Foods and Wild Oats Markets.

Ok, but if I choose to bring someone, can I go back in time to get them?

Then I’m going to hop in the DeLorean to get my husband for a trip to Norway. We always said we would go there, and it was a really important place for him. He served his LDS church mission in Norway from 1978-1980, so traveling there would be all about the places he went and what he experienced. Of course, we’d have to travel in the summertime, when it isn’t so cold. It gets really cold in Norway!

Thank you!