Business partners and opposites Mark Smith and Wayne Andersen don’t get on each other’s nerves the way Oscar Madison and Felix Unger did in the ’70s television series The Odd Couple. But they do have their differences. For one, Smith prefers flying a Falcon 50 and Andersen a Hawker 800.
In the mid-’70s, young Chad Surprenant’s chin is barely above the kitchen table and almost every evening at dinner he’s engaged in conversational repartee with his parents and three older siblings. They discuss and debate politics, current events, and aspects of their family business. Quite an introduction to the world of ideas. Chad grows up being heard and treated as an equal at home though he’s the baby, eight years younger than his closest sibling. In other words, he is being nurtured by a rock-solid phalanx of maturity.
Today, Surprenant is trying to recreate at I&S Engineers & Architects this same “kitchen table” atmosphere. To a great extent he’s succeeding.
Lori Wightman had no intention of staying in New Ulm.
When she accepted an assignment from Allina Health Systems in July 2002 to serve as interim president of New Ulm Medical Center, she intended to keep it exactly that. “I figured I’d be here six months, that I’d just keep things held together until a new president could be found,” Wightman says. “I didn’t necessarily want to stay in New Ulm.”
Pat Johnson and Peggy Grey, two vivacious sisters who own a pair of southern Minnesota’s oldest family businesses, are day-brighteners.
If your mood’s been slightly skewed by corporate and stock market scandals, a snail’s pace economic recovery, pink slips, job outsourcing, bickering politicians, a couple of nasty wars and color-coded terrorism alerts, an hour with Johnson and Grey is an upbeat, uplifting 60 minutes. Two hours is even better.
Fred C. Krahmer wins the award for “most diverse background,” which he has earned in life by experiencing a hodge-podge and mishmash of this and that, an imbroglio that became the solid foundation for an equally diverse business career.
His well-rounded resume includes teenage summers working at an amusement park and befriending a band of Gypsies, feeling the sting of military discipline at Faribault’s Shattuck School, socializing there alongside students from all over America, and learning how to “think” from his University of Minnesota Law School professors. In addition, don’t forget the political smarts he has acquired working alongside son and business partner Fred W. Krahmer, a.k.a. Martin County DFL chair.
Executive Director Jane Sletta chooses to use her own money to buy snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies for Mankato Symphony musicians during dress rehearsal breaks. She does it because the Symphony doesn’t budget for it and the four-decade-long tradition of serving cookies to the Symphony’s 70-some musicians weighs on her.
Gene Miller now thanks his lucky stars that Waseca County’s welfare director retired a year early, meaning Miller and his unfinished MSU master’s degree in 1976 weren’t quite ready to interview for that position he had dearly wanted.
Pat Beemer drilled his first well 40 years ago, boring 217 feet through glacial drift to strike water for a farmer southwest of Lakota, Iowa.
Beemer drilled that well in the summer of 1965, when he was 12, and his face shines with delight at the memory. “My dad helped me set up the drilling rig but it was great, running it all by myself.”
More than a decade after Jamie Cimino and his wife began Canyon Outback Leather Goods, he no longer notices the rich, heady aroma of leather permeating every inch of the 15,000 sq. ft. building he built in New Ulm two years ago.
