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.
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.
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.”
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.
Duane Leach comes across as a plain-spoken, soft-spoken, uncomplicated sort of guy.
He doesn’t rely on rhetoric, doesn’t use $20 words, thinks before he speaks and shrinks the Business Facts of Life to simple terms unblemished by qualifying adjectives.
For a businessman trapped in a shrinking market, Gary Andersen remains remarkably optimistic.
Andersen is publisher of the Sentinel, a daily newspaper that’s been serving Fairmont and its surrounding trade area in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa since 1874. Fairmont, long regarded as one of Minnesota’s most attractive little cities, lost some of its shine in recent years. In many ways the booming ’90s skipped most rural areas, where population shriveled, retail stores closed and farm families left the land.
