Say cheese, Dennis.
It’s easy getting Dennis Miller to smile. On November 18, 2005, $10 billion Alltel of Little Rock, Arkansas, announced it would buy Mankato-based Midwest Wireless for a bit more than $1 billion.
Happy days are here again.
In Bob Weerts exist all the trappings of a folk legend.
Like Minnesota’s homegrown Babe the Blue Ox and Paul Bunyan, Weerts at times seems much larger than real-life. In a regional business climate often preferring quiet parentheses, he’s an entrepreneur with an exclamation point after his name.
One frosty morning soon in Winnebago, Minn.—perhaps near the blazing-white welcome sign promoting the town’s annual celebration, Motofest—you might catch a local or two stretching a colorful vinyl banner above U.S. 169.
Perhaps it will say: Welcome to Winnebago. Home of Corn Plus. In 2005, first in the world to make ethanol production truly energy efficient.
It’s 5 a.m.
Pam and Roger Barnlund are up and ready for the first walk of the day. They wake the dogs—today there are only 12, but there could be up to 30—and start out with one on each of their arms. It takes an hour to give all of them a brisk morning romp.
Healthcare Academy overlooks the city of Henderson. A homely, handmade sign showing the letters “HDD” leans into a window of this 114-year-old Historical Register site at the corner of Eighth and Minnesota. The sign faces Eighth Street, so most passersby driving up steep Minnesota Street hill never see it. Since “HDD” is no longer the company’s name, the sign, if seen, really wouldn’t help most first-time visitors anyway.
Ideas flow from Mary and Wayne Dankert like newsprint off a high-speed printing press. Watch them go. The ideas flow because the two have so many percolating about in their constantly churning minds—so many ideas printing and collating, printing and collating, so many, one, two, three, four. And the ideas leaving make room for more.
A Menard’s employee seven years ago sold Glen Taylor a lawn mower.
An elderly man saw Glen Taylor purchasing flowers at Hilltop Florist.
A married couple saw him eating lunch at The Peddler.
A hunter saw him bringing a deer into Vernon Center Market.
A girl in a sundress is drawing a picture of herself on a four-sided easel set up in a shady spot—but she needs help with the nose. A little boy in a floppy hat and saggy shorts lifts a chubby leg and climbs into a sand box. At the far end of the playground, several more small children take turns banging melodically on a metal trash can lid mounted strategically on the chain link fence.
Welcome to Pamella Willard’s world.
On the surface it seems she should be. She is Vice President and General Counsel of Boston Scientific’s cardiovascular division, and as such works inside the pulsating heart of a $5.6 billion publicly traded corporation (NYSE: BSX). Boston Scientific has 16,000 employees worldwide—with a hearty 3,000 in Plymouth and Maple Grove, Minn., including Lance, helping manufacture, develop and market lifesaving medical devices.
Primarily, she serves as an in-house attorney. The medical device she personally helped launch in 2004, the complicated sounding TAXUS® Express2™ Paclitaxel-Eluting Coronary Stent System, has been offering genuine hope for millions of Americans with blocked heart arteries. Earlier this year, Boston Scientific announced the millionth sale and implantation of that particular stent, nearly doubling the corporation’s revenue.
