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Tom Rosen

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Tom Rosen, 51, stands tall in a tasseled cornfield. He’s a great big mountain of a man, 6’5″, 250-plus, who towers over a crowded room both physically and professionally. Success didn’t stunt his growth. The family business he guides, Rosen’s Diversified, Inc. (RDI), grossed $550 million in 1998, which makes it Minnesota’s sixteenth-largest privately held business. Of businesses headquartered in south-central Minnesota only AMPI ($1.1 billion) and Taylor Corp. ($950 million) are larger.

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Orthopaedic & Fracture Clinic P.A.

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Please forgive Dr. Wynn Kearney, Jr., senior partner and president at Orthopaedic & Fracture Clinic P.A. (OFC), if he seems preoccupied with the future.

For thirty years his specialty has been in a state of constant flux, and the next thirty won’t be any different. He doesn’t know yet whether OFC’s Mankato office will expand on-site, out to land on the outskirts of Mankato, or over to Immanuel St. Joseph’s Mayo Hospital. And there’s more: demand for OFC’s services has increased so much it recently had to thoroughly and tirelessly search for a new physician with the “right stuff.” Other exhaustive recruitment forays are on the horizon.

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Winland Electronics, Inc.

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W. Kirk Hankins likes to say Winland Electronics, Inc. had three beginnings, one in 1972, another in 1984 and a third in 1995.
Today the Mankato company is recognized as one of Minnesota’s fastest growing electronics manufacturers, guided by a master plan that many of its 125 employees had a hand in crafting. It’s set impressive sales and profit records for three consecutive years, streaking ahead at 40 percent annually, and netting $856,000 on revenues of $18 million in 1998. Earnings per share tripled in that period and more money than ever is being spent on research and development, according to Hankins, who is chief executive officer and chairman of Winland’s board.

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Rick McCluhan

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If a draw on his slow-burning Macanudo and a sip of his Beaujolais Nouveau doesn’t get your blood moving, his in-your-face pragmatism towards politics definitely will. Rick McCluhan, 42, born of a full-blooded Sicilian mother and Scotch-Irish father, carries a zest for life, business and politics that few southern Minnesotans can match.
From his Sicilian mother’s genes he seems to have inherited a blunt pragmatism and a fondness for pasta, cigars, and wine. It was the Sicilians’ neighbors, the Romans, after all, who coined the phrase II vino veritas: In wine there is truth.
On his Dad’s side, his heritage extends back to the feisty Protestants of Northern Ireland, who bred such Revolutionary War patriots as Patrick Henry of “Give me Liberty or give me death!” fame. All three U.S. Presidents with a Scotch-Irish past began or greatly inflamed wars: Polk (Mexican), McKinley (Spanish-American), and Johnson (Vietnam).

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Hendrickson Organ Company

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He owns every issue of The American Organist published since 1929, and every issue of The Diapason back to 1913. Those trade magazines still print today. His bookshelves are crammed full of faded cloth books with out-of-print titles like Organ Building, Vibration and Sound, The History of the Organ in the United States and The Art of Organ Building. A few have German titles: Die Brabenter Orgel and Zungenstimmen. Not everyone builds pipe organs these days. When the company phone rings, Charles Hendrickson, 63, casually picks it up and says “Charles Hendrickson.” He absolutely loves his freedom as owner at Hendrickson Organ Company in St. Peter.

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The Dam Store

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Jim Hruska leaned across a table in his cafe replete with mounted walleye and tacked-up Polaroids of fishermen, and he smiled. Glancing over at his wife, Linda, he said, “Sure we work long hours, from seven in the morning until nine at night, seven days a week.” When most small business owners would have burned out in months with such a demanding schedule, the Hruskas have lasted 27 years quite nicely. It’s all in how they do it.

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Jerry Crest & Doug Wood

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With his sinewy hands touching together at the fingertips, Dr. Doug Wood, president at Immanuel St. Joseph’s- Mayo Health System, and cardiologist, tried clearing up some of the confusion about recent changes in healthcare. But it seemed, to this writer at least, a futile task. A state-of-the-art knowledge of healthcare, like that of computer technology, often lasts only a few months before becoming outdated.

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Lambrecht’s & Christmas Haus

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The Taoist religion defines yin and yang as the male and female principles in nature, total opposities that somehow meld together to produce all that exists. In plain Western lingo, it could best be summed up as the synergy that sometimes occurs when “opposites attract.”

“I’m the kind of person who has these very big pie-in-the-sky ideas,” said Donna Lambrecht, her words bubbling up like popcorn through a hot air popper, “while Curt is a practical realist. My cup is always half full, his half empty.” Their synergystic relationship has created New Ulm’s two largest gift shops, both of which zero in on that city’s burgeoning tourist trade.

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