Lora Rahe is barefoot, her blue jeans rolled an inch above her ankles. A trail of wet footprints follows her from the side door of her New Ulm business to the spot where she now stands, talking happily with one of her favorite customers.
It seems almost aeons since your five-year run as executive director of Valley Industrial Development Corp.* ended. So much has changed since 1997. You then became national marketing director of Scholarship Management Services (SMS) before joining the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce (MRCC) in 1999. You left there in January 2003 as its chief executive officer and president. You have earned a Masters from Regis University of Denver, Colorado.
And now you’ve returned home.
Ron Wenger generally launches his workday at 6 A.M., sometimes grabbing a shovel and clearing snow off sidewalks around his physical therapy clinic in North Mankato.
Even if you know zero about Wenger, his early morning shoveling helps you make a number of reasonable assumptions: He’s one of those “morning people” who can’t wait to get out of bed.
Historian Steven J. Keillor* writes in his book Cooperative Commonwealth that the cooperative was a widely used form of business organization in rural Minnesota through World War II because “business was distant” then. Rural residents and farmers organized cooperatives, such as the creamery, to provide goods and services to areas off the beaten track from big-city suppliers. Ownership in a co-op also gave these rural denizens a measure of local control over their economies.
The Kenya Airways pilot dips his left wing as if to prod Timothy Tulloch into appreciating the vast plains of Tsavo, and beyond, the snow-clad Mt. Kilimanjaro. Nairobi is fifteen minutes yet. The earth below is a lush paradise of cheetah, Maasai villages and elephant herds. The seat belt light above him flashes. Mt. Kilimanjaro appears out his window.
A is for the apples Eric Luetgers produces at Timberlake Orchard south of Fairmont.
B is for the bees he nurtures to pollinate his trees and produce the honey he bottles.
C is for the fresh-pressed cider Luetgers sells with his apples and honey, but it could stand for cucumbers, one of several vegetables he raises to diversify his crop.
Only four persons from the nine-county area around Greater Mankato have been inducted into the Minnesota Museum of Broadcasting Hall of Fame. Of the four, three are Linders. Our cover story, John Linder, isn’t in the MMB Hall of Fame—yet, but he is creating lots of radio waves in our state’s broadcasting industry.
His waves aren’t tsunamis: they’re more a never-ending, behind-the-scenes ripple.
It was a dark and stormy night.
Leo Nissen was scrunched down in his black sedan, fumbling with chow mein and chopsticks and peering out from behind a Star Tribune. He was waiting for the blubbery bloke with the spaghetti hair and toothless grin—the bad guy.
The outdated notion of private counseling being an hour of pure hell with a daffy German shrink asking stomach-churning questions goes out the window for good during an appointment with Joanna Hocker. She’s a Licensed Psychologist all right, but none like most people have experienced: with her seemingly perpetual cackle of a laugh and infectious Christmas glow she’s more a cross between Phyllis Diller and JoAnne Worley (of Laugh-In fame) than Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers, both well-known therapists.
