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.
Huffing and puffing up endless white steps while carrying camera equipment under the Capitol dome shadow in St. Paul, higher and onward, Kris and I finally enter through double doors and hang a left toward the Governor’s Office. His receptionist tells us to relax, but can we? We’re nervously waiting for this person with the power to make or break Minnesota’s business climate, to make or break your business perhaps.
So this is the Governor’s Office.
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.”
Columnist George Will turns to Wade Hensel and asks about Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s recent job performance and Wade is so nervous his knees start knocking Morse code. Wade offers his opinion. He is front and center in bright-lights Nashville readying to address 6,000 peers in 2003 as Chairman of $20 billion in assets Cooperative Finance Corporation (CFC), a private organization owned by 800 rural electric cooperatives. George Will, Wade’s keynote speaker, is nervous too yet later coolly delivers his spiel on world events, politics and those lovable Addison Street losers, the Chicago Cubs.
North Mankatoan Wade Hensel is acting precocious, again.
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.
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.”
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?)
In the movie title The Passion of the Christ, the word “passion” refers to acute suffering, as in the spiritually opaque hours between Jesus’ last supper and his crucifixion. The Latin root for passion means “suffering.”
In business, “passion” has a different meaning, usually referring to a continual burning excitement a person feels toward a product, company or task, as in “I have a passion for my work.”
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.
