Most people scrapbook memories.
Roxie Mell-Brandts of Garden City, Connect Business Magazine Business Person of the Year 2007, preserves hers by restoring a Minnesota town.
Last fall, some friends in Bob Coughlan’s ballroom dancing class mentioned they were taking a weekend trip to Philadelphia for a teacher’s conference. Coughlan, the great-grandson of T.R. Coughlan, who founded Mankato Kasota Stone in 1885, immediately offered his input on the couple’s itinerary while in the city of brotherly love.
“If you’re going to Philly, you have to go see the Philadelphia Museum of Art,” he told the couple. “My grandfather supplied the stone for that building.”
Say cheese, Dennis.
It’s easy getting Dennis Miller to smile. On November 18, 2005, $10 billion Alltel of Little Rock, Arkansas, announced it would buy Mankato-based Midwest Wireless for a bit more than $1 billion.
Happy days are here again.
In Bob Weerts exist all the trappings of a folk legend.
Like Minnesota’s homegrown Babe the Blue Ox and Paul Bunyan, Weerts at times seems much larger than real-life. In a regional business climate often preferring quiet parentheses, he’s an entrepreneur with an exclamation point after his name.
In the mid-’70s, young Chad Surprenant’s chin is barely above the kitchen table and almost every evening at dinner he’s engaged in conversational repartee with his parents and three older siblings. They discuss and debate politics, current events, and aspects of their family business. Quite an introduction to the world of ideas. Chad grows up being heard and treated as an equal at home though he’s the baby, eight years younger than his closest sibling. In other words, he is being nurtured by a rock-solid phalanx of maturity.
Today, Surprenant is trying to recreate at I&S Engineers & Architects this same “kitchen table” atmosphere. To a great extent he’s succeeding.
Lori Wightman had no intention of staying in New Ulm.
When she accepted an assignment from Allina Health Systems in July 2002 to serve as interim president of New Ulm Medical Center, she intended to keep it exactly that. “I figured I’d be here six months, that I’d just keep things held together until a new president could be found,” Wightman says. “I didn’t necessarily want to stay in New Ulm.”
