The other side of the rainbow. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

Last weekend I was in Tucson, Arizona, visiting my parents, which of course,

great and lovely in and of itself. But admittedly, the little twing girl inside me was much more excited

about something else, visiting the iridescent pink gates of the now abandoned Lisa Frank headquarters.

If you're a millennial, or older Gen Z, or even Gen X, the name Lisa Frank likely elicits

some emotion in you. The hyper-colored pop art inspired animals, shapes and rainbows were

essentially the backdrop of my childhood. But the brand Lisa Frank isn't just enviable

trapper keepers and sparkly relief stickers. No, the world of Lisa Frank, as I discovered,

was dark, oppressive, drug-fueled, chaotic, and even described as the rainbow gulag.

All played out in Tucson, Arizona, under the watchful and litigious eye of its mysterious founder,

so mysterious that there are only two pictures of her online. Her name is Lisa Frank, and today

we're talking about the rise and fall of Lisa Frank incorporated. Lisa Frank was born on April 21,

1955 to affluent parents in suburban Michigan. In fact, Frank's father was an art collector,

who very early on introduced her to pop artist Peter Maxx, an artist who very obviously influenced

the young Frank and what she would go on to do. Frank told the Urban Outfitters blog that quote,

my dad was an art collector and my mom had a little kill in our basement and we would make pottery.

I think from about age five on, they sent me to art classes and I was a huge colorer, huge.

I think to keep me quiet, they would bring the coloring books and crayons and I would fill up

the books. I was totally a girly girl. I was not a jock. When I was 12, my parents got me a loom,

so I was a weaver. I loved to read, I loved to do artwork, I loved to do anything girly. She

attended Cranbrook Kingswood School, a fancy prep school whose alumni also includes Selma Blair

and Mitt and Anne Romney. It was there that she began painting. Frank immediately found

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