Bad news often unravels lives.
Yet it caused this passionate bunch and their co-workers to dream dreams together and plunge headfirst into business ownership. Ultimately, their bad news would precipitate great good and through it hundreds of southern Minnesotans would experience healing from life’s hurts.
Read MoreIt’s 5 a.m.
Pam and Roger Barnlund are up and ready for the first walk of the day. They wake the dogs—today there are only 12, but there could be up to 30—and start out with one on each of their arms. It takes an hour to give all of them a brisk morning romp.
Read MorePat Johnson and Peggy Grey, two vivacious sisters who own a pair of southern Minnesota’s oldest family businesses, are day-brighteners.
If your mood’s been slightly skewed by corporate and stock market scandals, a snail’s pace economic recovery, pink slips, job outsourcing, bickering politicians, a couple of nasty wars and color-coded terrorism alerts, an hour with Johnson and Grey is an upbeat, uplifting 60 minutes. Two hours is even better.
Read MoreThe kid’s dad died young. Suddenly he and three siblings were baptized into a single-parent home and mom had to sell the farm. To make ends meet, she labored in a hot kitchen preparing meals for other people’s kids. He was a youngster at risk. Fatherless poor kids from large families often gravitate to the wrong side of the tracks.
But not an Annexstad, and not in St. Peter.
Read MoreSon of world’s greatest singer attends Gustavus Adolphus College, marries soft-hearted Iowan and moves to Sweden, later begins long career at Gustavus Adolphus and opens gift shop in St. Peter garage. It’s tough to pick which story to write.
So let’s begin with Jussi, the great Jussi Bjorling, who from 1938-1959 sang tenor at the Metropolitan Opera. Nearly all top-hat music critics utter Bjorling’s name in the same breath as Domingo, Pavarotti and Caruso—and more than a few claim Jussi Bjorling was the world’s greatest singer of all time, of any genre.
Read MoreZ. Sam Gault doesn’t own the biggest or by any means the most powerful bank in southern Minnesota, but his family has owned one in St. Peter, Minn., since the days of U.S. President Chester Arthur in the White House. He owns Nicollet County Bank, which in 2000 had nearly $100 million in assets. And Gault tenders an excellent interview: often his answers are sharper than Lizzie Borden’s axe.
Read MoreMost children of the ’60s lost their idealism years ago, opting for the rutted path of materialism that many of their parents and grandparents chose. But tucked deep inside the conscience of many of them rests the fond memory of their own fight for their ’60s causes.
Read MoreHe owns every issue of The American Organist published since 1929, and every issue of The Diapason back to 1913. Those trade magazines still print today. His bookshelves are crammed full of faded cloth books with out-of-print titles like Organ Building, Vibration and Sound, The History of the Organ in the United States and The Art of Organ Building. A few have German titles: Die Brabenter Orgel and Zungenstimmen. Not everyone builds pipe organs these days. When the company phone rings, Charles Hendrickson, 63, casually picks it up and says “Charles Hendrickson.” He absolutely loves his freedom as owner at Hendrickson Organ Company in St. Peter.
Read MoreRobert Walton Wettergren, a.k.a. “Mister St. Peter,” reminds you of the man that drives his Model T down the road doing 45, and while you’re passing him he’s glancing over and smiling like he’s the one passing you.
Rock-solid. Traditional. Bob Wettergren does things the old-fashioned way. When he recently celebrated fifty years of marriage with wife, Renee, he was asked their secret for staying together (this, during an age when half of marriages end in divorce). Bob said, “We work at [marriage]. And we pray together. When you pray together, you stay together.”
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