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Fred C. Krahmer

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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.

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Mankato Symphony Orchestra

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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.

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Elm Homes

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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.

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Beemer Well Drilling

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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.”

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Canyon Outback

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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.

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Birds Eye Foods

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Iowa State defensive tackle Roger Ashland crouched at the five-yard line and readied himself to hammer a Nebraska running back corkscrewing through the air toward the goal line. Roger licked his chops, but he was the one getting slobberknockered.

“He just knocked me…oh, my gosh,” Ashland was saying of a 1966 collegiate football game, “that was the hardest I’d ever been hit in my life.”

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El Sarape

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Today’s immigrants wear different faces than the pioneers who populated the sod houses and the prairie towns across southern Minnesota. But they struggle for the same opportunity, a chance to live better lives than in their homelands.

More than a century ago, an immigrant shopkeeper in the bustling railroad settlement of St. James might have been asked this question: “Wie sind Sie nach St. James hergekommen?” (How did you come to St. James?)

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KMA Design & Construction

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Imagine Lucy Van Pelt of Peanuts marrying Charlie Brown and the two becoming U.S. Navy captains, then constructing and remodeling homes. In a Sunday cartoon strip this never would happen. But in this story, in Connect Business Magazine, “Lucy” is Pauline Marlinski, 53, and “Charlie” is Chuck Klimmek, 56, married co-owners of KMA Design & Construction in Gaylord, Minn.

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Pneumat Systems

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Gene Nelson is a Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not kind of guy.

The recipe for his success has been, uh, unbelievable. He includes his dad’s failed business venture, his own deteriorating health, two terrible grain bin fires, a flippant Canadian, a $40 purchase order, and a competitor’s ugly actions as defining moments in his career.

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