fairmont

Feature Story

Center For Orthopedics & Sports Medicine

Five years ago, Dr. Corey Welchlin faced an uncertain future as the only orthopedic surgeon in Fairmont.

He loved orthopedics and wanted to keep practicing in the town where he was born. But he suspected that the Mayo Health System planned to eventually import its own orthopedic specialists after buying the Fairmont Medical Clinic in 1996 and acquiring the Fairmont Community Hospital in 2000.

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Cover Story

Ed Bosanko

Historian Steven J. Keillor* writes in his book Cooperative Commonwealth that the cooperative was a widely used form of business organization in rural Minnesota through World War II because “business was distant” then. Rural residents and farmers organized cooperatives, such as the creamery, to provide goods and services to areas off the beaten track from big-city suppliers. Ownership in a co-op also gave these rural denizens a measure of local control over their economies.

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Feature Story

Timberlake Orchard

A is for the apples Eric Luetgers produces at Timberlake Orchard south of Fairmont.

B is for the bees he nurtures to pollinate his trees and produce the honey he bottles.

C is for the fresh-pressed cider Luetgers sells with his apples and honey, but it could stand for cucumbers, one of several vegetables he raises to diversify his crop.

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Cover Story

Rep. Bob Gunther

Rep. Bob Gunther, like Mr. Whipple, enjoys squeezing the Charmin — and periodically poking a finger into the Pillsbury doughboy’s tummy. In fact, his calloused hands and fingers are into squeezing and poking nearly everything.

Ask 100 people outside his hometown of Fairmont and they will describe Gunther’s poking and squeezing 100 different ways. The grocery industry leans heavily on his savvy: he co-owns Gunther’s Foods in Fairmont and Elmore, and understands grocery issues in minute detail. To corporate executives he’s the razor-sharp yet unassuming Republican point man on many job training and workforce development issues.

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Feature Story

Fairmont Sentinel

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.

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Cover Story

David Castle

A few decades back if a corporate executive even brought up the notion at a board meeting that their $127 million company ought to buy out a $254 million foreign rival, he or she would have been laughed out of the board room. But this is the ’00s. When Fairmont’s Weigh-Tronix did it by buying out British rival Avery Berkel in late 1999 with the leverage of Berkshire, a U.S. investment group, it became the second largest scale manufacturer in the world behind Mettler Toledo. And for the record, nobody laughed at them.

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