It was a dark and stormy night.
Leo Nissen was scrunched down in his black sedan, fumbling with chow mein and chopsticks and peering out from behind a Star Tribune. He was waiting for the blubbery bloke with the spaghetti hair and toothless grin—the bad guy.
The outdated notion of private counseling being an hour of pure hell with a daffy German shrink asking stomach-churning questions goes out the window for good during an appointment with Joanna Hocker. She’s a Licensed Psychologist all right, but none like most people have experienced: with her seemingly perpetual cackle of a laugh and infectious Christmas glow she’s more a cross between Phyllis Diller and JoAnne Worley (of Laugh-In fame) than Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers, both well-known therapists.
Despite his training as an aeronautical engineer, Lyle Jacobson never designed soaring rockets or jet aircraft for a living. Instead, he discovered life (and opportunities) outside the realm of space.
For 24 years, he’s helped provide peace of mind to people whose feet are rooted firmly on earth, not in the stratosphere. Jacobson heads Mankato’s Katolight Corp., which supplies emergency power generation systems to customers who must continue operating despite rolling blackouts or ice storms.
On the windward side of Truman, Minn., and only ten miles north of where road-weary travellers crisscross I-90, The Whittler’s Lady Bed & Breakfast began as a monument to a homegrown lady’s poignant memories and to her wild dreams.
When Kathie Davis left her job with the Region 9 Development Commission in 1996, co-workers said “bon voyage” with a gold watch and an office chair.
Those were useful and appreciated gifts, but Davis left with something of far greater value: Her thick Rolodex, brimming with the names and telephone numbers of people she knows can make things happen in southern Minnesota and beyond. It’s the chief asset of “Resource Connections,” the company she formed after serving Region 9 from 1973-79 and 1985-96 as public information coordinator and marketing director.
Ben Pieser’s American-born grandfather settled on the shores of Turtle Lake, Wisconsin, in the late 1800s, and ultimately started a Ford dealership there. He later owned Royal Food Market in Mankato. Ben’s father Dick, who had worked at Royal Food Market after graduating from Mankato High School, followed in his father’s footsteps by cofounding New Ulm Furniture in 1945. And finally, Ben Pieser, the current owner, has helped grow New Ulm Furniture into “The Furniture Giant.”
A simple sandwich launched Najwa Massad’s career.
She operates Najwa’s Catering in Mankato, providing everything from box lunches to sit-down dinners, serving as few as five and as many as 2,500. She caters weddings, funerals, anniversaries and company events ranging from in-office lunches to picnics and parties. Massad has been the exclusive caterer for all events at the Midwest Wireless Civic Center since it opened in 1995.
Capstone Press keeps exploding, Mankato may someday be known as the “Book Publishing” Capital of the Upper Midwest.”
You’re excused if you’ve never heard of Capstone Press. New owners coaxed it out of financially troubled obscurity in 1990, re-starting it with two employees and a vision.
You may never meet another married couple quite like Gene and Margo Hoffmann. Except for their wedding date – “It’s in 1964, I know that much,” claims Margo – neither know the important dates that most people would have memorized along life’s path, such as the year they began Nicollet South Bike Shop, or the year they purchased their rural Nicollet home, or the years they graduated from Mankato State. Even when pressed about her husband’s age, Margo had to fidget five or six seconds. “Fifty-nine, because he just had a birthday,” she says.
