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Nicollet South Bike Shop

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You may never meet another married couple quite like Gene and Margo Hoffmann. Except for their wedding date – “It’s in 1964, I know that much,” claims Margo – neither know the important dates that most people would have memorized along life’s path, such as the year they began Nicollet South Bike Shop, or the year they purchased their rural Nicollet home, or the years they graduated from Mankato State. Even when pressed about her husband’s age, Margo had to fidget five or six seconds. “Fifty-nine, because he just had a birthday,” she says.

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Tom Engdahl

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Brown Printing COO Tom Engdahl didn’t bring along to seat 7D his latest New England Journal of Medicine with the article on “Pulmonary Langerhans’-cell histiocytosis” – or for that matter, any other publication his company prints.

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Timeless Images in Metal

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HELP WANTED: Immediate opening for marketing professional to spread word about neat stuff made by inventor/artisan/craftsman. Must make up for 30 years of lost sales. Call 507-278-4302.

Arnie Lillo never placed that ad. He’s more interested in conceptualizing and creating than in selling his creations. He holds three patents and passed up several others. But not one of his ideas put him on a road to fame and fortune, for a variety of reasons.

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Meter-Man

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Listening to 70-year-old Lyle Stevermer talk about his company is like watching an inquisitive man trying to pencil in a Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle for the first time. He has lots of ideas, but doesn’t know where he will put them all.

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Rep. Bob Gunther

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Rep. Bob Gunther, like Mr. Whipple, enjoys squeezing the Charmin — and periodically poking a finger into the Pillsbury doughboy’s tummy. In fact, his calloused hands and fingers are into squeezing and poking nearly everything.

Ask 100 people outside his hometown of Fairmont and they will describe Gunther’s poking and squeezing 100 different ways. The grocery industry leans heavily on his savvy: he co-owns Gunther’s Foods in Fairmont and Elmore, and understands grocery issues in minute detail. To corporate executives he’s the razor-sharp yet unassuming Republican point man on many job training and workforce development issues.

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Ground Zero Services

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At night when most southern Minnesota businessmen are snoring loudly and dreaming of sugar plum profits, New Ulm native Jon Gasner is roaring his machine across a Wal-Mart parking lot, gulping hot java, and trying to stay awake by shoulder shimmying to Alabama and Alan Jackson. Other than being a fastidious neatnik, buying a $35,000 vacuum sweeper in 1998 to begin a new business with no customers, purchasing the old UPS facility with no renters, and circumnavigating a messy divorce in 2001, Gasner’s story has little shine.

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United Spray Systems

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They say God works in mysterious ways.

Le Sueur’s United Spray Systems owes much of its current good fortune to one tough-as-nails kid, Blake Plonske, 11, who beat long odds in surviving 13 major surgeries after being born prematurely in 1990.

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Deb Flemming

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No political organization could be more crooked than New York City’s “Tweed Ring” in 1868-71. “Boss” Tweed and his Democratic henchmen “Slippery Dick” Connolly, “Brains” Sweeney and “The Elegant One” Hall looted the City treasury of more than $45 million, primarily through shady deals involving unscrupulous contractors. Tweed himself amassed $12 million.

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