Bob Freyberg comes from a long, strong line of petroleum salesmen.
He doesn’t touch the stuff himself anymore, except when fueling his auto, but he leans on his ancestral experience, traditions and values nonetheless.
At night when most southern Minnesota businessmen are snoring loudly and dreaming of sugar plum profits, New Ulm native Jon Gasner is roaring his machine across a Wal-Mart parking lot, gulping hot java, and trying to stay awake by shoulder shimmying to Alabama and Alan Jackson. Other than being a fastidious neatnik, buying a $35,000 vacuum sweeper in 1998 to begin a new business with no customers, purchasing the old UPS facility with no renters, and circumnavigating a messy divorce in 2001, Gasner’s story has little shine.
They say God works in mysterious ways.
Le Sueur’s United Spray Systems owes much of its current good fortune to one tough-as-nails kid, Blake Plonske, 11, who beat long odds in surviving 13 major surgeries after being born prematurely in 1990.
No political organization could be more crooked than New York City’s “Tweed Ring” in 1868-71. “Boss” Tweed and his Democratic henchmen “Slippery Dick” Connolly, “Brains” Sweeney and “The Elegant One” Hall looted the City treasury of more than $45 million, primarily through shady deals involving unscrupulous contractors. Tweed himself amassed $12 million.
Haul a well-bred, 700-pound boar to a “genetic transfer station,” put him to work artificially inseminating hundreds of sows, and he’s worth $5,000.
Haul that same high-priced boar to market and he’ll bring $105 to $140 at the slaughterhouse, a humiliating 15 to 20 cents per pound.
The life of Henry Busse Jr. has been a rollercoaster ride, with more twists and turns and thrills than most people experience in ten lifetimes. He began his wild ride at 3, when his famous father divorced his mom. Reconstructing a relationship with his absent father has been a lifelong avocation — and now it’s also his business.
His dad is a mostly forgotten man, dead 46 years, remembered only by the scattered enthusiasts who cherish big band 78s, black & white ’30s show posters and yellowing sheet music. But hot trumpeter Henry Busse Sr. truly is a legend. Al Hirt and Herb Alpert say they were inspired by Busse Sr.’s trumpet solos, particularly his rendition of “Rhapsody in Blue.” He and singer Bing Crosby invented the mute for trumpet.
Even a dirt-poor farm kid, mocked by classmates for his ragged clothes and brown-bag lunches, can make a million in America. That may be the paramount lesson of Floyd Palmer’s life, a life no longer endured in rural squalor because Palmer followed his instincts. “I didn’t want to live poor. I wanted to own my own business.”
Forty-year-old Sharron Moss-Higham manages Kraft Foods’ largest North American process cheese plant — and perhaps the world’s largest. It is 350,000 sq. ft. of aged cheddar cheese and 950 employees wearing hair nets. All those 22-ton trailers rumbling out of New Ulm to distribution points all over are trying to satisfy America’s long-standing hunger for Kraft process (or “processed”) cheese, the nation’s fourth bestselling product line in grocery stores. This year Kraft-New Ulm alone will manufacture and ship billions of Kraft process cheese slices, all of America’s Handi-Snacks, and nearly all the nation’s Velveeta, the kitschy cheese loaf adored by millions.
Shade permits ferns and moss to flourish, but squelches the colorful blooms many gardeners covet as backyard-brighteners.
In all its dappled degrees, shade confounded Clayton Oslund for years. A canopy formed by mature oaks around his Waseca home prevented sunlight and moisture from nourishing much of anything beneath them, forcing him to search for species that could survive or thrive in this semidarkness.
