Premier Partners
“Atwood” likely is the most “seen” surname in all southern Minnesota.
In fact, so many Century 21 Atwood Realty signs have bedecked our region’s lawns over the years that at times the signposts have looked like corn. They grow tall, align in neat rows and have hanging fruit: SOLD.
In 2003, the company was involved in sales of $78 million, accounting for an eye-arresting 25 percent of the Greater Mankato total. Its closest competitor (Re/Max) had 15 percent.
Business consultants often list the ability to “build and maintain relationships” as one indicator of an aspiring businessperson’s future success. We think it might be the indicator.
CEO Lorin Krueger of $20 million Winland Electronics is every bit Noah.
They laughed and laughed at Noah when he took on ark building. It seemed such a hopeless project, that of building on dry land so far from coast and port. But Noah had faith he was doing the right thing. After its construction, he immediately marched his tiny band inside and boy did it rain, and rain, and rain. The rain seemed as if it never would stop, cats and dogs, day and night, buckets all over. Though the storm clouds roared as pounding timpani and lightning shot its deadly arrows, and others outside the ark were lost, the tiny band never lost faith. In due time, he and his few, having survived, marched off the ark two by two to multiply profitably. It was a miracle.
The 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.
Trivia few could answer:
Name the largest business headquartered in Mankato.
Think you know? In terms of revenue, the correct answer since 2000 has been Ridley Inc., the $500 million, cash-rich corporate mammoth sitting high and dry on Riverfront Drive next to the railroad tracks and flood wall.
It seems almost aeons since your five-year run as executive director of Valley Industrial Development Corp.* ended. So much has changed since 1997. You then became national marketing director of Scholarship Management Services (SMS) before joining the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce (MRCC) in 1999. You left there in January 2003 as its chief executive officer and president. You have earned a Masters from Regis University of Denver, Colorado.
And now you’ve returned home.
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.
Only four persons from the nine-county area around Greater Mankato have been inducted into the Minnesota Museum of Broadcasting Hall of Fame. Of the four, three are Linders. Our cover story, John Linder, isn’t in the MMB Hall of Fame—yet, but he is creating lots of radio waves in our state’s broadcasting industry.
His waves aren’t tsunamis: they’re more a never-ending, behind-the-scenes ripple.
Dan Gislason digs the Icelandic countryside. It’s a winter wonderland of crystal-clean waterfalls and gargantuan glaciers, an arctic canvas of white and lipstick red homes nestled against pastel-green Ansel Adams ridges. Iceland is a cornucopia of mentally stimulating sights and refreshing sounds—the rushing waterfall, the flapping gull, the gentle spring wind melting ice. Rural Iceland would have been a natural fit for Dan today if his ancestors hadn’t left there in the late 1800s.
