waseca

Ideas flow from Mary and Wayne Dankert like newsprint off a high-speed printing press. Watch them go. The ideas flow because the two have so many percolating about in their constantly churning minds—so many ideas printing and collating, printing and collating, so many, one, two, three, four. And the ideas leaving make room for more.

Gene Miller now thanks his lucky stars that Waseca County’s welfare director retired a year early, meaning Miller and his unfinished MSU master’s degree in 1976 weren’t quite ready to interview for that position he had dearly wanted.

Iowa State defensive tackle Roger Ashland crouched at the five-yard line and readied himself to hammer a Nebraska running back corkscrewing through the air toward the goal line. Roger licked his chops, but he was the one getting slobberknockered.

“He just knocked me…oh, my gosh,” Ashland was saying of a 1966 collegiate football game, “that was the hardest I’d ever been hit in my life.”

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.

Every summer, a seasonal suburb blossoms across from Clear Lake, just east of the Waseca city limits on U.S. Hwy. 14.

Residents begin moving in around mid-April with the population peaking at about 1,300 in mid-summer. As in most suburbs, nearly everyone is from somewhere else. Half come from the Twin Cities, 30 percent from Southern Minnesota and the balance from other regions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and the remaining states. And, like typical suburbanites, most go to the nearest Big City (Waseca) to shop.

Ernie Glass, 62, president of Johnson Components and survivor of five buyouts over the past thirteen years, leans across his desk to explain why his Waseca office has few furnishings. “My tradition of a bare office dates to my General Electric days,” says Glass, a hint of a smile breaking across his lips. “I moved every two years then so I never really bothered to fill my office up with things that would need to be packed and eventually unpacked. Then I came to this company where I’ve had six different office suites at three different plant sites since 1987. I carried on the tradition.”