“The best bet,” he said, “is to surround yourself with good people, and bet on yourself.” The president, chief executive officer and sole principal of Industrial Equities L.L.P. makes the comment quietly but not arrogantly, exuding a self-assuredness that has evolved one project at a time over the last three decades.

“I sit down with my children all the time and I always tell them the same thing: have confidence in yourself,” he said. “I studied the real estate business north, south, east and  west until I knew it, and I invest in and choose projects that I understand.

“Bet on yourself and don’t rely on others who might steer you in a different direction. You have to trust your own instincts and your own judgment.”

Allen’s philosophy has allowed him to build Minneapolis-based Industrial Equities into a commercial real estate investment, development and management firm with a portfolio of nearly 3 million square feet. His Windsor Development of Florida, a residential development company, has completed 1,500 lots in Minnesota, Arizona and Florida, and he has developed several hotels.

Projects like those are a long way from Suamico, Wis., north of Green Bay, where Allen grew up the second oldest of six children. He enrolled at Northland College in Ashland, Wis., to major in social science, minor in history and political science, and play outside linebacker in football and center in basketball.

After graduating in 1977, Allen moved to Minnesota and law school at Hamline University. He had no intention of practicing law but he believed a legal background would  better enable him “to think logically and intelligently in understanding the complexities of business and politics.”

A magazine article piqued his interest in the real estate sector, and Coldwell Banker Commercial Real Estate Services hired him – “the first and only job I ever interviewed for” – as an industrial broker in January 1981. His first deal involved an 800-square-foot lease and within two years he was one of the top five producers in the firm’s Edina office.

“John had an overriding resolve to excel and succeed, and I also saw a guy who was very proud of his family,” said Ken Sandstad, the Coldwell Banker executive who hired both Allen and Patrick Ryan ’75, now president and CEO of Ryan Companies and a fellow St. Thomas trustee with Allen. “I have seen many people who say they are highly motivated and driven, but in the end they do not live up to the talk. John always did. The pride in his family stood out for me, too.”

Allen remained with Coldwell Banker until 1995, advancing to become senior vice president and arranging more than 10 million square feet of sales and lease transactions,  and he also struck out on his own in 1983. He founded Industrial Equities because “ultimately, I wanted to develop my own portfolio,” and he has long favored institutional-grade industrial properties with the most up-to-date technology, extensive glass, ample parking and attractive landscaping.

“We are very nimble and engaged,” he said, referring to a “guerilla development” strategy that allows him “to get in, don’t take too big a bite out of the apple, get the deal  done and then move on to the next investment.” It’s important to always manage risk, especially in challenging economic times.

“We also have to remain focused,” he said. “We have resisted the temptation to go in other real estate directions. We did some hotels and residential lots and had really  good runs, but our best thrust is multitenant, institutional-grade industrial projects. We understand the market demands – and what is going to lease.”

Lee Anderson, a fellow St. Thomas trustee who owns more than 30 construction related companies, admires Allen’s ability to assess a project’s potential and move quickly if he deems it a good fit.

“John sees opportunities where others might not,” Anderson said. “He knows how to size up a good deal. He has an engaging personality, and he uses it to his advantage. People like being around John.”

Dee Ann Stinebaugh, a 1988 St. Thomas alumna, has worked for Allen since 1995 and today serves as director of property management at Industrial Equities. She calls her boss “super driven,” with an innate sense as to whether a project will work.

“He has made so many right decisions along the way, and he also has walked away from some deals that could have been bad,” she said. “He has the touch.”

Most Allen projects fly below the public radar, but one that didn’t was his proposal last year to construct a 68,000-square-foot office and warehouse building on the north side of Interstate 94, east of Highway 280 in St. Paul.

The project complied with all city requirements and industrial zoning codes, but the city council voted “no” in response to neighborhood concerns about design and parking. Allen successfully sued the city and expects to open the warehouse this year.

“I’m not litigious by nature,” Allen said, “but in this case I had to protect my investment. This will be a good project for St. Paul, with more new jobs (150) and more taxes for the city.”

Among Allen’s hobbies – and one he shares with Anderson – is restoring wooden boats, which he keeps on property he owns on Gull Lake in northern Minnesota. He has acquired 22 boats; the oldest, Chief Mackinac, is a 1917, 32-foot launch constructed by Consolidated, and the youngest dates to 1955.

“Gull Lake is one of my favorite places to be,” Allen said. “Lee encouraged me to get into antique boats and I have thoroughly enjoyed them. We have a healthy collection and competition.”

Allen’s fondness for Gull Lake led him to purchase the legendary Bar Harbor Supper Club in Lake Shore. The original 1938 restaurant burned down in 1968 and was rebuilt twice before Allen purchased it last year with an eye toward an extensive renovation that would recall its past.

“Bar Harbor’s historic presence appealed to me,” he said. “Three and four generations of families have dined and danced there. After the renovation, an older gentleman told me, ‘I am 92, and I have been coming here every summer since 1938. I thought I would hate what you’ve done, but I love it!’”

Allen jokes that Bar Harbor “never will make my Top 10 deals from a standpoint of profitability,” but he has no regrets. As he examined the project, he chose to move ahead in large measure because he believed it would benefit the community.

And it was, he might have added, another example of betting on himself.

Read more from St. Thomas Magazine.

“My father used to say to us kids, ‘Reach for the stars, and if you end up at the moon, you’ll be happy,’” she said. “We were disciplined, and we pushed each other. We knew that nothing was beyond our reach if we worked hard enough.”

And work hard is what Short always has done – as a young associate in a big law firm, as a judge on the Minnesota Court of Appeals, as managing partner of the same law firm and now as chief legal officer for UnitedHealth Group.

But she waves off praise from peers and credits Marion and the late Robert Short with providing an invaluable foundation for her and her six siblings, four of whom also have law degrees.

“There was no larger influence in my life than my parents,” she said. “They instilled a sense of family and faith and discipline. I credit any modicum of success to them.”

Short grew up in Edina. Her dad owned several businesses, including a trucking company, the Leamington Hotel, the Minneapolis (now Los Angeles) Lakers and the Washington Senators (now Texas Rangers), and he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1978.

“As children we were always involved with my father and his cronies,” she said. “It didn’t make any difference if you were 10 or 16, you would sit and listen to or talk about current issues. Those experiences really made us think.”

Marion Short remembers her daughter as the ultimate planner and “the most-organized person in the world.” When the Shorts moved during Marianne’s childhood, “she started planning neighborhood parties to meet the other kids,” Marion said. “You can be a success at anything if you’re a take-charge person, and that was Marianne.”

As a high school student at Visitation in Mendota Heights, she was founding editor of First Edition, the school newspaper. She covered the 1968 presidential election party at the Leamington for Hubert Humphrey, a family friend, who lost a close race to Richard Nixon.

“I just walked around and took notes like a regular reporter might do, on the atmosphere and mood,” she said. “It was exciting, but there was sadness, too,” and her story was headlined, “The Last Hurrah of HHH.”

Short enrolled at Newton College of the Sacred Heart in Boston at the encouragement of Visitation’s Sister Perone Marie, who had taught there during her novice years. Short majored in political science and philosophy, graduated in 1973 and earned a law degree three years later from Boston College. She returned home to spend 18 months as a state assistant attorney general before moving to Dorsey & Whitney, a Minneapolis-based law firm.

“I wanted to learn from the best on how to prepare for and try cases,” she said. “The best thing about (Dorsey & Whitney) is the depth in all practice groups and the expertise within the walls. I could walk down the hall and get help on just about anything.”

Short found her childhood experiences invaluable, too, as she matured in the job and handled banking, securities and employment law cases.

“I always wanted to be a litigator,” she said. “I liked the courtroom drama and the challenge of putting together a case for a jury. Part of that was my upbringing with my siblings, battling things out at the dining room table. They taught me well, too.”

Gov. Rudy Perpich appointed Short, at age 37, to the Minnesota Court of Appeals in 1988. She decided to take the job because she felt it would provide her with a regular work schedule and a better work-family balance as the mother of two young sons.

“I had some hesitation,” she said. “I worried it might be like going to study hall because it would be too quiet. The biggest surprise was no busy signal on my phone, where I could put people on hold. I thought, ‘How will I ever work here?’ I discovered that people don’t call judges; rather, you walk down the hall for conversation with your colleagues.”

Short grew to love the job, writing 900 opinions in 12 years, and she came to appreciate the impact that the court has on people’s lives. “You don’t take that responsibility lightly,” she said.

But as she turned 50 and her sons headed to college and high school, she felt a need for change and returned to Dorsey & Whitney in 2000. Her work focused on health care law, with clients such as Medica, UnitedHealth and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

“Quite honestly, she was a stronger lawyer when she came back,” said Bill Berens, a 1975 St. Thomas alumnus with Dorsey & Whitney since 1978. “Her experience on the bench gave her insight into the practice of the firm, and from a different perspective.”

Seven years later, Short faced another big decision – whether to become the first woman to serve as managing partner of Dorsey & Whitney, then Minnesota’s largest firm with 600 attorneys in 19 offices around the world.

“It was a huge honor to be asked, but I didn’t want to give up my practice,” she said. She worked out a blended schedule – two-thirds management and one-third practice – and enjoyed it because “it kept me relevant to clients. Part of the job was managing and making strategic decisions on the direction of the firm, but I also needed to be responsive to clients.”

Much of Short’s tenure came during the recession, which forced her to deal with cost-cutting issues and adding value to services provided to clients. Another opportunity
involved the constant need to nurture attorneys and strengthen their engagement to private practice.

“Our talent walks out the door every night, and we have to make certain they come back every day,” she said. “Practices need to connect the next generation of lawyers to the firm and to our clients.”

Short had special appreciation for Dorsey & Whitney’s culture and three core values: clients (“we are committed to them”), colleagues (“we like and respect each other”) and community (“we give back”).

She has long given back personally through her service on numerous boards, including Boston College, where she has been a trustee on and off since 1985 and today is chair of the Student Life Committee. Father William Leahy, president since 1996, values her balance.

“That comes out of her training as a lawyer and jurist,” he said, “but there truly is a judiciousness in her observations and judgments. She’s a voice of wisdom.”

As satisfied as Short was at Dorsey & Whitney, she accepted an offer to join UnitedHealth as its chief legal officer in January. She was reluctant to leave the firm but believed it was time to try something different.

“You always hate to leave a group you’ve worked with for so long – the people who helped you grow as a lawyer and a leader,” she said. “Not that you ever get comfortable with any job, but there is something about new opportunities that keeps you fresh and takes you out of your comfort zone.”

Along the way, she said, she still finds herself following her dad’s advice. “I don’t know if it’s the stars or the moons,” she said, “but I’m still reaching.”

Read more from St. Thomas Magazine.

The trait showed up when he was an 8-year-old south Minneapolis boy who had two newspaper routes and later bagged groceries at a neighborhood store.

The trait was present throughout a three-decade career during which he rose from a construction splicer’s helper at Northwestern Bell Telephone to president of the company and then as president of a US West Communications division.

And the trait still motivates him today as president of management consultant MLM Partners and board member of seven companies and nonprofit organizations – service that earned him the No. 1 spot on Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal’s “Hardest-working Board of Directors” list in 2009.

“I’m not afraid of hard work,” Madison said. “I just applied all of the principles that I learned on my paper routes as I went through my jobs in the phone business.”

Madison saved money from those paper routes to buy a black-and-white television for his family. His dad was a railroad engineer, his mom managed a bakery and he had a younger sister, and they had a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

“That’s just the way it worked in those days,” he said. “We had a nice neighborhood and home, but you had to work as a kid if you wanted spending money for pleasure. There were good learning experiences in those jobs.”

He smiled as he told about one experience. He not only delivered newspapers but also collected for them, and some customers would try to avoid him.

“I learned how to sneak up on a house,” he said. “You didn’t come up the front steps. You had to learn the habits of each customer, and their personalities. If you gave good service, you could expect a good tip. That meant delivery right to the front door, and inside the door if it was raining.”

Madison also bought his first car, a 1941 four-door Chevrolet, at age 15 with earnings from his jobs. He drove the car to Roosevelt High School, where he graduated in 1953, and the University of Minnesota to pursue a degree in aerospace engineering and an interest in becoming an astronaut.

But he left school halfway through his freshman year and took a job with Northwestern Bell.

“We’d go into manholes, splice wires together and slip a sleeve over the copper to protect the wires,” he said. “I also had to vent the manholes and clean up after the splicer.”

Madison later worked as a lineman, installing telephone poles and attaching cables and wires, and he also installed residential telephones. He learned a lot on those jobs, including one important lesson: “Working at Northwestern Bell was a wakeup call, telling me I didn’t want to do this work for the rest of my life,” he said. “I knew I needed to go back to school and prove I could become an engineer.”

Tom Madison and St. Thomas

• Served on the Board of Trustees from 1981 to 1997 and rejoined the board in 2011. He is on the Investment and Student Affairs committees.

• Represents US West, with his late wife, Pat, and their three children, in one of 13 fresco pillar portraits in the Terrence Murphy Hall atrium on the Minneapolis campus. St. Thomas designated US West as one of the founders of the Minneapolis campus, which opened in 1992.

• Believes St. Thomas’ biggest challenges are related to the increasing costs of higher education. Students need more financial aid, he says, and the question always will be asked about whether a college education is worth the cost: “I think it is, and I believe St. Thomas is positioned well, but I’m worried about debt loads. We also need to ask, ‘Can we be everything to everybody, or do we need to focus more?

When he graduated in 1959, Madison had a family – wife, Pat, and the first two of their three children – and a decision to make. He had 10 engineering job offers from around the country, but he decided to stay in Minnesota and work for Northwestern Bell because “the people were good, the benefits were good and the culture was good. It was the right fit.”

And it was a fit that lasted 33 years, starting with a 10-month training program in which he worked in every department. When the training ended, he chose to work in the plant department as a service foreman who managed telephone installers.

Madison quickly advanced into other supervisory jobs, usually requiring moves around the Midwest. He spent four years in Redwood Falls, Minn., as a district plant superintendent, before returning to Minneapolis for a year. Then it was off to Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota; all told, he held 16 positions, including president and chief executive officer beginning in 1985 in Omaha.

“I don’t think I ever aspired to be CEO,” he said. “I first wanted to be a district plant manager, and then my goal was to be a department head, and then an officer. … All of those experiences helped me in knowing that I could manage the company. I had ‘been there, done that.’”

Dick McCormick, the retired chairman of US West, worked with Madison for nearly 40 years and admired him because of his energy level and his ability to analyze and resolve issues.

“Tom always had high expectations of himself and the people who worked with him,” McCormick said. “He was demanding and tough but fair, and a good communicator. People always knew where they stood with him.”

The breakup of the AT&T-Bell system led to the establishment of seven regional operating companies, including Denver-based US West (which later became Qwest and today is Century Link). Madison held three senior executive positions in Minneapolis before retiring in 1992.

His inclination was to do consulting and venture capital work, and the opportunity to serve on corporate boards intrigued him. Service on the Minnesota Mutual Life Insurance board led to an interim position as vice chairman and co-CEO in 1994, and more companies approached him about joining their boards. His biography lists more than 40 boards over the last two decades.

“I could contribute and I could help,” he said. “As a CEO, I faced a lot of different challenges and opportunities. I had been through the mill, so my goal was to help the management of companies avoid the kinds of mistakes I had made.”

Digital River of Minnetonka is one example. Joel Ronning founded the global e-commerce company in 1994 and brought Madison onto the board the following year. They are still together – Ronning as chairman and CEO of a company with 1,400 employees and Madison as lead director.

“Tom is very focused,” Ronning said. “He has ‘high-low’ capabilities. He can go down into the process to make your organization work better, and then he can go to the highest levels and talk about governance issues in an international area.”

Madison has stayed on the Digital River board this long because he closely identifies with its goals and its fundamental strategy of using the Internet to spur business growth.

“I have enjoyed the challenge and the fun of new, innovative technology,” he said. “Every company is faced with challenges and with changes in technology, and if the company can’t adjust, it won’t exist five years from now.”

He held up his cell phone, a symbol of change in the way he has communicated during his lifetime. When he started at Northwestern Bell, people used clunky rotary-dial telephones tied to land-based lines. Today, they carry phones in their pockets and rely on them to access a world of information.

“If you don’t have one of these,” he said with a nod to his cell phone, “you’re in trouble. Every single company out there is faced with technological change and how it impacts their bottom lines. The strategies of five years ago and today are significantly different.

“It’s fun to see how companies evolve, and I think I can give them some valuable advice.”

Read more from St. Thomas Magazine.

Judy Sunberg

Judy Sunberg, wife of former St. Thomas trustee Frank Sunberg, died Saturday, Aug. 18.

The Frank and Judy Sunberg Student Leadership Center on the third floor of the Anderson Student Center is named after the couple. The center offers space and resources for student organizations, including USG, STAR, Hana and the Aquinas Yearbook.

The Sunbergs received the Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton Award from the National Catholic Education Association in 2010 for their support of Catholic education, including programs at Cretin-Derham Hall and St. Thomas.

Visitation will be held from 4 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 21, at O’Halloran & Murphy Funeral Home, 575 S. Snelling Avenue, St. Paul. Mass of Christian Burial is scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 22, at Assumption Catholic Church, 51 W. 7th Street, St. Paul, with interment at Resurrection Cemetery.

Frank Sunberg was a St. Thomas truestee from 1999 to 2009.

The Sunbergs’ granddaughter Jessica is registered to attend St. Thomas as a first-year student this fall.

As chair and executive director of the GHR Foundation, and previously as chair of the Better Way Foundation, Amy Goldman is involved in making contributions to transform organizations focused on improving the quality of life for the less fortunate around the world.

Deciding who gets funding is a daunting responsibility because the needs seem endless and the cases often are compelling, but Goldman approaches the process with the precision of an academic researcher and the heart of a compassionate philanthropist.

“I like the intellectual challenge – to examine a situation and determine the best cause of action – and I like the collaborative capabilities and the leverage we can give to a grantee,” she said. “It’s satisfying to know we can help the people who are doing the real work. They’re the heroes. It’s amazing to see what they are doing to improve society.

“And it’s fun to come into work every day and think about how to help people do a better job of serving others.”

As a young adult, Goldman never expected she would run a foundation. She was interested in a career that would combine her interests in international issues,economics and political science.

She grew up in Edina, the youngest of seven children of Henrietta and Gerald Rauenhorst, founder and longtime chairman of Opus, a real estate development and construction company based in Minnetonka. The 1982 graduate of the Convent of Visitation School in Mendota Heights heeded her parents’ rule – they would pay only for Catholic colleges – and chose Georgetown University and its School of Foreign Service.

“I knew I wanted to live overseas and learn foreign languages, and I told the Georgetown recruiter that I wanted to be in the White House press corps.”

After earning her bachelor’s degree in international economics and politics, Goldman worked at the International Management and Development Trustee Profile Institute in Washington before enrolling in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Boston. As she pursued a master’s degree in international business and East Asia, she took advantage of opportunities to teach and conduct research at Sogang and Yonsei universities in Seoul, South Korea.

Returning to the United States, she enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley to pursue a doctorate in political science and met Philip Goldman. They married, she earned a master’s degree in political science and they moved to Washington, where she obtained a MacArthur Foundation fellowship to continue her doctoral research.

She joined International Trade Services in 1993 and worked with clients on a variety of regulatory, investment and trade issues. “There was a lot of writing and advocacy work,” she said. “And I found myself using so much of what I had learned at Georgetown, Tufts and Berkeley.”

The Goldmans adopted infants Nicholas from the Ukraine in 1997 and Julia from Russia in 2000 (Nadia, their third child, was born in 2007), and Amy became an active volunteer. One day, Philip, who had been working for the World Bank in Washington, came home with news.

“He said, ‘I got a job offer to work for the bank in Croatia, and I’m sure you’ll never consider it,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Are you kidding? Let’s go!’ ”

The Goldmans spent two years in Croatia and returned to the United States – Minnesota, not Washington – in 2005. Amy continued her work with foundations that her father had established, starting with the Better Way Foundation, which she chaired from 2003 to 2009. It proved to be a good fit.

“It was more than just writing a check,” she said. “We worked in partnership with our grantees. Every dollar we gave had to make an impact. That was my mandate from the founder and the board.”

As Goldman dove into her work with Better Way, she saw pressing needs everywhere. The foundation decided to split its grants between domestic and international programs and targeted areas such as HIV/AIDS education in East Africa. An order of nuns received a grant to pay for a certificate program at Uganda Martyrs University after demonstrating that their most urgent need was to learn counseling and leadership skills.

Louise Myers, an international health care consultant who served on the Better Way board for six years, called Goldman’s formative efforts “brilliant.”

“She took a new foundation and did all of the right things to develop a vision, a structure, goals and a program focus,” Myers said. “She methodically built the  foundation and was able to blend personalities, different agendas and dynamics that are part of any board.”

Matt Rauenhorst, her nephew, went on an eyeopening trip to Uganda in 2006 with board members to learn more about programs that could help orphans and children in poverty. “Amy showed great leadership with that trip,” he said. “She showed that a foundation like ours can make a difference.”

In 2009, Goldman moved down the hall to the GHR Foundation as its chair and executive director. It has a similar mission – “to assist those providing sustainable solutions to the world’s most pressing social issues” – and helps grantees establish longterm partnerships with educational and social service institutions.

One program is the Children in Families Initiative, which works with community organizations to create services that place children without parents, or inout-of-home care situations, in stable environments. Another program, Sisters Support,examines declining vocations of religious women, who historically have been powerfulforces in the fight against poverty.

“We have anecdotal data, but we’re funding a research study and then will go back and see who is proposing ways to address obstacles in their congregations,” Goldman said. “In Africa, the numbers are high but they don’t have the education, so we need to look at education and training for them.”

As infinite as the challenges and problems seem and as limited as the dollars are to address them, Goldman always is heartened by progress that she sees. It’s a result, she said, of making sound choices on programs and ensuring that those who receive funds not only spend them wisely but also have the passion and the wherewithal to affect change in their communities.

If they accomplish those goals, Goldman insists, they’ll become the true heroes of the day.

Read more from St. Thomas magazine

When Peltier, fresh out of graduate school and three years of teaching, decided to try his hand at real estate, he had a simple goal every time he met with customers: He wanted to buy and sell houses.

And when Peltier became chief executive officer, and later chairman, of what now is the nation’s second-largest residential real estate brokerage firm, he had a simple goal when faced with the opportunity for growth: He wanted to make the right deal for the right reason.

Sports and real estate may be different in many respects, Peltier acknowledged, but they also share common traits, and they both have a certain “rush” to them.

“When you drop the puck, you aren’t sure where it will go but you hope you have the right strategy and people in place,” he said. “You don’t win every time, but you learn from losses what you can do better the next time.”

The same philosophy applies to business.

“There’s a real sense of satisfaction in developing client relationships from beginning to end,” he said. “You want a positive outcome, whether it’s selling a house or acquiring a company. Taking on a challenge – and there is no shortage of them – such as finding a strategic acquisition, establishing a rationale and a value and then bringing it to a conclusion … it can be a rush.”

Peltier has had a lot of rushes in his lifetime, whether they were on neighborhood rinks on St. Paul’s East Side or in the board room of HomeServices of America, which has 22 real estate brands in 20 states, including Edina Realty here in the Twin Cities. Those rushes meant hard work – and success.

“It’s putting your talent on the line every day,” he said. “You’re judged, in effect, by if you can sell. It’s not about going through the motions, but getting results. You get paid for results. I liked that. If I wanted to work harder than other guys, I might be successful. I wanted to compete.”

Peltier’s competitive streak was honed on the East Side, where he grew up in a family of seven, with three sisters and a brother. His dad worked in marketing incentives for Brown & Bigelow, a calendar and playing cards company, and his mom was a head nurse for what now is Regions Hospital.

She would take the kids to hockey rinks when they were 4 years old “to burn off energy,” Peltier said. “She’d bring us up there, help us put on our skates, and we’d go at it. We’d spend Saturdays, Sundays and weeknights after our homework was done, skating. We’d play baseball, too, but we were always thinking hockey.”

Among Peltier’s early coaches, as a Pee Wee and a Bantam, was Herb Brooks. Lou Cotroneo coached Peltier at Johnson, where he played center on three state tournament teams from 1965 to 1967. At Minnesota, he played for Glenn Sonmor, Lou Nanne and Brooks again, and they reinforced core values such as commitment, responsibility and teamwork.

“I always had really good coaches,” he said. “They stuck with you in terms of how your personality was shaped and how a sense of competition developed. Their message: Whatever you did, you could do more, and 100 percent was not good enough. You had to give 110 percent.”

Peltier majored in history and political science at Minnesota and intended to go to law school but instead earned a master’s degree in education from St. Thomas in 1973. It fit nicely with his first job as a history teacher and hockey coach at the new Blaine High School. He had dabbled in real estate – buying, renovating and selling a duplex – and decided to change careers in 1977.

“Once I got the hang of the real estate business,” he said, “I thought, ‘Boy, is this empowering!’ I knew how to sell, and I knew I could do it anywhere.”

Edina Realty knew it, too. After 18 months as a sales associate, Peltier opened a Maplewood office, was promoted to regional manager for the east metro area a year later and moved up to president and CEO in 1992. Edina changed hands several times before it evolved into HomeServices of America and became part of the Berkshire Hathaway empire in 2000. His new boss? Warren Buffett.

“Whether in sports or business, you want to interact with successful people and learn from the best,” Peltier said. “You won’t learn from losers. You won’t learn from bad actors. So how would I not be excited about Berkshire Hathaway? He (Buffett) has all winners.”

HomeServices thrived and used acquisitions over a decade to expand around the country. The real estate crash hurt sales volume and revenue – they dropped from $64 billion and $2 billion in 2005 to $33 billion and $1 billion in 2010 – and HomeServices survived only by trimming costs and laying off employees and sales agents. It wasn’t fun, Peltier said, but it was necessary.

“We never saw it coming – and neither did anyone else,” he said of the recession. “I’ve been through good times and bad, but nothing like this. It took on a life of its own.”

Peltier believes the market has stabilized, even though there is little job growth, and he is eager to acquire more firms as HomeServices pursues a long-term goal to have the No. 1 or 2 brand in 60 prime markets. His “real estate is all local” philosophy remains the same, and he has no intention of trying to create a national brand.

“To put an Edina Realty in Iowa would be foolish,” he said. “We acquire companies that are well-established in their markets.”

Peltier relies on loyal employees such as Barb Jandric, another St. Paul native, to get the work done. He hired her 28 years ago as sales manager for Edina’s office in Highland Park, and today she is president of the firm.

“Ron never told me what to do,” she said. “He always allowed me to choose my own solutions, to figure things out, and then we’d talk and he’d ‘fine tune’ my ideas. I learned how to solve problems in a really good way, on my own, and I developed into a stronger leader.”

Another employee who has learned from Peltier is his wife, Arlie. They were high school sweethearts at Johnson, and after working as a Montessori teacher she went into real estate. She directs Edina’s Exceptional Properties division. She calls her husband a “smart, warm, caring, sincere, honest, direct” man who is driven to succeed.

“He’s passionate about absolutely everything he does,” she said. “Business, pleasure, family, whatever. He always said you could not be a great hockey player unless you gave your heart and soul. It’s the same in real estate. It’s the same in anything he does.”

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“We just plodded along,” he said. “We never were a star. We put one foot ahead of the other, just like a horse. Then we woke up one day and we were the biggest.”

He shrugs, not in an immodest way, but to suggest that was the only way he felt comfortable doing business. He knew from the beginning that he wanted to build Great Clips into a national brand because he felt one was bound to emerge in the industry.

“When we started franchising, there was this idea of building a national brand,” he said. “We may not have used that term, but was it possible? Yes. Some chains had 400-500 salons, but no national presence. We figured, ‘Why not us?’”

Why not, indeed. Great Clips has become that national brand, with 2,900 stores in 43 states and Canada and annual revenues of $800 million. Barton expects to hit a long-envisioned 3,000-store milestone this year and $1 billion in revenue by 2013. Not bad for a guy who went to five colleges, left two jobs in a six-month period and lost money in his first franchise venture before landing with Great Clips.

Barton was born in South Dakota, the only boy in a family of six kids and the son of an engineer dad who built grain elevators and a mom who ran a restaurant and a cheese shop. They moved around the Midwest during his childhood and settled in the Twin Cities, where he graduated from Minnetonka High School in 1967.

He served in the Navy Reserves, got an accounting degree from San Diego State University and spent four years with Grant Thornton in Denver and Minneapolis. He joined Century 21 to develop real estate franchises and then an oil exploration company, but neither job panned out. Nor did his franchise with The Barbers chain. He opened a Town Square salon in 1981 in downtown St. Paul, intrigued by the hair care industry and similarities with Century 21 when it came to franchising potential. He lost money and sold the franchise after a year, but got to know Great Clips founders Steve Lemmon and David Rubenizer, who had four salons. Barton came on as a partner to recruit franchisees and sell a simple concept.

“Quality, convenience, price – we called it our value quotient,” Barton said.

At the time, independent salons and barber shops with the classic red, white and blue poles dominated the business. You made an appointment for 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday or on Saturday morning, and you bought a shampoo, cut-and-style package for $16.

“We unbundled the services,” he said. “If you wanted just a haircut, you could get it. Six bucks. We were open until 9 p.m. and all day Saturday. Right away, we were different. Convenience was a huge factor, and our stylists were well trained. We did more haircuts and better haircuts.”

Barton and partners sold the first franchises to friends and family members, including his wife and mom, and targeted Des Moines and Omaha before expanding into Denver and the Twin Cities. They provided marketing clout via television and radio advertising and developed training programs, although they scrambled on the latter.

“We realized we didn’t have a training program,” Barton said, so I called my sister and asked her to help us develop one. She said, ‘Sure, when do you need it?’ I said, ‘Two weeks …’”

“And I told him, ‘Of course,’” said Rhoda Olsen, then a Land O’ Lakes human resources manager.

Olsen came through with the training program and joined Great Clips in 1987 as vice president of human resources. Eleven years later she was named president – the No. 2 position under chairman, chief executive officer and majority owner Barton, who had bought out his original partners.

“Actually, I’m No. 2, and she’s No. 1,” Barton said. “I have my job because of Rhoda’s great work.”

Olsen laughs at her brother’s wry humor. She admires how he never wavered from a vision that “we would be the biggest and best, and he never let anybody try to steer us off that path.” As for her role, “I never thought I could do these jobs, but he did, and that carried the day.”

Potential franchisees would approach Great Clips. An Indiana man visited Barton and mailed him a $10,000 check for a franchise, but Barton hesitated because Great Clips had no presence or support services there.

“He figured we wouldn’t say no if he sent us the money,” Barton said, “but we had a strategy. We thought long-term, not short. What was best for us that day was to cash the check because we needed the money. But we were disciplined enough to send back the check.”

In 1988, during the first Great Clips franchisee meeting, Barton proclaimed a “3,000 (salons) by 2000” goal, with annual sales of $1 billion. Two years later, he wrote a mock 1999 Wall Street Journal story about Great Clips’ success and had franchisees sign the story. Never mind that Great Clips didn’t hit those marks; that wasn’t the point.

“It unified our whole organization on a quest,” he said. “It was very powerful from that perspective. When I wrote notes to franchisees, I always finished, ‘I look forward to working with you as we get to 3,000 by 2000.’ My wife said, ‘You have to stop saying 3 by 2.’ I asked her why. She said, ‘Because people are starting to believe you.’”

Jim Hemak believed. He was working for Junior Achievement in Denver when he opened his first franchise in 1984. He built his Great Clips empire to 39 stores in Milwaukee, Colorado Springs and Denver before selling most of them. He owns nine today.

“Ray was extremely committed to a vision of making Great Clips the largest hair salon brand even when we had only 30 to 40 salons,” Hemak said. “People would raise their eyebrows and say, ‘Right, Ray …’ and he’d say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna do it.’ He was tenacious. He had a lot of moxie.”

That tenacity and moxie still are there today. So is Barton’s focus on adding franchises one at a time. So is his commitment to quality.

“Winning is always fun, but we have challenges,” he said. “We don’t spend much time resting (on our laurels). We just think about how we can get better – for our customers and our franchisees.”

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As serious as those times were, Flynn was well-prepared to deal with them, thanks to 30 years of experience at a Big Four public accounting firm and vital lessons from Sister Mary Magdalene, principal of Nativity of Mary School in Bloomington.

“I spent some time in her office,” a grinning Flynn said. “She was a small, demure nun – small in stature, but she could make an impression on you. I was ‘spirited’ and quicker with the lip than she would have liked. When you got in trouble, you stood in the hallway. Big trouble was if your desk was in the hallway.”

Flynn not only survived those hallway “timeouts” but also learned something from them, and he hasn’t stopped learning. His philosophy: Work hard. Listen carefully. Communicate clearly. Involve co-workers in decisions. And above all else, trust people.

“I’m often asked how I define leadership,” Flynn told St. Thomas graduate business students as their commencement speaker last May. “To me, it’s very simple. It’s all about trust. It is about earning the right to have others put their trust in you, and then living up to that responsibility every day.”

Flynn learned the value of trust and hard work early in life. He grew up in a family of eight, his dad the chief financial officer of Overland Express, a trucking company, and his mom a homemaker. After those formative years at Nativity of Mary, he graduated from Bloomington Kennedy High School and enrolled at St. Thomas, where he majored in accounting and put in 32 hours a week – 60 in the summer – unloading freight and working as a trailer mechanic at Overland.

A self-described “analytical person,” he fell in love with accounting and, in the words of Dr. Shirley Polejewski, was a natural who made a big impression in her Cost Accounting course.

“I only hope that each year I teach, I have a Tim Flynn in one of my classes,” said Polejewski, who has been at St. Thomas since 1976. “He was a serious, outstanding student who had – and still has – a work ethic that along with a value system is among his greatest attributes.”

Flynn graduated in 1979 and went to work at what then was known as Peat Marwick Mitchell. His first assignment was to conduct audits on privately held family businesses and he moved on to work with high technology companies such as Control Data and Cray Research. He wrote two books, Going Public: What the High Technology CEO Wants to Know and How to Build a High Technology Business.

As he climbed the ladder in the Minneapolis office, he was asked in 1987 to move to California’s Silicon Valley to work in the firm’s high-technology practice.

“It didn’t feel right for my family,” he said, referring to his wife, Susan, and their daughter, Laura (son Tyler was not yet born). “I began to think, ‘Where is this career going?’ If I wanted to accelerate my opportunities, the move would be a good launching pad. I reflected a lot on it – on how to balance career with family.”

His decision: no move. As it turned out, the man who led the Silicon Valley operations moved to Minneapolis the following month to run that office, and Flynn became a partner a year later. “He liked me,” Flynn said. “He didn’t fire me!”

Flynn was among two dozen partners chosen in the early 1990s to participate in KPMG’s Leadership 2000 program. He ran the firm’s Midwest manufacturing practice from 1993 to 1996, and moved to New York in 1997. He was global managing partner in two areas – human resources (1998-2000) and audit (2001-2005) – and today serves as chairman of KPMG International, with 137,000 professionals in 144 countries, and KPMG LLP, its U.S. member firm.

The Andersen-Enron debacle forced accounting firms to reexamine practices and recommit to fundamental values, said Flynn, who called it “a dynamic moment. We needed to reassure our people and our clients that this was a great profession,” and in doing so he insisted on ethical behavior beyond reproach.

“Some people did things that were flat-out wrong,” he said. “We instilled a values-based corporate culture – that you can’t just put your head in the sand if you see something wrong. You need to tell us. I can’t guarantee that everyone always is doing the right thing, but I can create the right environment where people will do the right thing.”

Flynn believes people “cross the line” for three reasons: They rationalize their decisions (“I’ll do it just one time, but not again”), they look for implied permission (“My boss knows I’m doing this; if I’m wrong he’ll tell me”) and they do it out of fear (“If I don’t, I may lose my job”).

“People see themselves as falling into traps,” he said. “We need to have the means in place to help them through the process.”

Flynn is proud of the changes that he has engendered, both within the profession and at KPMG, especially given the nation’s economic challenges. He recalled the conditions when he graduated from St. Thomas: inflation and mortgages near 20 percent, high unemployment and a $800 million government loan guarantee that allowed Chrysler to survive.

“We go through these cycles,” he said. “This one is just deeper and longer lasting. It will change people’s habits. They’ll think longer term about spending and investing, and that’s significant.”

Recognizing the need for fundamental change and having the appropriate perspective on the economy are two reasons that Flynn has succeeded, according to retired KPMG partners Bill Simon and Paul Snyder. It also helps to be intelligent and personable, they point out.

“Tim can digest and process information faster than anyone I’ve ever met,” Snyder said. “He’s a good team builder. Even when his plate is very full, he reaches out and helps people. He takes time to build and nurture relationships in an honest and sincere way.”

“His personality is such that he can convince people to get on board and help him get things done,” Simon said. “We’re all born with the potential to be leaders. Tim has demonstrated he is one.”

Flynn appreciates recognition but is modest in accepting praise, and it’s almost as if he’d rather receive it from other quarters. He said as much last year when he received the Dean’s Medal of Excellence at the Opus College of Business graduation ceremonies.

“I am humbled by receiving this tremendous honor,” he said. “I just hope Sister Mary Magdalene is listening from above. She’ll be relieved to know that all my ‘visits’ to the principal’s office paid off.”

Tim Flynn and St. Thomas

• Joined the Board of Trustees in 2006 and serves on the Audit-Finance Committee. He also is a member of the Opus College of Business Strategic Board of Governors.

• Graduated from St. Thomas in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting. His son Tyler is a junior. Other family members with St. Thomas degrees include his father (Richard ’44), two brothers (Tom ’80 and Peter ’81), a sister (Margaret ’84), father-in-law (George Moskalik ’39) and the latter’s father (Joseph Moskalik ’10 – 100 years ago!).

• Has encouraged the university to cut costs and minimize tuition increases, especially during tough economic times and as demographic changes loom. “St. Thomas has done a fantastic job of expanding and being willing to take risks,” he said, “but there must be more innovative and cost-efficient ways to deliver higher education. When you recognize you need to change, it’s less painful if you do it yourself than if someone does it for you.”

But something wasn’t quite right. A piece was missing. As Gage thought about it, he realized he missed the advertising business, where he had started his career as a copywriter. His dad didn’t expect the company would develop an advertising specialty, and that left Gage to explore whether he should leave and join an established agency to practice his first love.

“All of a sudden, when dad asked one day, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ I realized that I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” Gage said. “I saw a need and an opportunity, so I decided to put together a small team and do it.”

“It” was his own agency, and he did “it” from scratch. His goal was simple: “find a handful of talented people who would work with their clients and help them build their brands and their businesses.”

Ten years later, Gage sits in a small conference room in an Excelsior office building overlooking Lake Minnetonka and reflects on his decade in business. His agency – Geoffrey Carlson Gage Brand Solutions – still is small, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. He enjoys working side-by-side with clients and making sure he can meet every one of their needs.

“It’s being able to think of branding as a whole,” he said. “As I believe our new positioning line accurately reflects, we help clients… ‘Look better. Sound better. Stand out. And inspire!’”

Gage has stood out for a long time.  As the son and grandson of two business icons – Edwin “Skip” Gage and the late Curtis Carlson, founder of the Carlson Companies – some people expected that he would follow in their footsteps and spend his career in one of the family businesses.

“I was lucky,” Gage said. “Growing up, when I talked to my dad about what I might do, he was honest: ‘Everyone has his own gifts and talents, and you’ll have to find out what yours are.’ He always said, ‘The company is here. If you want to work here, great.’”

Gage became interested in advertising as a student at Augsburg College, selling ads for the student newspaper and landing an internship at Grant and Palombo, a small agency.

After graduating in 1989 with a communications degree, Gage worked at Campbell Mithun Esty for three years but grew restless and feared that “I would be pigeonholed as a writer. I wanted to look more strategically at communications – to step back from the creative process and see what else I could do for a client.”

He talked with several agencies but found the right opportunity at Gage Marketing. He handled a number of accounts, including the River Road record label, before managing the corporate communications area. “I looked around and realized nobody was advertising Gage – that there wasn’t enough of a Gage brand,” he said. “What’s our message?Who are we?”

He again grew restless, which didn’t surprise his dad.

“It was quite clear Geoff was more into the creative and advertising side of marketing than the sales promotion side, which was our area of expertise,” Skip Gage said. “I didn’t think we’d ever get to the point of being a traditional advertising agency, so I told him, ‘If that’s what you want, maybe you should look around.’”

Gage did more than look. He founded his own business, landed Gage Marketing as his first client and spent a year in the Minneapolis warehouse district before moving to Excelsior. Early promotional efforts promised “a traditional advertising agency with an Internet twist.”

Those were the days, remember, when theWorld WideWeb was just beginning to flourish, and traditional print and broadcast media still dominated communications. Gage respected that but also realized he needed to embrace ever-changing technology.

“I’m not sure people understood the potential of e-communications when it came to branding an organization,” he said, and “it’s not an either/or. You can talk in more than one voice. At one moment, you might be looking at the Internet and in the next, at a print piece. You always have to step back and ask why. You have to figure out your objective and the best way to go about it.”

Gage’s approach intrigued early clients like Greg Hoyt, whose start-up company sold coffee to restaurants. Hoyt’s partner was a CivilWar buff, and they brainstormed with Gage on a name for the company. The result: Bull Run Roasting. Their slogan: “Finding great coffee is no longer a battle.”

“Geoff did a great job conceptualizing what it would look like,” Hoyt said. “He directed us: ‘So what do we do with Bull Run?’ He encouraged us to stay with the words and to create a logo. It’s almost a brand in itself. He helped us come up with something that wasn’t trendy, that wasn’t 2001, that would last. And it has lasted.”

That kind of vision attracted Lorinda Hanson to leave a stable job at another agency in 2000 and work for Gage. She worried about taking a risk but was impressed by her new boss’ character.

“His strength is his passion for what we do,” said Hanson, vice president and creative director. “It’s what sells our customers. Geoff knows good creative work when he sees it, and he is great at identifying a client’s needs and how we can help.”

Gage likes to talk about passion, too. The word finds its way into almost every statement he makes – passion for advertising, passion for creativity, passion for clients, passion for their products and even passion about the size of his six-person company.

“I’m passionate about being a small agency because I want to focus on our clients and meet their needs,” he said. “We could get bigger for the right reason, but I would want to make sure I’m still involved with everyone.”

Gage finds it hard to believe he’s been in business for 10 years. He has a greater appreciation every day for what his dad and grandfather did in establishing their own companies, and he cherishes the day-today interaction with clients who look for help in building their identities.

“I love what I’m doing,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”

Geoffrey Gage and St. Thomas

- Joined the Board of Trustees in 2007 and serves on the Institutional Advancement and Student Affairs committees.

- Graduate from St. Thomas in 1997 with a Master of Business Communications degree. His wife, Kelly, has a Master of Arts degree in history from St. Thomas and teaches at St. Catherine University. (They have two sets of twins, including five-year-olds adopted from Russia.)

- With his wife has endowed a St. Thomas scholarship.  He sees that, along with his work on the board, as “an opportunity to give back and make sure others can have the same experience I did.”

- Believes St. Thomas’ biggest challenge is to “continue to do the right thing.”  He recalls what Padraig Hayes, former CEO of Waterford Crystal, told his graduate commencement exercise in 1997: “Do what’s right and be the best at it.” Thaty may sound simple, Gage says, “but it’s profound – for me and for St. Thomas.  We must do what’s right time after time.”

“I audited clients,” he said. “I started out doing a lot of grunt work, a lot of copying. I asked myself, ‘Get a four-year degree and become a CPA to make copies?’ I wasn’t so sure.”

It didn’t take long, however, for Zesbaugh to realize the fundamental value of “learning companies inside and out.” And, he added with a smile, “Boy, did I come to realize what I didn’t know!”

Zesbaugh proved to be a fast study. Within four years – at 26 – he became treasurer of Life USA. The promotions came quickly: chief financial officer, first at Life USA, at 29 and at Allianz Life Insurance Co. of North America, which had acquired Life USA, at 34. And then the big one: chief executive officer of Allianz Life at 37.

Not bad for someone who once worried about making copies. But in the process, as he vaulted the ladder, he never forgot where he started and he came to appreciate the grunt work. “I learned so much,” he said. “It’s where I got my foundation.”

The real foundation, he also is quick to point out, came at home. He admired the work ethic and took to heart the values instilled by his dad, a systems analyst, and his mom, a medical records librarian, as well as “tough brotherly and sisterly love” as the youngest of five children.

Zesbaugh’s parents were of modest means and thought he would be able to afford only two years of private college. He started at Gustavus Adolphus before transferring to St. Thomas as a sophomore. He wanted to become a psychologist “because I liked the aspect of working with people,” and took an accounting class taught by Len Minars in order to fulfill a psychology degree requirement.

“Len would say in class, ‘Mark, what’s the answer?’ and I would have it,” he recalled. “It was easy. He pulled me aside one day and asked, ‘Ever think of going into accounting?’ And I said, ‘Never.’ I took another class and I was hooked.”

Minars pointed Zesbaugh in the right direction, and Life USA founder and CEO Bob McDonald shaped him. “He took me under his wing and guided me,” Zesbaugh said of his mentor. “He had sound business skills, and his ethics were impeccable. Everything that my dad and mom taught me about ‘doing right’ at home, Mac did in the business world.”

As a young, boyish-faced executive, Zesbaugh encountered many challenges, including supervising employees who were older and more experienced.

“But the more challenging it became, the more I thrived,” he said. “I fell on my face a lot of times, but somebody always was there to pick me up. Leading people is not easy, and it took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t there just to develop their skills but to get the most out of them.”

When the chief financial officer of Life USA retired in 1994, he told Zesbaugh, “We want you to take the job.” He protested – “I told him, ‘I’m only 29,’ and he said, ‘That’s OK. Mac knows you can do the job.’ I called my wife and said, ‘You aren’t going to believe what just happened.’ ”

Allianz Life Insurance acquired Life USA in 1999. McDonald became CEO and Zesbaugh CFO, and three years later, McDonald showed him a letter while on a business trip. “It was his resignation, saying he was leaving in two weeks and that he was recommending that I take over as CEO.”

“I got a lot of negative reaction fromWall Street people when I made Mark CFO of Life USA,” McDonald said. “They were fixated on how old he was, not how good he was. When I retired in 2002, I got the same reaction – he’s so young. After a short period of time, the Allianz people came back to me and said, ‘We’re glad you retired. Mark’s good!’”

Zesbaugh indeed was “good,” McDonald said, not only because he was “extremely intelligent and talented and got along great with people,” but also because “he always focused on what he was doing. He never pushed for something or tried to feather his own nest. He just worked hard.”

Allianz Life, a subsidiary of the German insurance giant Allianz AG, grew remarkably during Zesbaugh’s five years at the helm. Premiums more than quadrupled to $14 billion as the company concentrated on selling annuities, invested assets increased from $15 billion to $70 billion and annual operating profits grew from $100 million to $600 million.

A combination of the job’s demands, with frequent travel overseas, and differences of opinion with the parent company on Allianz Life’s strategic direction led Zesbaugh to conclude it was time for a change.

“It was a grind,” he said. “I had young kids (now 13 and 10). I was gone all the time, and even when I was home I was working all the time. I was 42. I really wanted to spend more time with my family. I didn’t know my kids well enough.”

So he quit, and has had no regrets. The only things he misses, he said, are “the people and the relationships. I liked the interaction – sitting in front of 1,000 people and talking with them about the company.”

McDonald laughed when asked about Zesbaugh’s people skills. “Ask him about the time he came into a Life USA meeting to announce financials and did cartwheels in tights! He never took himself too seriously.”

Zesbaugh has spent the last two years as a consultant and board director of several companies. He enjoys helping companies develop business plans and raise capital. Last year he began to raise funds to start a new insurance company based in Bermuda, but dropped the effort when capital markets shrunk and his investment banker, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy. As intriguing as the opportunity was, in hindsight he would not have wanted to run a Bermudabased company and be away from his family: “I learned I won’t commute to my job. For my job, yes.”

Whatever he does in the years ahead, his goal is to lead a “consumer- driven company” – one that that “understands the consumer perspective. Find out what they need and then develop the products to meet those needs.”

If that means Zesbaugh has to do some grunt work along the way, that’s just fine with him. He’ll even make his own copies.

Mark Zesbaugh and St. Thomas

- Joined the Board of Trustees in 2003 and serves on the executive, institutional advancement and student affairs committees; he chairs the latter

- Graduated from St. Thomas in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and received the Alumni Association’s Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2005.

- Became an inaugural member of the Next Generation Committee because he relished the opportunity to involve younger alumni in the life of St. Thomas.  “They want to give back, but like I once did, they don’t know how to give back. We need to re-engage them – not just asking for their money but also their time and talent.”

- With his wife, Jodie, donated $500,000 to be used as matching gifts to create $50,000 endowed scholarships. 15 such scholarships have been established.

- Says one of St. Thomas’s primary challenges is to respond appropriately to changing demographics. “It’s not just about diversity, but reflecting society and making sure we remain a good university for the next 125 years.”

Stephen Nachtsheim of Atherton, Calif., is a computer pioneer who co-founded St. Thomas’ quantitative methods and computer science program and went on to have a long career as an executive with Intel Corp.

A trustee of St. Thomas since 2002, Nachtsheim’s connections to St. Thomas go back to his childhood. His father, Henry, was a St. Thomas faculty member and the family lived in what was called Tom Town, a series of huts once located on the site of today’s O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center.

He first planned to study chemistry at St. Thomas, but “that didn’t appear to be one of my great talents,” he recalled. After what he termed a “disastrous freshman year” with a 0.94 grade-point average, he switched his major to business, and in the summer of his sophomore year took the Introduction to Fortran class that launched a life connected to computers.

He began teaching computer courses at St. Thomas while still a student. After graduation in 1967, he stayed on campus and for the next six years helped develop the quantitative methods and computer science curriculum and department. St. Thomas was the first liberal arts college in the state to offer a computer science major.

Still in his mid-20s, Nachtscheim was director of the St. Thomas Computing Center when in 1972 he decided to hitchhike around the world. By thumb and sometimes by train, he traveled throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, Russia, Japan and Korea.

He returned to a nine-year stint at the University of Minnesota, where he taught and ran its Academic and Research Computer Center. In 1981 he started a 20-year career with Intel, where he served as director of design automation, European general manager and vice president of Intel Capital.

Humanitarian of the Year – Daniel Saad ’85, ’91 M.B.A.

Daniel Saad of Prior Lake received the 2009 Humanitarian of the Year Award for his efforts to help troubled or homeless young people.

“Kids start out smiling, but for some reason, the smile goes away,” said Saad, who in 1995 founded the Safe Haven Shelter for Youth in Prior Lake. “We rebuild trust,” he said. “A lot of the kids who come to our shelter think they are juvenile delinquents … [when] what they often need is a stepping stone and a chance.”

Saad, who holds two degrees from St. Thomas – a 1985 bachelor’s and a 1991 M.B.A. – was on a corporate sales career path when some work-related projects revealed a talent for fundraising. That knack, plus years of coaching youth athletics and participating in youth ministry, pointed to a new career in helping troubled youth.

With backing from an anonymous donor, Saad opened Safe Haven’s first six-bed shelter in Prior Lake in 1997. The following year a 10-bed home opened. Today, the homes serve Twin Cities boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 18; on average, 40 to 50 young people spend five months at the homes each year.

In 2000, Safe Haven purchased two homes in Burnsville that are used for transitional housing for young adults who are homeless or at risk for homelessness. About 25 people stay in these homes annually – each visit lasting five months. In 2007, Saad’s program opened the Safe Haven Welcome Center and Apartments. Located in the Shepherd’s Path development in Shakopee, the five apartments serve families and those 18 and older who have some form of disability and who are homeless. The welcome center has gathering spaces as well as medical and support facilities.

Safe Haven, its Web site explains, is “founded on the philosophy that there is an immediate need to help at-risk children and youth who have lost faith, hope and have a great need for love.”

Professor of the Year – Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell

As a youngster, Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell wasn’t exactly dreaming of a career in art history, much less earning a doctorate from Yale and specializing in ancient Greece.

“When I was in college I had never even been to a museum until I got dragged into one by a girlfriend,” he recalled recently. “And I found it fascinating.”

Other than being able to print neatly, Stansbury-O’Donnell says he has no artistic ability, and before that first trip to a museum, “I really didn’t know anything about art.”

“But I tell stories, and I love the stories behind the art … that’s what makes it so interesting.”

Stansbury-O’Donnell who has been teaching at St. Thomas for 18 years and chairs the Art History Department, keeps his first experiences with art in mind when he’s teaching, especially when he’s teaching students who are taking his classes to fill a fine-arts requirement for their degrees.

“A lot of the students I teach are not going to major in art history, but they need to think about what people are saying visually,” he said. “Here is an object … a concrete thing that has a story.”

Stansbury-O’Donnell said one reason he is honored by the award is the recognition it shows from faculty peers that “I’ve been on the right path.” He makes it a point to visit classes to see how other professors at St. Thomas teach. “The day I think I know what I’m doing, or I’m content with what I’m doing, is the day I should stop teaching,” he said. “There’s always a better way, and as teachers we are a work in progress. To be a good teacher, you need to keep at it. I always try to keep that in mind.”

Stansbury-O’Donnell especially enjoys the liberal arts, multidisciplinary nature of his field. He says he appreciates working with his department and university colleagues, the opportunity to teach students at different levels and “the freedom to carve out my career here and teach courses as I think they should be taught.”

Monsignor James Lavin Award – Mike Feltault ’81

Mike Feltault recalled that he wasn’t very active in high school, but when he came to St. Thomas in 1977 a member of the student government told him, “Just get involved.” It’s advice he’s followed ever since.

As a student he served twice as a class representative and in 1981 was president of his senior class. He also was elected to the executive board of the All College Council and served as vice president for social affairs. “It was a great learning experience,” he said. “I had my first office, formed committees and managed a large budget. It was almost like running a business.”

Now the owner of a wholesale distribution firm, Feltault previously worked for Honeywell and for several years lived in Chicago, Dallas and Sacramento. “After I came back, I found the Alumni Association was a good way to reacquaint myself with my alma mater and old friends. There were lots of opportunities to get involved.”

In addition to serving on the association’s board of directors, Feltault has been active with the First Friday speaker series; St. Thomas’ Minnesota State Fair booth; class reunions; homecomings; Christmas concerts; golf and theater events; NeighborFests; St. Thomas Days; Society of the Arches; and two capital campaigns, Ever Press Forward and Opening Doors.

“I love working at the State Fair booth,” he said. “I hear so many stories from people about how St. Thomas has touched their lives.””

The Lavin award honors a volunteer for service to the St. Thomas Alumni Association.

Tommie Award – James Ewer

A headline in the Feb. 27 issue of The Aquin student newspaper read: “He always responds with a smile.” The story was about James Ewer, of Lakeville, who received the 2009 Tommie Award.

One of 26 nominees and three finalists for the award, Ewer represents the essence of the Tommie Award “as a committed student who was selected for his commitment to St. Thomas, academics, leadership and his community,” according to Jane Canney, vice president for student affairs at the university.

The Aquin’s headline came from a quote from one of Ewer’s friends, Jamie Vortherms, executive vice president of the Undergraduate Student Government. She said Ewer “does a great job making the students feel welcome and at home. He’s very sociable. He just has a very great presence about him. He always responds with a smile.”

In addition to participating in the Dease Scholars Program, Ewer has been on VISION service trips to Guatemala and White Earth, was a volunteer in Peru and served in the Tutor Mentor Program.

A business administration major, with a focus in leadership and management, Ewer has a minor in psychology and a 3.29 grade-point average. He served as a resident adviser in Brady and Ireland residence halls.

A track-and-field All American in the long jump and track team captain, Ewer has competed in two NCAA and five MIAC championship meets. In addition to helping St. Thomas win several MIAC titles, he holds the university’s second best time in the 55-meter dash.

Those are characteristics that she always has sought to guarantee during a career that has led from working as a nurse to serving as president of the oldest hospital in the nation’s capital to leading the Catholic Health Association of the United States. As importantly, those are characteristics that she insists must inspire any health care provider – and especially a Catholic one.“We have to offer the things that make up any good hospital – quality and efficiency – and we have to recruit good employees and medical staff,” she said. “But we also must bring a mission component that, yes, we honestly believe that people are made in the image of God. We need to provide care with the commitment and understanding that if you come to a Catholic hospital, regardless of your situation, we will treat you with dignity and as a child of God.

“Ours is far more than a job. We are very clear about that in the choices that we make – that they’re not based just on whether we’ll get a good return on our dollars, but also on what’s good for the community.”

Those are rather tall and clear expectations, especially for an industry wracked by runaway costs and always seeking to reform its practices, but Keehan finds them reasonable and attainable. She also has an imposing bully pulpit, though she would not call it that, from which to deliver her message: 600 Catholic hospitals and 1,400 Catholic nursing homes, surgical centers and clinics in the United States employ more than one million people and treat one of every six people hospitalized.

“In many communities, we’re the only hospital or the largest hospital,” she said, “so we have a profound impact on them both in terms of the health care we deliver and the jobs we provide. We make a difference.”

Keehan always has made a difference herself since she earned her nursing degree. Born in Providence Hospital in Washington, D.C., she grew up in a family of five in southern Maryland and chose to enroll at the De Paul Hospital School of Nursing in Norfolk, Va. The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul ran the school, and it occurred to her that she might enter that community.

“I’d think about it and say, ‘Whoa, not me. Give me another option,’ but it became increasingly clear that’s what God was asking me to do,” she said. “You could easily see what a difference the sisters’ commitment to the care of patients and families meant. You also could see a wonderful, strong community life. They enjoyed each other, and there was a great deal of happiness and laughter. They had the right priorities.”

The new member of the order became a nurse at Providence Hospital, which the Daughters of Charity founded in 1861, and then at “the ripe old age of 25” her superiors tapped her to run Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in Pensacola, Fla. The goal was to centralize pediatric care for the entire region, with intensive care, perinatal and neonatal units in one location.

“At 25, you think you can do anything!” she said. “I was just asked to try. We had a lot of bright people, and I knew we would bring a lot of talent to the table. We had such wonderful physicians and nurses. Those were 10 great years.”

Keehan returned to Providence in 1979 to serve as its vice president for nursing. One of the head nurses, Choko Sumiyoshi, persuaded Keehan that she should visit Japan to teach and learn about its health care system. She made that trip in 1980 – and every year or two since.

“It has been a great opportunity to study another culture and another system,” she said. “Each of our systems has wonderful things to contribute, and each has some deficiencies. Part of coming up with a better health care system here is to learn from what others – in Europe, Canada and Japan – have done.”

Sumiyoshi worked at Providence from 1967 to 1999 and today is a nursing professor. She said Keehan made a powerful impression on Japanese health care management leaders, giving them “good advice on how to update health care systems in hospitals.”

Keehan moved to Sacred Heart Hospital in Cumberland, Md., to serve as its president in 1987, and two years later returned again to Providence, this time as its president and chief executive officer. During her 15-year tenure, the hospital took over operation of a nursing home from the Archdiocese ofWashington and then opened a 240-bed home on the Providence campus. It also opened a new operating wing and neighborhood clinics to serve poor families and expanded its outreach to pregnant women and their infants through its Center for Life.

“It was a challenging time at first,” she said, “but also a very good time because we found out how much people believe in the importance of Catholic health care and care for the poor.”

Keehan’s departure in 2004 to serve as chair of the Sacred Heart Health System in Pensacola was greeted with sadness; Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick called her an “extraordinary blessing” and said, “I know no one who has exemplified so well the spirit of Catholic health care.”

Keehan herself said she was “heartbroken” to leave Providence, but that came as no surprise to her. “I have hated to leave every job I’ve ever had, and I have fallen in love with every new job.”

The following year, the Catholic Health Association presidency came open, and associates encouraged her to apply. She knew the organization well, having just finished a term as its board chair, and took the position in October 2005.

“She was the natural choice,” said Lloyd Dean, chair of the association’s board and president of San Francisco-based Catholic Health Care West, which has 42 hospitals. He cited “her leadership skills, her relationships with key Catholic constituencies, her experience in leading Catholic health care organizations and her passion in advocating for care for the poor and the underserved.”

Two years later, Modern HealthCare magazine named Keehan the “Most Powerful Person in Health Care.” Such recognition gives her an important platform for discussions about health care reform, which she believes will be taken more seriously this time around.

“There is more resolve today,” she said. “Everybody says we have to reform the system – labor, small businesses, insurance companies, the pharmaceuticals – and that we have to do it right. People who were lukewarm at best, and sometimes downright hostile in the past, want to work together.”

Keehan doesn’t know how long she’ll serve as association president, but she’s not worried about job security. “You have to know the Daughters of Charity,” she said with a laugh. “If you’re breathing, you’re working. The future will take care of itself.”

While in New York, he assisted at a parish and decided that life – as a parish priest – “was my true calling.”When he got a call from Archbishop Harry Flynn with an offer to become a pastor, he came home in 1999 – first to St. Joseph’s in West St. Paul and then to All Saints in Lakeville.

So when new Archbishop John Nienstedt met with Piche last spring and asked him to consider the positions of moderator of the curia and vicar general of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Piche found himself with another conundrum.

“There was no undue pressure or arm twisting,” he said. “The archbishop wanted this to be a free and happy decision on my part. But it was difficult because it meant stepping away from parish ministry again, and I dearly loved that.”

He also remembered an incident involving Father Kevin McDonough, who served as vicar general for 17 years until last June. McDonough was at St. Joseph’s for a Mass and Piche saw him sifting through a stack of phone messages. “I thought, ‘Boy, I pity the guy who is going to get his job when he moves on to a new assignment.’”

Well, Piche became that guy. He took the job – essentially, it is the No. 2 position in the archdiocese – because he came to a better understanding of his role.

“I’m still a pastoral person,” he said, but with a broader perspective “of working with all of the priests, parish councils, church leaders, trustees and others.” As moderator of the curia, he is chief of the archdiocese’s central staff. As vicar general, he is the archbishop’s representative and similar in many respects to any pastor who is the vicar of his own parish. He also serves as pastor of St. Andrew’s in St. Paul.

“It has been challenging and fast-paced – and especially challenging for multi-tasking,” he said. “The degree of responsibility and authority is very demanding. People are looking to me for decisions that affect their parishes.” He also found the archbishop’s absence for summer trips to Rome, Germany and Australia both “terrifying” and helpful “because I could feel my way into the job.”

“The aspect of this ministry that is most exciting is being able to assist the archbishop – to advise, to carry out his objectives and to understand his vision as the chief shepherd of the archdiocese,” he said. “The things I’m learning and the people I’m meeting are fascinating – I never would have dreamed, for example, that I’d be on the Board of Trustees at St. Thomas.”

“I think I’m a good listener, and maybe that I don’t know all of the answers is a plus because I won’t make snap judgments”

Piche finds the greatest – and the most vexing – challenges have to do with what he calls “the unrelenting demands to solve problems.” He jokes that he comes into the office thinking not “whether there’s going to be a crisis today, but what will be today’s crisis.” Often those crises involve the need to deal with people’s anger and frustration.“People are looking for someone who will listen to them and understand where they are coming from,” Piche said. “I think I’m a good listener, and maybe that I don’t know all of the answers is a plus because I won’t make snap judgments.”

Piche learned how to be a good listener as the oldest of seven children born to a banker and a homemaker. The family moved from Minneapolis to New Brighton in the mid-1960s and Piche graduated from Irondale High School in 1976. He enrolled at St. Thomas that fall – a year before, he noted with a wink, “St. Thomas went coed and I had my first vocational crisis.”

Actually, he had thought of the priesthood since he was six or seven years old, and throughout high school and college he was intrigued by the liturgy and a priest’s role.

“I knew I wouldn’t be happy just making money,” he said. “I wanted to help people and to prepare them for eternal life.” At the same time, becoming a priest concerned him because “I knew it would be difficult to give up the idea of family life, having grownup in such a large family.”

After graduating from St. Thomas in 1980, Piche entered the St. Paul Seminary. Each spring, he said, he got tired and his confidence waned, “and I questioned if I was really able to do this (the priesthood). Then I would go to ordination at the Cathedral and I’d think, ‘I’ll give it another year.’ Their example inspired me.”

He was ordained in 1984 and spent three years at St. Mark’s Catholic Church in St. Paul. He was assigned to the philosophy faculty at St. Thomas in 1987 with the understanding that he would immediately begin his doctoral studies. He spent a year at Princeton, which he called “a phenomenal experience – sitting in on lectures of world-renowned scholars, and I didn’t know what they were talking about!” His Columbia experience, interspersed by teaching philosophy at St. Thomas from 1994 to 1997, convinced him that a college classroom was not his calling.

“He always wanted to be a parish priest,” said Dr. Thomas Sullivan, who has taught philosophy at St. Thomas since 1966 and remembers Piche as a student and a faculty colleague. “He wasn’t ‘on fire’ to be a university professor.”

It is too early, obviously, for Piche to even think about next steps, and he insists he has no ambitions to hold higher office. He simply wants to direct his energy both to his new assignment “and, most of all, to being a good priest until I’m called by the Lord.”

He recalls how a homilist once told about a visit with a dying priest, and asking him for what he should pray.“His response,” Piche said, “was, ‘Just pray that I will be faithful.’ That still moves me when I think of it, and it’s what I want, too.”

Father Lee Piche and St. Thomas

• Joined the Board of Trustees in 2008 and serves on the Academic Affairs Committee.
• Graduated in 1980 with a degree in philosophy, and loved his language courses.  One semester, he took Greek, French and German classes and tutored Latin students.  He taught philosophy from 1994 to 1997.
• Is delighted to be back on campus as a trustee: “It’s like coming home.  There is enough of an element of newness – more faculty, students, buildings – that brings excitement.”
• Sees a challenge in maintaining a focus on the university’s Catholic mission.  He acknowledges a greater diversity of thinking within the church today and how ”I’m not sure everybody agrees what ‘Catholic’ means today.”

His superiors had other ideas. Monsignor Giovanni Montini in the Secretary of State’s office told Laghi that the Holy See needed young priests in its diplomatic corps and would assign him to Nicaragua, where he would work in the nunciature (equivalent to an embassy).

“Yes, I was anxious – to go out into a world unknown to me, coming from the Italian countryside like I did, particularly when I had to leave my family, learn new languages and live in a new land,” he said. “We looked at a map to see where Nicaragua was, and my mother was concerned!”

Montini recognized talent when he saw it, and his choice was validated many times over the next half century. After Nicaragua (1952-1954), Laghi held positions in Washington (1954-1961), India (1961-1964), Rome (1964-1969), Jerusalem and Palestine (1969-1974), Argentina (1974-1980) and Washington (1980-1990) before returning to Rome as prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education. Along the way, he became an archbishop (1969) and a cardinal (1991).

And Montini? He did pretty well, too. In 1963, his fellow cardinals elected him as Pope Paul VI.

Laghi learned early that he liked foreign service, and he treasures the many acquaintances he made. He found “a special grace” in Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was “such an inspiration to me – her work, her spirit, her charisma and her service to the poorest of the poor.” Another rewarding, albeit difficult and frustrating, assignment was his work as apostolic delegate to Jerusalem and Palestine, where the strife 35 years ago was similar in many respects to today.

His final assignments in the United States, as apostolic delegate and then as the first apostolic pro-nuncio (akin to being an ambassador), came during an exciting time because of President Reagan’s decision to formalize diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1984.

“That was touchy because of First Amendment concerns about separation of church and state,” Laghi said, but it proved to be one of the factors that led to the downfall of the Soviet Union. “Reagan was smart. He knew he would need the cooperation of Pope John Paul II to accomplish his objectives. He saw in John Paul a great friend and a great leader.”

Laghi earned a reputation as a skillful diplomat who quickly grasped the cultural nuances of the Catholic Church in each country in which he served while handling sensitive situations and balancing competing interests. He once wrote that diplomacy “has everything to do with honest exchange and frank encounter. It does not seek confrontation.”

Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations, worked with Laghi in Washington from 1984 to 1988 and found him to be a fine teacher who was grounded “in a sound theology and a serene, jovial spirituality.”

“I was impressed with the loving and prudent way he handled crisis, tension and creative progress within the Catholic Church in the United States,” Migliore said. “His passion for peace and justice was evident, and he developed a pleasant empathy with people, which made him a natural bridge builder.”

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and as the Soviet Union dissolved, the pope told Laghi it was time to come home for good and oversee Catholic education around the globe.

“When I took over as prefect, the final text of Ex Corde Ecclesiae was on my desk,” Laghi said, referring to the papal statement about the mission of Catholic higher education. “The Holy Father told me, ‘This is one of your commitments’ – to travel around the world to the 950 Catholic colleges and universities, to respond to their questions and to convince them to take on the norms of a Catholic university.”

Ex Corde Ecclesiae received a mixed reception in the United States because of concerns over potential conflicts between church doctrine and academic freedom. Those concerns ebbed as Laghi and his successor cleared up misunderstandings.

Laghi resigned as prefect in 1999 and served two years as cardinal protodeacon before retiring in 2002. He since has undertaken special missions, including a trip to Washington in March 2003 to meet with President Bush about the impending war in Iraq.

“I tried to convince President George W. Bush how dangerous a war would be – that it wasn’t justified because of the consequences and wasn’t legal because he didn’t have the backing of the United Nations,” Laghi said. But Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in separate audiences with him, “told me that the regime of Saddam Hussein had become a cancer in the Middle East, and they had to extract the cancer before it metastacized.”

In an Ash Wednesday homily at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, Laghi prayed for the “precious gift of peace” and explained how it “is built on four pillars: truth, justice, love and freedom. The Church’s solicitude for peace has been a constant one, and that is why she never tires in her work for the cause of peace. She believes that peace can always be constructed even in the darkest moments.”

Five years later, Laghi is saddened that the war continues – just as he is saddened with the ongoing tension between Israelis and Palestinians. He remains optimistic that peace can be achieved in the Middle East, “but in my lifetime, that may be difficult.”

As successful as Laghi has been in so many different realms, he still takes the greatest satisfaction in his daily work as a priest – in celebrating Mass and ministering to others. He remembers how the possibility of becoming a priest grew on him slowly as a teenager in a country facing war, “and as I saw people suffering, I thought I needed to do something to help.”

That something was the priesthood, and he worries why young men and women don’t feel the same calling to religious life that he did. “We have lost a sense of vocation, a sense of calling – a call to life,” he said. “People think life is in their hands only, but they need to realize their life also is in the hands of God, and they should listen to Him. They look for having more – and not being more.

Cardinal Pio Laghi and St. Thomas

• Joined the Board of Trustees in 2007
• Received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree in 1982 and the university’s first John Ireland Award in 1994 for outstanding contributionsto Catholic education.
• Served as founding chair of the School of Law Board of Governors from 2000 to 2004. Dean Thomas Mengler said Laghi’s appointment provided “immediate credibility” for the fledgling law school. Diana Murphy, a federal appellate judge who succeeded Laghi as chair, said his passion “imbued a great sense of confidence in the future of the school. He was a big shot and that he would get involved here was a green light for a lot of people.”
• Says St. Thomas is “among the very best” Catholic universities in the United States but will be challenged to remain true to its Catholic roots given an increasingly pluralistic society. “We must cultivate the spirit – the spirit of your founder and the great archbishops and presidentswho have done so much to advance St. Thomas.”

Buckley has another title – doctor – that reflects his engineering Ph.D. and in that capacity he not only fits nicely into the 3M environment but he also continues to live out his grandmother’s bold prediction when he was a three-year-old boy in Sheffield, England.

He recalls the prediction as if it were made yesterday. He was standing by the large table in her kitchen one day when she had a visitor.

“The woman asked, ‘And who is this young man?’ I didn’t answer,” Buckley said, “given my grandmother’s philosophy of ‘children are to be seen and not heard,’ so my grandmother said, ‘This is George.’

“The woman asked, ‘And what are you going to be when you grow up, George?’

“I didn’t answer that question either, of course, and grandmother said, ‘He’s going to be an electrical engineer.’

“It’s an amazing story! None of my family members had ever been to a university, and I have no idea where she got that idea, but it was firm in her mind, oft repeated, and eventually it became firm in mine.”

So firm that Buckley became an electrician, an electrical engineer and a senior executive at several corporations before he took the top job at 3M in December 2005. He looks back on that moment with his grandmother, as well as his childhood, as “something right out of a Dickens novel” in the way it shaped his career and his character.

Buckley’s parents split up when he was young and he lived at his grandmother’s rooming house, where foster parents who were itinerant lodgers raised him. His foster mother died when he was eight, and his biological mother came back into his life when he was 11. He had ailments, including chronic bronchitis, kidney disease and anemia, and went to a school for physically handicapped children.

He left school at 15 and got a job as an apprentice electrician at a construction company. He spent five years at what today would be called a community college before matriculating at the University of Huddersfield, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering. He received his engineering doctorate from Huddersfield and Southampton in 1976.

He was a researcher for the Central Electricity Generating Board in London and worked in Detroit as a researcher for General Motors before returning to England as the managing director (president) of a British Railways Board division. He moved to the United States for good in 1993 as chief technology officer for a division of Emerson Electric Co. in St. Louis.

Emerson manufactured motors, gearboxes and other equipment for major appliances, and one of Buckley’s projects was to design a more-efficient washing machine.

“We invented what was to become the Maytag Neptune washing machine,” he said. “It was revolutionary.” While conventional machines could handle 1.3 pounds of clothing per kilowatt-hour, “our machine did 3.6 pounds – or nearly three times the efficiency.”

Buckley moved up the ladder at Emerson to become president of two divisions before joining Brunswick Corp. in 1997 as president of its Mercury Marine Group. Among his tasks there was to develop a four-stroke engine that delivered more horsepower with less noise and fewer emissions, “and run so smoothly that I could set a glass of champagne on the top of the motor and not see a ripple.”

“How are we going to do this?” Mercury’s chief engineer asked Buckley.

“I don’t know,” he replied, “but we are going to do it!”

And they did. Buckley said the engine transformed the industry and the way Mercury was perceived in the marketplace, and the company’s success with the project validated his philosophy of how to work with employees.

“If you are going to get the best out of people, you have to inspire them,” he said. “And you aren’t going to inspire them if they don’t get to know you. They have to see the level of your commitment, your drive, your resolve to achieve a breakthrough.”

Peter Leemputte, senior vice president and chief financial officer of Brunswick, saw that resolve. He said Buckley brought an unusual set of skills to Brunswick, including a strategic vision of what the company could accomplish and an engineer’s eye for details, “and then he motivated us to achieve that vision. He is a fantastic guy.”

Three years ago, a headhunter contacted Buckley about the 3M job. He loved his work at Brunswick, where he had risen to chairman and CEO in 2000. He did a pros and cons spreadsheet about the Brunswick and 3M jobs.

“But that spreadsheet told me absolutely nothing,” he said. “I could not come to a decision. I was torn between my loyalty to Brunswick and my friends there and the opportunities at 3M. So here is how I resolved it. I knelt down in my office and prayed to God. I said I didn’t know what to do, so I would toss a coin – heads, 3M; tails, Brunswick – and I asked Him to make it come down on the correct side. You know which side came up.”

During his first annual meeting in 2006, Buckley told 3M stockholders the company would focus on four strategic elements: core business growth, complementary acquisitions, emerging business opportunities and international expansion – all undergirded by innovation.

“One of the keys to sustainable success is unfettered and well-directed innovation,” he said. “Innovation is not just about a process, it’s also about imagination and people.”

He believes today in the power of innovation more than ever, especially at 3M, which has earned worldwide recognition because of product brands such as Scotch and Post-it.

“Innovation is part of our culture, our genetic code. My job is to instill a sense of optimism and a willingness to take risks. This company has an incredible history,” he said, pointing out his office window. “Look at all of those buildings and laboratories. They’re all about innovation.”

Buckley’s message resonates well. Roger Lacey, vice president for corporate strategy and a 32-year 3M employee, credits Buckley for taking the time “to go into the labs and talk to people. He makes the time because he believes in these people, and he knows what they can do for 3M.”

Early results in Buckley’s tenure are encouraging. Revenue and earnings hit records of $22.9 billion and $3.9 billion, respectively, in 2006 and $24.5 billion and $4.1 billion in 2007.

As important as innovation is, Buckley is equally insistent on ethical business conduct. The company is “defined by the character and integrity of its people,” he says on 3M’s Web site. “All of our constituencies expect this of us. More importantly, we expect it of ourselves.”

He always has expected it of himself, too. He traces his own character and integrity to the early influence of his foster mother and grandmother. “They colored my entire upbringing with their Victorian-style value system,” he said.

And they inspired him to become something he still calls himself today – an electrical engineer.

A large bank of windows provides far-reaching vistas to the south and east. The décor is reserved but tasteful, and furnishings include a desk, a conference table and several pieces of art.

The exception? Dogs. Bull terriers, to be exact – the ones you see in Target advertising. Two dozen of these cloth creatures are bunched together on a table near Ulrich’s desk, almost as if they are keeping an eye on their boss. He cheerfully explains that each one is distinctive and represents a different segment of Target – everything from business operations in India and Shanghai to asset protection and construction practices in Minnesota.

“And this one,” Ulrich said, holding up a dog, “is our team member, in khaki and red.”

It may have been the 20th time that Ulrich has used the word “team” during an hourlong interview, but that comes as no surprise. Ask Ulrich about his 40-year career at Target and its predecessor Dayton Hudson and he always talks first about the Target team.

The same goes for other questions about his accomplishments and successes, including the prestigious CEO of the Year Award that he received last summer from Chief Executive magazine. As proud as he is, his associates say he always makes it clear that it isn’t his award.

“It’s a reflection on our team,” he said. “We have a winning team here at Target.”

Ulrich laughs and recalls how years ago, when he and other executives would visit Target stores, there would be whispers of, “Here come the suits.”

“So we switched to khaki and red,” he said. “There was a subtle thing about it. People came to know that you were part of the team. We’re all part of the team. We’re all important.”

“It’s not a theory,” Michael Francis, executive vice president for marketing and target.com, replied when asked about the team concept. “It’s not the management guru idea of the week. It’s the real thing. Bob believes it, and it’s a fundamental element in the way we operate.”

Ulrich got his start on the team in June 1967 after graduating with a speech and journalism degree from the University of Minnesota. He began as a merchandising trainee, spending time on the sales floor and as a buyer, and he loved the challenge.

“It was the ability to be entrepreneurial – to work with advertising, sales, business analysis,” he said. “You would get early, quick feedback through sales results. You knew if you were doing a good job. It was stimulating.”

Ulrich’s bosses certainly knew he was doing a good job, and he advanced rapidly. He was vice president and general merchandise manager at Dayton’s within 10 years and became president in 1984. Three years later, he became chairman and chief executive officer of the Target division. He got the top job in 1994 at Dayton Hudson Corp., which later was renamed Target Corp.

Under Ulrich, Target has grown to become the nation’s No. 2 discount retailer behind Wal-Mart. The numbers are startling compared to 1987: 1,591 stores in 47 states (vs. 317 in 24 states), 352,000 employees (vs. 126,000 for all of Dayton Hudson) and $60 billion in revenue (vs. $5 billion for Target Stores). Ulrich believes there is capacity to double the number of U.S. stores.

The growth and changes have been necessary for Target to remain healthy and competitive, Ulrich says, although he admits, “Any time you have change, people get nervous inside and outside the organization. We make sure we have a consistent merchandising direction and we try to please the guests.”

Guests? It’s another word for “customers,” but you won’t hear Ulrich say the latter. He considers the people who walk into Target to be guests. “They make everything possible,” he said. “Our reward is taking care of them – providing good merchandise and clean stores, with no waiting and good return policies.”

Ulrich lists guests and – of course – team members as critical factors in Target’s success. A third is loyal shareholders, who have earned 20 percent annualized returns – $100 in Dayton Hudson stock in late 1987 would be worth $3,400 in Target stock today, after reinvested dividends. A fourth is the community: Target gives away 5 percent of income in grants, primarily in the arts, education and social action. That amounts to $3 million a week.

“We give to the community,” he said, stopping for a moment to emphasize that “we don’t give back to the community. It’s not like we have to do it, but it is part of who we are. We hope we can improve society and inspire others to do the same.”

Retail observers credit Target’s masterful marketing and branding for setting it apart from competitors. The red Target bull’s-eye logo is everywhere, the focus of catchy advertising and those adorable bull terriers. So are the slogans: “Expect more, pay less,” “fast, fun and friendly” and “speed is life,” which perhaps best defines Ulrich’s corporate philosophy.

“It’s recognition that if you don’t move fast and make good decisions, you’re in trouble,” he said, slapping his hands on a table. “You can’t be complacent (slap). You can’t get bogged down (slap). You have to use your ability to innovate (slap). If that doesn’t happen, you will lose market share.”

And market share is critical at Target, given the competition. Ulrich respects Wal-Mart – he would be foolish not to, considering that it has four times more revenue – but he points proudly to a Target “guest profile” that includes higher family income, more education and younger families. It also helps to work in an environment where people want to do their best.

“Bob consistently is able to motivate people to perform above what they think they can do,” said Gail Dorn, who has worked with Ulrich since graduating from St. Thomas in 1984. “People respect him. He’s honest, he’s forthright and he always knows where he is going.”

John Pellegrene, who worked with Ulrich for three decades before retiring as executive vice president of marketing, said his ex-boss’ greatest strength is his ability “to surround himself with people who complement what he is best at. He knows he can’t be an expert in every field, so he finds people to help him get where he wants to go.”

Ulrich learns from those people, too, especially when he steps into a Target store, unannounced and wearing the traditional khaki and red, to check things out.

“Once I’m there, I’ll find out if the store team leader is around,” he said. “I’ll walk through the backroom, talk to employees and find out what’s on their minds. It’s so important to keep in touch, and it’s absolutely vital to be where our guests are and where our team members are so they know we’re not living in an ivory tower.”

Ulrich will retire as chief executive officer on May 1, and will remain as chairman until Jan. 31, 2009. He then will pursue other interests, but Target employees won’t be surprised if they still see him wandering around their stores wearing the trademark khaki and red.

Boss or not, he’ll always be part of the team.

Slick scripts and powerful images can carry an institution only so far, of course, and danger always lurks that a tagline might dissolve into an empty buzzword that leaves people scratching their heads. It can come down to the ability of one individual to make the critical difference in articulating, and then living out, what it means to “believe.”

Dr. Antoine Garibaldi is that individual at Gannon University – and to see him in action for a couple of days as president is enough to persuade even the most skeptical observer that there is something quite tangible about this “believe” mantra.

And that’s because people believe in Garibaldi.

“He has to be the best president we’ve had,” said Linda Wagner, vice president for finance and administration and a 25-year employee of Gannon, an 82-year-old diocesan Catholic university in downtown Erie. “He does so many things so well. He came in at a challenging time and brought us out of that.”

“He’s very engaging,” said Susan Black-Keim, vice president for university advancement for seven years. “He has very high ratings among donors because of his accessibility and stewardship. He’s in his element when he’s in a crowd. He is so relationshiporiented.”

“He’s never wrinkled,” said Ron Kerman, who joined Gannon earlier this year as its first executive director of marketing. Those around the table laugh at Kerman’s choice of the word “wrinkled,” and he goes on to say he’s not just talking about his boss’ well-pressed suits and impeccable social graces. “He is so calm even in the most frenetic, crisis-driven times. He is a very sharp guy in every sense of the word.”

Students feel the same way, and the affection with which they hold him – and vice versa – is obvious in a campus walk where he greets everybody by name and with a smile. Ryan Carlisle, a physical therapy major, has a more down-toearth assessment.

“Everyone at Gannon loves Dr. G,” said Carlisle, a physical therapy major, as he gave a campus tour one gorgeous late April day. “It seems I see him in a sweatshirt and baseball cap more than a suit. He gets along great with students, and he knows everybody’s name.”

Garibaldi later laughs at the “never wrinkled” and sweatshirt characterizations, perhaps because of their contradictory nature, but he finds both gratifying. Hours earlier, he had chided Carlisle about not participating in a finals-week tradition.

“I missed you at breakfast last night, Ryan,” Garibaldi said.

“I was there,” Carlisle replied. “I really was!”

“Not in my line,” Garibaldi said.

“Oops…” Carlisle said with a sheepish grin.

Garibaldi generates a lot of smiles on the Gannon campus these days. As far away and as different as his hometown of New Orleans is from Erie, he credits his upbringing for having prepared him well for today’s challenges. He was the sixth of nine children of a father who was a Pullman porter, a custodian and a longshoreman and a mother who never worked outside the home “but is the smartest woman I know.”

The Garibaldi children attended St. Joan of Arc, the only all black Catholic school in their area of New Orleans. He never has forgotten the influence of the Sisters of the Holy Family and the Josephite Fathers, who were more than just exceptional teachers.

“The sisters also inculcated and reinforced the importance of values such as honesty, integrity, and service, and they helped each one of us to develop strong self-concepts and self-esteem,” he wrote in Growing Up African American in Catholic Schools. “More than any other goal, they expected all students to achieve to their potential and to be successful in their adult years.”

A religious vocation intrigued Garibaldi, and in 1964 he enrolled as a high school freshman at Epiphany Apostolic College, the Josephites’ minor seminary in Newburgh, N.Y. He spent six years there, a year in a Delaware novitiate and two years at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Washington, D.C., where he also took classes at Howard University and Catholic University.

He decided to leave the seminary during his senior year of college, convinced that “I still could make contributions to the black community and society in general without having to be a priest.” He earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Howard in 1973 and the University of Minnesota accepted him into a doctoralprogram in educational psychology. Minnesota appealed to him because two of his sisters were teaching in St. Paul public schools.

Dr. Frank Wilderson, then on the Minnesota faculty, asked Garibaldi to be principal of the St. Paul Urban League Street Academy, an alternative high school for students in trouble. He agreed to run the school, a partnership between the university, the league and St. Paul Public Schools, as long as he could continue his graduate studies and complete his doctorate on time. “He took on kids who were difficult to teach and reach and carried out a program in a controlled environment where there was order and discipline,” said Wilderson, a fellow New Orleansarea native who today serves on the St. Thomas Board of Trustees with Garibaldi. “He had the temperament to be friendly but stern, to be kind but consistent.”

“The Street Academy was the best experience of my life,” Garibaldi said. “It taught me a lot about patience, discipline and how to deal with difficult situations.”

After receiving his doctorate in 1976, he became an educational policy fellow in the Institute for Educational Leadership at George Washington University in Washington. He remained in Washington until 1982 as a policy researcher, first at the National Institute of Education and then at the National Commission on Excellence in Education.

“And then I went home,” he said, to chair the Education Department at Xavier University in New Orleans, the only predominantly black Catholic university in the country. He held two other positions at Xavier – dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and vice president for academic affairs – before returning to Howard in 1996 as provost and chief academic officer. A one year sabbatical as a senior fellow in the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., preceded his appointment as the sixth president of Gannon in 2001.

“I could see myself here,” he said of the presidential selection process. “During the interviews, everyone was throwing so many things at me.”

That fall, Gannon enrolled 3,407 students – 2,463 undergraduate and 944 graduate, and had an endowment of $22.7 million, which is small for a school of its size. Garibaldi’s assessment going into the job was that Gannon “had a strong, committed board … a lot of continuity with faculty and staff … a good curriculum base … and a good academic reputation that might not have been as obvious to many because it was perceived as a local institution.”

Nevertheless, challenges abounded. The budget, while balanced, provided few additional resources to support projects such as faculty research. Academic buildings needed upgrades and faculty also had concerns about Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the papal document on Catholic universities. “In my first month,” Garibaldi said, “I bought 600 copies of Ex Corde and distributed it so people had a better understanding of it.”

He spent his first summer immersing himself in Erie, meeting with business and civic leaders to learn how Gannon could meet their needs. He visited every high school because “I wanted to make sure they understood I was serious – very serious – about recruiting their students.”

Garibaldi began a strategic planning process during his first year and identified seven goals, including advancing academic excellence by creating stronger learning environments, promoting Gannon’s Catholic identity, increasing enrollment and embarking on a capital campaign.

“Our ultimate goal,” he told guests at his 2002 inauguration, “is to produce more leaders for a society that needs more educated youth, more stable families, and more hope in a world that is full of despair and uncertainty.”

Five years later, how does Garibaldi assess Gannon’s progress toward meeting those goals?

He is pleased for the most part, and for reasons like these:

• Enrollment has increased 12 percent to 3,815 last year, the highest total since the mid-1990s, and is expected to hit 3,900 this year.

• Average SAT scores for freshmen and retention percentages for returning students exceed the national average, and U.S. News & World Report has ranked Gannon in the top 10 of its “Great Schools, Great Prices” category for northern tier master’s degree schools the last two years.

• New undergraduate academic programs have been started in biotechnology, bioinformatics, journalism communications, scientific and technical sales, and sports management and marketing. There also is a new master’s degree in embedded software engineering and a new Ph.D. program in organizational learning and leadership, and the master’s program in physical therapy has been upgraded to a doctoral program.

• Gannon launched The Power to Transform campaign and has raised $21 million of the $30 million goal. Priorities include $13 million to enhance the university’s endowment, which has increased 62 percent to $37 million during Garibaldi’s presidency; $9.5 million to renovate the science center; and $7.5 million for the annual fund.

• Gannon received a $4 million state grant to open the Erie Technology Incubator, which will help start-up companies. A five-year federal grant of $1.8 million established the Center for Excellence and Teaching, which helps faculty use technology more effectively in the classroom.

Alumni and trustees also are pleased, said Joe Messina ’63, an Erie attorney and vice chair of the Gannon board. “He’s excellent,” Messina said. “He has exceeded our expectations, and I always was confident he’d do a great job. You rate people 1 to 5, and he’s No. 1.”

Given the competition for students – Erie is at the top of a triangle that includes Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Buffalo, all within two hours – Garibaldi knows his admissions counselors really have to hustle to recruit students. He tells of how Bishop John Mark Gannon, the university’s namesake, once said that students of the then all-boys school should be able to pay for their education on a paperboy’s route.

While a $21,000 price tag for tuition no longer makes that feasible, “that’s still the case I make in fundraising,” said Garibaldi. “We’re raising money for scholarships to make our education affordable. We have to be very creative. The same holds true for other things we have done to attract students to us andnot a different institution.”

The “Believe” marketing campaign undergirds much of what Gannon is trying to achieve both in raising funds and stature. Garibaldi recalls the university’s former slogan – “Gannon: The Right Place for You” – and how research showed the public felt Gannon was a “good” institution.

“Well, we want to be more than a ‘good’ institution; we want to be a ‘great’ institution,” Garibaldi said. “I see students who come here who are confident. Quietly confident – not cocky, but with a sense that they are in the right place.”

Ultimately, Garibaldi said, the Gannon community feels the word “believe” best describes people’s feelings and aspirations, “not just in a spiritual connotation but in the potential to do something and get somewhere.”

His words six years into his presidency reflect one of the themes he sounded during his inaugural address, when he used that word at more than one juncture to underscore what he insisted would make a Gannon education distinctive from others.

“Our motive,” he said, “is rooted in the inherent harmony between faith and reason – that as we learn more, we can believe more firmly; and as we believe more deeply, we are ready to learn more courageously and reaffirm the inherent dignity of the human person.”

Those words resonate well at Gannon and throughout Erie. Wagner, the business vice president, remembers a trip to the doctor, who told her when he learned where she worked, “My daughter is going to Gannon, and there’s one reason: your president.”

Spoken like another true believer.

Figuring she had nothing to lose, a part-time Marso told Thorne in 1982 that she would return to work on a full-time basis if Thorne would sell her the company. Marso had no idea how to pay for it, but didn’t think it would hurt to ask.

Thorne said “yes,” they shook hands and Marso thought, “Oh my gosh, just what am I getting myself into?”

Twenty-five years later, it’s easy for Marso to laugh about her bold inquiry. But she admits it was a little scary when she reached an agreement in 1984 with Thorne, her long-time mentor, and found herself running the downtown St. Paul business.

“At that time, I didn’t have a formal education in finance, but I had people I could trust and I learned in the process,” Marso said. “There were a lot of long hours and I felt the pressure, but somehow I was able to hang on and make a go of everything.”

Owning a business may have been the last thing on Marso’s mind as a young woman. She grew up in Henderson, north of Mankato, with two older brothers and a younger sister. Her dad was a truck driver and her mom was a teacher (prior to marriage), and they impressed upon her the importance of going to college. She chose Mankato State, her mom’s alma mater, and majored in sociology and political science. She planned to be a social worker.

Marso married and moved to the Twin Cities after graduation. Social work jobs were scarce there, and she became an assistant to the public relations director of Gould National Batteries in St. Paul. After the birth of her first son in 1969, she went to work for Thorne and “did just about everything – I typed, wrote payroll, was a sales rep and got to know the business from the ground floor up.”

Thorne said Marso was an “ambitious, conscientious and loyal” employee and remembered their discussions about Marso’s interest in social work. “I laughed and told her, ‘Mary, that’s not the field for you. You’re too emotional. You’ll take every case to heart!’ ”

Thorne did think Marso would be a natural as a small business owner. Even though Thorne had an opportunity to sell to a couple of national firms, she chose Marso.

“Jeanne had the foresight to see that if we paid attention to skill sets, made good matches between temporary employees and companies and knew their cultures, we would do a better job than what was expected in the marketplace,” Marso said. “That proved to be a quality difference for Jeanne Thorne, and it’s stayed the same to this day.”

One motivation for Marso in buying the company was that she thought if she could achieve success, “My three sons could go to any college that they wanted. It was a wonderful feeling to envision them graduating from college debt free, and they did!”

Marso has been at the forefront of many industry innovations brought about by clients’ changing needs. Jeane Thorne Inc. now makes more full-time career placements, and the gender mix of temporary employees is more equal. Three years ago, she added a financial division and matches skills with needs, ranging from billing assistants to accountants to chief financial officers. There is significant growth potential in the legal field, with the intent to focus on paralegals and administrative support.

Technology also has had an impact. There is less need for receptionists because of voicemail systems, Marso said, “and not as many executives need secretaries to type letters with the ever-increasing use of e-mail.” She recalled a counterpart’s response in the mid-1980s when she told him that all employees eventually would have computers on their desks: “Now Mary, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, isn’t it?”

Her industry also has proven to be a reliable bellwether on the economy, and never more so than with the recession that reached its peak after the 9/11 tragedy six years ago.

“When companies see a downturn in the economy,” she said, “the first thing to go is their temporary staffing. We saw it coming in late 2000, and it hit hard. We had to make a number of fundamental decisions to survive.”

Marso sold her Fargo and Kansas City offices to focus on the Minnesota market. It has taken a few years to recover, but today the company is healthy, with 18 full-time staff members and several hundred on-call temporary employees.

A big reason for success has been Marso’s connections, according to her son, Andrew Schmitz, a 1996 St. Thomas alumnus and the company president. “Mom is great at networking and marketing,” he said. “She loves the business, and she’s good at it, too. This is her baby, after all.”

Another key to success is a loyal workforce. Marso has recognition programs, gives scholarships to employees who go back to school and provides one-month paid sabbaticals to staff members for every seven years of service as long as they use one week as a community service volunteer. Jeane Thorne was the first in the industry to become a Minnesota state-certified equal employment opportunity company and the first to provide health insurance for temporary employees.

Marso once did a presentation at a national association meeting about her benefits program, and afterward someone approached her and said, “You can’t run a business like this. You are wearing rose-colored glasses and being a Pollyanna.”

“In my business career,” she said, “I have learned one of the best ways to disarm an opponent is to look at him and smile. So I did. I just said, ‘I think this is going to work.’ ”

And it has. Along the way, Marso has gained a greater appreciation of how temporary employment does make a difference, assisting many in staying connected with the work world while searching for their next full-time career opportunity.

“I have watched people lose self-esteem by becoming disconnected,” she said. “Work is meaningful. It is an important piece in building self-esteem by being productive and earning one’s way. People are searching for a purpose in life. Every day at Jeane Thorne, we help people in their search by providing opportunities for immediate income and long-term employment.”

Marso always has looked for “purpose” herself. Jeane Thorne is a Minnesota Keystone Program member because it gives 5 percent of pretax profits to charity. She established the Marso Foundation in 1994 to fund projects related to children and education. She volunteered as an intake worker at St. Joseph’s Home for Children, which is run by Catholic Charities in Minneapolis, and has sponsored a golf tournament that has raised more than $500,000 for St. Joseph’s over the past dozen years.

“Kids come to St. Joseph’s from unsafe environments,” she said. “It just tugs at the heart to see the kinds of issues that some kids have to deal with. There is so much work to be done to give all children an emotionally better start in life.”

Comments like that don’t surprise friends like Cyndi Lesher, president and CEO of Northern States Power Co.-Minnesota, who calls Marso “a savvy business owner who focuses on quality and the customer.” Even more impressive, Lesher said, is Marso’s “unparalleled civic engagement. She has a real compassion for people – a giving, generous spirit.

“She is a tremendous role model. We need more Mary Marsos in this world. She is the most authentic person I know.”

I have met some of the richest and poorest people in the world. I have engaged people of power, presidents of countries and titans of industry. I have visited people in jail who have committed horrible crimes, and I have been exposed to a broad cross-section of humanity. Furthermore, I have read many biographies and memoirs of people characterized and accepted as great in anybody’s terms.

All of that has led me to become curious about what constitutes greatness: why we remember someone, no matter what their walk of life, set of circumstances or time in history, as having made a distinctive and great contribution. As far as I can figure it out, it has something to do with character.

To be a person of character is to have attributes that seem reliably good over time. The question is whether, in a business school or in any other academic branch of a university, you can teach character. My answer is you can’t teach it, but you can mold it. You can create circumstances in which individuals entrusted to your care have a chance to be great according to their God-given talent.

For example, you can try to foster circumstances in which students learn good judgment: not simply being a prisoner of facts but taking a broad set of circumstances into account. Having a sense of history, an alert antenna to where we are today and a projection into the future so we can gauge what results might come from their exercise of good judgment.

You also can help students participate in circumstances of fairness: not simply in one-to-one relationships or in contractual terms, but also in networks that make a difference. To have a sense of responsibility for more than what meets the eye. To know the conditions under which some people operate out of necessity. To recognize what it means to be in circumstances of privilege.

And finally, that students have a sense of discipline. Recognize there is, if you want to be a leader, a relationship between your lifestyle and the judgments you make. You can have credibility. If people see that relative to the good things of this world, you can laugh. You can have a sense of perspective. You can see how it all fits together.

This wonderful facility – and the faculty who will work within it and the students entrusted to their care – needs to be a place where character can be promoted. Those qualities that I identified have other names: like prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance – the so-called cardinal virtues. It goes under the presumption that if we want to turn out leaders of character, we need to foster certain attributes and prevailing values in and out of the classroom.

My second point has to do with accountability. We know society has seen a hemorrhaging of respect and confidence both in the business enterprise and in the regulatory enterprise. Who’s watching the watchers? How can we restore trust in corporate life? In the relationship between boards and those that they oversee? In the relationship between management and the workforce? In the relationship between institutions and the broader society that they work within and, in the end, serve?

Accountability starts early, in the relationship between parents and children, and it goes on in academic environments. Holding people accountable means you give grades for work actually done. You recognize the difference in quality. The faculty, in turn, are evaluated by their students. Being open to that kind of feedback allows for a level of confidence that what goes on in an academic environment will carry over into the future.

Sometimes the dynamics in accountability are not easy to abide, and yet we’ve found wisdom in the expectation that at the end of life, we’ll be held accountable for the way we lived in this world. That for every gift and every opportunity, great things are expected by the God who brought us into existence. That goodness will be rewarded and evil will be punished. Insofar as we know our own human limitations, it means we never should grow complacent or content. We need to preserve the capacity to say, "I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Forgive me."

So as I have met people in various walks of life, and as I think about the responsibility of great universities, it seems to me there’s no substitute for character, and that in order to regain the confidence of the broader society around us, we need good and reliable systems of accountability.

It needs to start young. It needs to take place regularly in academic environments. And it needs to continue for the rest of our lives. If we have it, and if we can turn it out, this will be a much better world than the one that we inherited. I’m confident the University of St. Thomas is the kind of place – and McNeely Hall is the wonderful environment – in which these goals can be pursued.

The college’s fifth president took the youth to the dining room for a hot meal and began a story whose impact still is felt on the St. Thomas campus – and throughout Catholic higher education in the Midwest – some 105 years later.

The youth, Ignatius Aloysius O’Shaughnessy, told Dolphin that the previous day, he and two classmates at St. John’s University skipped Sunday vespers and headed for the woods and a hidden barrel of beer. They were nabbed upon their return to campus and expelled the next day. O’Shaughnessy was going to take the train home to Stillwater but got off in downtown St. Paul and walked several miles to St. Thomas.

One of his drinking buddies had beaten him to St. Thomas, but he had been turned down for admission after saying he thought he had been treated unfairly by St. John’s. Dolphin asked O’Shaughnessy if St. John’s was justified in expelling him.

“Absolutely,” he said. “I knew the rule and the penalty. I broke the rule and got caught. They had to fire me.”

Dolphin appreciated O’Shaughnessy’s honesty and accepted him on the spot. He went on to star on the football team, serve as secretary to the president and graduate in 1907.

The decision may have seemed minor at the time, but it proved to be fortuitously providential. O’Shaughnessy became the largest independent oil operator in the United States, amassed great wealth and gave most of it away – with St. Thomas and Notre Dame as primary beneficiaries.

“St. Thomas was the beginning of dad’s philanthropy with education,” said his son, Larry O’Shaughnessy, who studied for two years at St. Thomas, taught here for three years after graduating from Yale University and served on the Board of Trustees. “It made sense he would turn first to St. Thomas because of all the college had done for him.”

In this centennial year of I.A. O’Shaughnessy’s graduation from St. Thomas, it is appropriate to look back on his remarkable accomplishments – as an entrepreneur, as a philanthropist, as a friend and counselor to four St. Thomas presidents, and as a trustee who believed fervently in the importance of a liberal arts education.

” ‘Unique’ is a strong word. It should be used with the greatest restraint,” James Shannon, president of St. Thomas from 1956 to 1966, wrote in a Minneapolis Tribune commentary after O’Shaughnessy’s death in 1973. “Having said that, I say that Ignatius Aloysius O’Shaughnessy was a unique human person. He was brilliant, tough, relaxed, determined, incisive, devout, witty, generous and a thoroughly lovely man.”

The youngest of 13 children
I.A. O’Shaughnessy was born July 31, 1885, the youngest of 13 children of Mary Ann and John O’Shaughnessy, a Stillwater shoemaker. The boy who would become known as I.A., or Nashe to close friends, liked to tell how he was named.

“By the time I arrived,” he told the St. Paul Pioneer Press, “mother had run fresh out of all the regular names like John, James and Joseph and, being a good Catholic, went to the calendar of Saints. So I became Ignatius.” He chose his middle name at confirmation. “Aloysius is the patron saint of boys,” he said, “and the sister who taught me at St. Michael’s grade school had that name. I liked her.”

O’Shaughnessy enrolled at St. John’s in 1901. St. John’s played St. Thomas for the first time in football that fall and won 16-0 behind O’Shaughnessy, who rushed for 76 yards and won a pipe from the alumni association for the longest run. “However, in those days,” O’Shaughnessy later recalled, “if a student was caught smoking a pipe, he was immediately sent home.”

O’Shaughnessy may not have smoked that pipe, but he did drink that beer and was expelled all the same. After arriving at St. Thomas, he made his mark on its gridiron as well and was described by the Collegian publication as “a hard, conscientious worker, and well-fitted in every respect to lead the Purple and Gray.” He was captain of the 1905 team.

Dolphin thought so highly of O’Shaughnessy that he was appointed the president’s secretary in 1903. O’Shaughnessy continued in that role, and later as the college’s bookkeeper, under Dolphin’s successor, Father Humphrey Moynihan. One responsibility was to buy uniforms for all students after the U.S. War Department made St. Thomas a military school.

O’Shaughnessy spoke fondly of his collegiate years and his appreciation for Dolphin and Moynihan, and he remembered occasions such as the holiday that was declared when enrollment reached “the magnificent sum of 200.”

It is not clear exactly when O’Shaughnessy graduated. Various publications over the past century have listed 1905, 1906 and 1907 as the date of graduation, and most sources cited 1907, perhaps because he continued his studies while working for Moynihan.

From insurance to oil
In any event, it is known that O’Shaughnessy left campus in 1907 to become secretary of the St. Paul Amateur Athletic Association, the forerunner to the St. Paul Athletic Club. He met Lillian Smith at St. Mark’s Catholic Church, and during their courtship he asked her if he could kiss her. “But we’re not even engaged!” she said, to which he responded, “OK, then, will you marry me?” She did, in 1908, and they had five children.

O’Shaughnessy left St. Paul to join two older brothers in the insurance business in Texas. He later went on his own, establishing insurance companies in Texas and Colorado. When World War I broke out, he leased a factory in Kansas to make tires on a government contract, and in 1917 he turned to the business – oil – that made him his fortune.

He established the Globe Oil & Refining Co. of Oklahoma and found he had the “touch.” He negotiated oil field leases with Indian tribes and the federal government, and pumped, refined and sold oil. With Globe and other companies that he established throughout the Great Plains area, including Lario Oil and Don Oil (named after his two youngest sons), O’Shaughnessy became known as “King of the Wildcatters.”

He was “an aggressive individual who bears the reputation of always operating on a lone hand and under his own steam,” the National Petroleum newsletter wrote in 1944. “I.A. O’Shaughnessy runs I.A. O’Shaughnessy’s business to suit I.A. O’Shaughnessy.” Even so, the newsletter went on to say, employees were loyal to him because he paid them well and encouraged them to establish a union to protect their rights. When he sold a refinery, the union thanked him “for your ceaseless effort for better working conditions for your employees.” It was said that he treasured the letter as much as any honors he received.

The O’Shaughnessy’s started to raise their family in Oklahoma, but Lillian missed St. Paul and once told her husband, “Nashe, I can’t raise a family like this.” He agreed and they moved, first to Minneapolis and then in 1928 to a house at 1705 Summit Ave., which remained his home for the rest of his life. He took trains and drove to his oil fields.

Nobody is quite sure why, but three decades after graduating from St. Thomas, O’Shaughnessy surfaced on campus in 1938 as a trustee. He may have become more interested because his three sons attended St. Thomas Academy when it was on the Summit Avenue campus. He wasted no time in making his mark by reaching an “arrangement” with Archbishop John Murray.

“Mr. O’Shaughnessy would put up a building if Archbishop Murray would do likewise,” Leonard Rogge ’31, who held key administrative positions for four decades, recalled in an oral history. “The building undertaken by Mr. O’Shaughnessy was O’Shaughnessy Hall.”

A Christmas present to students
“Here’s Your Christmas Present,” the Aquin stated in December 1939, referring to the $400,000 athletics building that would open the next month. The Minneapolis Times-Tribune called him an angel and opined, “One pair of wings for Mr. O’Shaughnessy.” Wrote an Aquin reporter: “When you line up a shot on the billiard table in O’Shaughnessy Hall and say to the fellow next to you, ‘Gimme room, chum,’ look twice, because that ‘chum’ may be Ignatius O’Shaughnessy, donor of the building.

“Mr. O’Shaughnessy looks forward to a dip in the pool and a workout on the handball courts. … He has already scheduled a bowling match with Father Moynihan (James, the president) as his partner against Father Flynn (Vincent, who became president in 1944) and Father Foran (James, an administrator).”

O’Shaughnessy told a dedication ceremony audience that he had long believed St. Thomas needed new recreational facilities. He recalled how the social hub of his college years was Mrs. Tilley’s Stand, a farmhouse at Cretin and Grand where students bought candy and pop.

“Recognizing the importance of small private colleges in our American life and recognizing the many needs of these institutions, I have had in mind for some time to do something in that direction,” he said. “It was only natural that I should turn to the institution which gave me so much in my youth. What I have done, I did in appreciation of what I have received, what my sons are receiving now … and what I hope their children will receive.”

Turning to Murray, he said, “Your Excellency, I am giving this building to you without any expectation of reward in this life. It is a gift from my heart. May others follow my example!”

And others did, although it was O’Shaughnessy who primed the pump. Over the next 35 years, his gifts to `St. Thomas totaled $8.5 million ($90 million in today’s dollars), including $100,000 for Albertus Magnus Hall – the 1947 building in the Murray “arrangement.”

O’Shaughnessy’s generosity extended to other colleges, most notably Notre Dame but also St. Catherine, Carleton, Macalester and Hamline. A $4.5 million gift underwrote construction of the Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, fulfilling Pope Paul VI’s “lifelong dream.” Dozens of other organizations, ranging from orphanages to hospitals to orchestras, received checks from him. Without the O’Shaughnessys, one recipient wrote in 1972, “the St. Paul Opera is a mere whisper.”

Why he gave away money
O’Shaughnessy offered several reasons for giving away his money:

· “A man with money has the responsibility of putting it to good use,” he told the Pioneer Press in 1956. “Money is not the most important thing in life; food, shelter and clothing can be bought with money, but the important things, health and happiness, cannot.”

· He loved to joke about money. When asked what it felt like to give so much money to Notre Dame, where his contributions included $2 million for the O’Shaughnessy Liberal and Fine Arts Hall, he replied, “It gives you an empty feeling – in your pockets.” After seeing “Hello, Dolly!” with Shannon, he said, “You know, that girl has the right idea. Money is like manure. It doesn’t do any good unless you spread it around.” Doing so was a relief because then “you don’t have to worry about spending it. I’ve got good health, two suits of clothes and I eat three meals a day. What more do I need?”

· He knew people were impressed with, if not awed by, his money, and he tried to put them at ease. Several St. Thomas students once encountered him in a St. Paul hotel and, recognizing him from his portrait in the library, talked with him. One student acknowledged O’Shaughnessy’s generosity by saying, “Well – thank you very much for the college, sir!” He just smiled: “Oh, that’s all right,” and waved goodbye.

At least in the case of St. Thomas, the businessman in O’Shaughnessy made sure every donated dollar was spent wisely. He followed every detail of planning and construction and even reviewed expense invoices that Rogge sent him.

Library for truly educated
He was the most involved in the construction of O’Shaughnessy Library. Shannon became president in 1956 and remembered that after his first trustees’ meeting, he walked around campus with O’Shaughnessy, who asked him about the college’s greatest need. “A new library,” he replied, to which O’Shaughnessy agreed and said, “The library is the heart of any campus. You get an architect, and I’ll build the building.”

In his oral history, Rogge said he informed O’Shaughnessy the library could cost $2 million. “Cut it back to $1 million,” O’Shaughnessy replied. Rogge did, but returned time after time to O’Shaughnessy for approval to fund additions that would increase the price tag to $1.6 million. He paid every penny. Shannon had told O’Shaughnessy the building would be less expensive if not designed in Collegiate Gothic architecture, and the donor said: “How much money are you putting into this building?” And so, Rogge added, “we had a Gothic library.”

Costly as it was, O’Shaughnessy wanted to make a statement with elements such as the stained glass medallions of writers, philosophers and church leaders in the library windows.

“He was saying, ‘We need a library that will embody the ideals of scholarship and the church,’ ” said John Lindley, who co-wrote a lengthy profile on O’Shaughnessy for Ramsey County History magazine in 2004. “These things are extras, luxuries even, in the construction of a building, but I.A. was willing to pay because they were important to him. It was more than four walls and a roof.”

The bond of loyalty
At the dedication ceremony for the library in 1959, O’Shaughnessy spoke about St. Thomas with fondness and passion, recalling Dolphin’s “kindness” a half century earlier.

“The bond of loyalty between any alumnus and his alma mater depends primarily on whether the school did for him in his youth what it promised to do,” O’Shaughnessy said. “If in his mature years, he finds by experience and competition that his early instruction was sound and his youthful formation was complete, his appreciation for the school in which he was trained, and shaped, and made aware, will grow with the passing years. …

“On this happy public occasion, I can say with pride that in my youth on this campus, this vision of what was possible, for a man to attain by means of effort and grace, was put before my youthful imagination. And I shall always be grateful for the spiritual formation, intellectual discipline and the manly example that were offered to me and to my generation at St. Thomas as the means available for turning such visions into reality.”

O’Shaughnessy reminisced about his discussions with the Moynihan brothers, who had longed for an “adequate” library and not just shared space in Ireland or Aquinas Halls. “I can still recall the graphic remark of Father James: ‘Once a man has learned to read carefully and with discrimination, all he needs is a bibliography and a quiet place.’ The heart of the campus, the college library, is at long last adequate.”

Even so, O’Shaughnessy warned, the knowledge that students would attain in a library – and at the college, for that matter – would not guarantee they would be truly “educated.”

“Nor will it suffice to answer for you in your later years the basic questions of life,” he said. “Knowledge is necessary for wisdom, but wisdom is necessary if one is to secure himself the rewards of eternal life. This college is committed to the task of teaching you to use the means for attaining this salutary wisdom. I am proud that I have been able in some way to assist you in this search for wisdom.”

Letters and telegrams of congratulation poured into St. Thomas. Nick Coleman, the 1949 Mr. Tommy Award winner who would go on to a distinguished political career, told O’Shaughnessy the library was “unbelievably wonderful…. St. Thomas will (become) the sort of center of learning that I would have had trouble getting into (particularly if I remained insistent on ending sentences with prepositions). But! The better the school, the more for me to brag about in the future.”

Learning how to think
O’Shaughnessy felt just as strongly about the value of a liberal arts education. Years earlier, in laying the cornerstone for a building at Notre Dame, he said such an education enabled people to gather not only facts but to regard them “in a perspective broad enough to develop sound judgment, a sense of value, and above all, a moral sense.” One would learn “how to think…. It is much better for a man to learn how to think than how to do,” and he “is never going to allow anybody to teach him what to think.”

O’Shaughnessy’s next St. Thomas project was to assist Shannon with the separation of the college and the academy. Many opposed the idea, but “again the steady hand and cool head (and deep pockets) of I.A. O’Shaughnessy guided the discussion,” Shannon wrote in his autobiography, Reluctant Dissenter. O’Shaughnessy gave $728,000 to the project and helped Father John Roach, then headmaster, raise the funds for the academy to move to Mendota Heights in 1965.

One more major St. Thomas project remained for O’Shaughnessy: a new classroom building. Monsignor Terrence Murphy identified the need for one when he became president in 1966, and O’Shaughnessy became the largest single donor ($2 million) to what was named O’Shaughnessy Educational Center when it opened in 1971.

“Doing good for others”In the last decade of his life, O’Shaughnessy received many awards. The Chamber of Commerce named him a Great Living St. Paulite in 1966, Pope Paul VI named him a papal count in 1967 (the only one in the United States) and the National Conference of Christians and Jews conferred its National Brotherhood Award in 1971.

Larry O’Shaughnessy said his father, a larger-than-life figure in public, enjoyed the attention. In business and civic life, “he always was the life of the party,” his son said. “But at home, he was quiet, respectful. I guess he thought of home as a refuge, of sort, where he didn’t have to be the center of attention.”

On Thanksgiving eve in 1973, I.A. O’Shaughnessy died in a Florida hospital. He was 88. The wake was held four days later in the foyer of OEC, followed by a funeral Mass in the Cathedral of St. Paul and a memorial Mass in the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Father Theodore Hesburgh, then president of Notre Dame, gave the funeral eulogy. He reflected on how St. Thomas Aquinas had said that a good man is one who knows the right things to have faith in, to hope for and to love.

“How did I.A. O’Shaughnessy meet this test?” Hesburgh asked. He talked about O’Shaughenssy’s faith in God, family and friends, his hope “to do good for others” and his love of God.

“All of us can be very proud that he was a dear part of our lives,” Hesburgh said. “While we will all miss him greatly – those twinkling eyes, that spontaneous smile, that great heart – both our lives and our institutions have been enriched by his presence and his great spirit, and we will long be reminded that he passed this way on his path to heaven and eternal life.”

He has lived most of his adult life in Edina and now splits his time between there and Florida, where he shares an office with fellow St. Thomas trustee Gerry Rauenhorst. McQuinn’s businesses always have had their headquarters in the Twin Cities, and his office today is in an Edina building off a congested highway.

But his heart and his soul are still among the crops. As he reminisces about his life’s work, you can see him out in the field – looking at crops, listening to farmers about yields, making a pitch to fertilizer dealers about new application equipment and technology. The soil isn’t under his fingers and the sweat from a noon sun isn’t on his brow, but he still speaks with intelligence, wisdom and passion about farming.

And he should. Farming not only defined McQuinn, but McQuinn helped to define farming as we know it today and will recognize it for generations to come.

McQuinn founded Ag-Chem Equipment Inc. in 1963 and ran it for 37 years before selling it, but he did more than just “run” the company. He grew it into a world-renowned, NASDAQ-listed manufacturer of equipment that applies fertilizers and farm chemicals, with more than $300 million in annual revenues and 1,700 employees. In the process, he earned a reputation as a “precision agriculture” pioneer motivated by one goal: getting the best yield of crops from an acre of soil.

“I just always enjoyed that challenge,” he said. “I just wanted to help fertilizer dealers and farmers, and this seemed to be a good way to advance agriculture.”

McQuinn was born on a farm near Butler, Mo., during the Depression, and his family “raised a little of everything,” he said. They moved to Independence, Mo., at the beginning of World War II so his mother could work at an ordnance plant. McQuinn spent weekends, holidays and summers working on a cousin’s farm outside the city limits.

Back in town, he often would bump into Harry S. Truman strolling through the neighborhood. “I’d walk to school up Pleasant Avenue,” McQuinn said, “and sometimes he’d be walking by himself. I’d always say, ‘Good morning, Mr. Truman,’ and he’d say, ‘Good morning, young man.’ He was just an incredible person – totally self-educated in history, literature, languages and the arts, with a high set of values and standards.”

McQuinn enrolled at the University of Missouri-Columbia because he thought a college education would help him improve his future in agriculture. He earned a bachelor’s degree in agriculture in 1954 and, as an Army ROTC graduate, spent most of four years as a pilot stationed at Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas.

“When I was in the Army, I flew to Minnesota in June of ’58 and got a look at the beautiful crops of southern Minnesota,” he said. “It looked like the Garden of Eden compared to Missouri. I thought, ‘I would like to live here someday.’ When I got back to El Paso, I told my wife Mary Agnes that Minnesota would be great place to live, and she agreed.”

McQuinn’s first job was selling fertilizer to dealers, and he quickly learned the importance of proper nutrient balance in soils. That spurred an interest in better equipment and more efficient ways of applying fertilizers and farm chemicals.

With $6,000 in the bank, he founded Ag-Chem. He purchased sprayers and other equipment and leased them to fertilizer dealers and other individuals. He also looked for ways to grow his company. He foresaw a need for attachments that would broaden the use of application equipment, “but manufacturers wouldn’t build them for me, so I opened a shop (in 1967) and built them myself.”

In this “shop” in Jackson, just north of the Iowa border in southwestern Minnesota, Ag-Chem did more than just build attachments. The company designed and manufactured two new lines of self-propelled application equipment known as Terra-Gators and RoGators, and over the next four decades Ag-Chem grew into the industry leader and Jackson’s largest employer (with five buildings and more than 1,000 employees).

Not content with just delivering more efficient equipment, McQuinn also wanted to harness increasingly sophisticated technology to help farmers improve crop yields. By spending more than $25 million on software and hardware development during a five-year period in the 1990s, he led the effort to create a system that integrated GPS technology, GIS software, on-board computer controllers, variable rate application equipment and yield monitor data, thus giving rise to “precision agriculture.”

“By merging soil sample data with yield monitor information, we would create a map that showed the level of nutrients needed for each part of a field based on what was already present in the soil, what was harvested last year, and what was being grown this year,” he said. “We would load this map on a computer in a Terra-Gator equipped with variable rate bins and a GPS receiver. As the machine moved across the field, it applied the optimum mix of fertilizer and farm chemicals for each location.”

The system was a revolutionary change from the longtime “one size fits all” practice of applying fertilizer and chemicals. That approach “is not the best agronomically or environmentally, nor is it the most cost-effective,” he said. “Our crop input system enables you to manage a big old sandy spot in the middle of field differently than the deep, loamy soil that surrounds it.”

McQuinn received seven patents for his work and Ag-Chem became “the epicenter of ground-rig customer application,” according to a 1998 story in Dealer Progress magazine.

“This is a guy who doesn’t have a computer on his desk, but he understood the impact of technology on business and what it could do for farmers,” said his daughter, Mary Jettland, who worked at Ag-Chem for 20 years and was senior vice president for soil technology. “He was out to change agriculture, and putting technology in place allowed him to do so.”

McQuinn also succeeded because he put the customer first, said Dave Lovell, who joined Ag-Chem in 1984. “Keep the customer satisfied and you’ll get the return you want and the profit you need. The customer may not have been always right, but Al’s philosophy was to resolve issues and move on.”

As with any business, the founder eventually moves on himself, and in 2000 McQuinn decided to sell Ag-Chem to Georgia-based AGCO Corp., the world’s third-largest farm equipment manufacturer. “I was ready to sell,” he said. “I felt we had developed our products to a high level of performance and reliability.”

Some people worried AGCO might reduce operations in Jackson because the new owner had plants elsewhere, but that has not been the case. AGCO has moved other product lines, including Challenger tractors, to Jackson, Lovell said.

While McQuinn sold the company, he did not retire. The Minnesota Business Hall of Fame member runs QuinStar Investment Partners and is n active options trader. He also keeps an eye on what’s going on in his old line of work, encouraging industry competitors to work together more to create compatible crop data management systems that would boost their bottom lines and – most importantly – would benefit farmers.

And that is what it’s all about for Al McQuinn, whose heart and soul never have left the fields.

Al McQuinn and St. Thomas

· Joined the board of trustees in 2005 and serves on the Investment Committee. In 1997, received the Cade Award for outstanding achievements as an entrepreneur.
· Has a son, Charles, who is a 1993 alumnus, and three grandchildren are students – Andrew Arndt ’02 is a third-year School of Law student, his brother Edward is a senior, and their cousin Katherine Jettland is a senior and all-MIAC hockey goalie.
· With his wife, has funded the Alvin and Mary Agnes McQuinn Distinguished Chair in Arts and Sciences; the chair’s first holder, Dr. Marisa Kelly, was invested in October and is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The McQuinns also have supported new McNeely Hall, where McQuinn Commons is named after them, and a School of Law scholarship established in the name of the late James Larkin ’51.
· Believes St. Thomas has two primary challenges: to keep its education attainable and affordable, and to better communicate the value of a campus-based education. While he understands the growing popularity of online learning, especially among graduate students, he says that “real learning takes place through the give-and-take interaction between students and faculty in the classroom.

McNeely would arrive on the construction site, don a hard hat and saunter through the building, watching it go up piece by piece as workers poured concrete, ran wiring and pipes, installed drywall and laid carpeting.

“I was just curious what was going on,” McNeely said. Even though signs banned everybody except construction workers from the premises, “nobody ever told me that I had to leave. So I would just sneak in and walk around.”

McNeely need not have feared he would be kicked out of the building . . . not when the building is named McNeely Hall, thanks to a generous contribution he made nearly a decade ago in the hopes of providing a bigger and better home for undergraduate business faculty and students.

He proved to be not only a curious benefactor but a patient one, too. It took St. Thomas five years to receive city approval to redevelop the two-block site, including McNeely Hall on the southwest corner of Summit and Cleveland avenues, and another two years before the doors would open to the 75,000-square-foot building and 120-car underground parking garage.

Worth the wait? What does he think of the building?

McNeely just nodded in response to the first question and had a two-word response for the second: “It’s terrific.”

This is St. Thomas’ second McNeely Hall. The first, immediately to the west, was named after his parents, Harry and Adelaide, in 1981 after St. Thomas purchased the building from William Mitchell College of Law. The old building will be called the Summit Avenue Classroom Building and will house the School of Social Work and several other programs until St. Thomas decides it’s time for another new academic building on that site, likely next decade.

The McNeely name at St. Thomas goes back much further than 25 years. Harry McNeely Sr. graduated from St. Thomas in 1908 and worked for railroads in the Twin Cities area before establishing the St. Paul Terminal Warehouse Co. in 1916.

“Dad provided warehouse and distribution services for the Soo Line and its customers,” using horses and wagons in the early years, the younger McNeely said. “We would unload the freight cars, store the product and move it to destinations around town.”

McNeely, the youngest of four children, attended St. Paul Academy and Yale University, where he earned a degree in government and international relations in 1947. His first job was as an administrative assistant to the U.S. ambassador to Australia, working in Canberra. He found the job “a good fit” initially, but after two years “I decided I was not cut out to be a career government person – too much bureaucracy, too much fiddling between the bureaucrats and the doers.”

He returned to the United States and went to work for his dad, who over three decades had expanded his St. Paul warehouse and transportation operations to Minneapolis, Roseville and New York. McNeely’s first stop was New York, and after moving back to St. Paul he held several executive positions, including those in petroleum transportation and over-the-road trucking.

The McNeelys continued to expand their holdings in the 1960s and 1970s, building warehouses in the Midway area of St. Paul, St. Louis Park and Hopkins as well as in Kentucky and Ohio. They turned spent limestone mines into storage facilities in cities such as Kansas City and Quincy, Ill., finding the advantages of underground space irresistible.

As warehousing needs changed to favor single-story facilities, the McNeelys found different uses for older buildings. After being a tenant for 60 years in a six-story building constructed by the Soo Line northeast of downtown St. Paul, they purchased the structure in 1980 and renovated it as office space. Today the building is leased entirely by the Minnesota Department of Human Services. The McNeelys also renovated and manage three adjacent buildings occupied by state government agencies in what has become known as the Lafayette Office Park.

After their father died in 1968, McNeely and his older brother, Don, ran the businesses under a holding company called Space Center. The brothers eventually decided to split the company, and the younger McNeely’s portion is known today as Meritex Enterprises, which has 300 employees and owns or manages about 10 million square feet of space. He still goes into the office every day as chairman emeritus, and the oldest of his six children, Harry III (Paddy), a 1981 St. Thomas alumnus, runs the company. (Paddy’s son, Nick, is a 2005 alumnus.)

McNeely is humble, if not shy, in explaining why the company has been so successful over the last 90 years. “Everybody knows the reason in the real estate business: location, location, location,” he said. “The other things that we’ve done well are to diversify and to be willing to sell long-held assets. When someone makes you an offer you can’t refuse … you don’t!”

Walt Richey, who worked for Space Center and Meritex for 25 years and served as CEO before retiring in 1998, calls McNeely “a perfect boss” who “had good, intuitive judgment” and “a strong sense of business and personal ethics.” In times of conflict, “Harry’s approach always was, ‘What’s fair for both parties?’ It was never about what was best for him.”

Father John Malone, pastor of Assumption Catholic Church in St. Paul, has known McNeely since their families had farms in Lake Elmo. Malone worked on McNeely trucking docks as a seminarian and always has found him to be “an absolute man of his word. You never need a contract with Harry. A handshake will do.” Malone also said McNeely takes philanthropy seriously and quietly makes contributions to many organizations.

As his active days at Meritex came to an end, McNeely took extra steps to ensure a smooth transition to a third generation. He and his children took a series of courses over several years at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and he was so enamored with the program that he helped to fund and launch the Institute for Family Business at St. Thomas.

“It has been a lot of fun,” he said, “and it should be. If it’s not fun, then don’t do it. I feel sorry for those who carry on the family business because they feel it’s their burden, their responsibility. That’s the worst reason in the world. At that point, you sell.”

McNeely never had to sell. Not that he’s looking for another job, but a certain construction crew might be willing to take him on for its next building project at St. Thomas so he doesn’t have to “sneak” around. Hard hat and all.

Harry McNeely and St. Thomas

• Joined the board of trustees in 1969 and serves on the Academic Affairs, Audit-Finance, Board Affairs and Executive committees.
• Through the McNeely Foundation and personally, has helped to fund several initiatives at St. Thomas. These include a faculty development program that supported sabbaticals (1974), the start-up of graduate programs in business (1970s and 1980s) and the establishment of the Institute for Family Business (1990), which later evolved into the Center for Family Enterprise.
• Commissioned the statue of Monsignor Terrence J. Murphy, president of St. Thomas from 1966 to 1991. The statue, near the main entrance of new McNeely Hall, was the last work of renowned sculptor Paul Granlund and was finished after his death by Nick Legeros. Murphy never saw the sculpture but approved a miniature version shortly before his death. “There were tears in his eyes when we showed it to him,” McNeely said.

Quite a diverse list, right? Not sure what to make of it? Wondering what one possibly has to do with the other?

Stop thinking. Don’t try to make sense of it. All that matters is that the list makes sense to Rod Burwell, who has spent 37 years owning, running or investing in companies that make barge covers, storage tanks and movies, sell tractors, test soil, provide hotel rooms, bottle water and display fish.

He remains active in most of those ventures, and he just smiles when it is suggested that his portfolio is, well, “unusual.”

“I’m an opportunist,” he said. “And an entrepreneur. I see opportunities and it’s hard to stay out of them. I like to buy value assets and I like tangible things. Sometimes when I see a business in trouble, I say, ‘I can fix that,’ and I do.”

In the process, Burwell has introduced innovations to industry on how to store gasoline and cover grain on river barges. He has accomplished this thanks to an inveterate curiosity, a good education and a strong work ethic.

The opportunist didn’t start out with the idea of building such a diversified empire. Born in Minneapolis, he was the oldest of three sons of a salesman who moved his family to Kansas, South Dakota, North Dakota and back to Minnesota. He graduated from high school in Grafton, N.D., and decided to enroll in the University of North Dakota because “it was only 40 miles away and I could hitchhike home.” Tuition, fees and books cost $99 his first semester.

Burwell wanted to combine interests in sales and engineering, and earned degrees in industrial engineering and business administration in 1960 and 1961. Active in Army ROTC at the university, he joined the Army as a lieutenant after graduation and served three years in the Corps of Engineers in Germany. He returned to the United States to teach in the ROTC program at Purdue before working on military construction in Vietnam.

After his discharge, he bought into his dad’s janitorial business in Minneapolis and worked as the general manager of a fiberglass company, where one of the nation’s agricultural giants came to him with a request in 1969.

“Cargill wanted me to make a barge cover out of fiberglass,” he said. “The thinking then was that you couldn’t make anything that big (20 feet wide by 31 feet long) out of fiberglass, but they wanted to move from steel to fiberglass to eliminate rust that would drip onto grain.”

Burwell drew patterns, built molds and developed a prototype in his backyard and a rented garage, designing and producing two-piece fiberglass covers. He tested them for durability by dropping clamshell buckets on them and driving cars over them.

Out of the experiment evolved Proform, with Cargill as his first customer. He started the venture with $4,000 of his own money, and believes that may have been the key to success.

“If I had had a lot of money, I wouldn’t have been as successful,” he said. “I had to build everything myself, and I learned firsthand more about the trade and the best designs – and redesigns. If I had hired a foreman and others and had not been involved in every aspect, it might not have worked.”

Proform went on to develop other fiberglass products, including covers for rail cars and products for sewer treatment facilities. Burwell held onto the company until 1984, when he sold it because he felt the market for the product had peaked.

Ten years after starting Proform, Burwell purchased the fiberglass division of Dart Industries, which made underground gasoline storage tanks, and named it Xerxes. Steel tanks dominated the market, with Xerxes holding a 1 to 2 percent share, but fiberglass’ popularity grew because steel tanks rusted and leaked. Bloomington-based Xerxes today controls 65 percent of the fiberglass tank market and 35 percent of the overall market.

As Xerxes grew, Burwell looked at other businesses, particularly those that he felt were undervalued and could be turned around and grown. Examples:

He and his brother-in-law purchased Chippewa Springs, a water bottling company in Chippewa Falls, Wis., in 1992 and sold it five years later.

A ski trip to Colorado led to his 1985 purchase of the Silvertree and Wildwood hotels at Snowmass Village. He still owns the hotels, which have 410 rooms, and a conference center, although he has a contract to sell to local interests.

He heard from a banker friend about the failing Concourse Hotel in Madison, Wis., and bought it out of bankruptcy in 1992. He told a newspaper that the hotel’s location near the Capitol made the deal attractive because “I had a strong hunch that state government won’t go away and probably won’t get any smaller.” His hunch, he notes wryly, was right.

Burwell also bought Pace Analytical Services out of receivership 10 years ago. The Minneapolis-based company, with 12 laboratories, has grown to become the third-largest environmental testing company in the country.

A friendship with a high school classmate led to C and B Investments, a John Deere dealership based in Gettysburg, S.D. After the friend died in 1999, his son took over the business and with Burwell expanded to 12 dealerships in five states.

An interest in movies led to a seven-year investment in a production company whose titles included “Desperately Seeking Susan,” Madonna’s first movie, and “Eight Men Out,” widely regarded as one of the best baseball movies ever made.

Burwell and his brother-in-law teamed up again in 1999 and purchased UnderWater World at the Mall of America. They turned around the attraction, which he proudly points out has more sharks (25) than any other indoor aquarium.

As Burwell purchased, overhauled and sold companies, he realized he could not run them on his own. He chose to hire first-rate executives.

“You can’t know all the nuances of every business,” he said. “They are too complicated. You need good employees, and you have to trust them so you can delegate to them. I am the backup. If something happens, I can step in and manage the business until I find someone else.”

Business associates find Burwell to be a good boss – and more.

“He is the best mentor I could have,” said Matt Cronin, president of C and B Investments. “Success to Rod isn’t just about the business doing well, but in seeing us learn and being there as much as we want. His approach is, ‘You’re running things.’ ”

“He’s hands off,” said Steve Vanderboom, CEO of Pace Analytical. “He’s a long-term thinker, a patient investor and a strategist. His most distinguishing characteristic is his outlook – not just the solution that works today, but will work in five and 10 years.”

Burwell’s willingness to delegate was a trait that developed both out of necessity and a desire to spend more time with his family. His first wife and two children were killed in a private plane crash in New Orleans in 1980. He later married Barbara Peterson, who was Miss Minnesota and Miss USA in 1976, and they have three boys ages 17, 14 and 12.

“I always have had a deep faith, and that got me through those times,” he said of the plane crash. “If you trust God enough and have enough faith, you can handle these things. I’m lucky that I got a second chance to have another family.

Rod Burwell and St. Thomas • Joined the board of trustees in 2004 and serves on the Investment Committee. He formerly served on the School of Law Board of Governors.• Is impressed with ongoing efforts to develop and refine three- to five-year plans, especially on budget matters, but prefers a longer-term vision. “What will you see when you look at St. Thomas in 10 or 20 years? You can sell that to all graduates – that St. Thomas is strong now but will be even stronger in 10 or 20 years, and how that will help them in their own careers.” • Has growing concerns about the cost of private higher education, and wonders even with generous financial aid packages how families that make $50,000 a year can afford to children to universities that cost more than $30,000. “We need to look at cost and price structures and see if there is a different way. We just can’t afford to continue to do business like this.”

She found out that it actually was “a speeding train that never stopped.” The temporary job became permanent and Dorn rose through the ranks, becoming at 32 the vice president of communications and public relations for what then was Dayton Hudson Corp. and Target Stores.

Dorn also came to discover that the idea of speed and never stopping fit her personality, and she thrived in an atmosphere that led to Target becoming one of the nation’s largest retailers.

“The beauty of Target is that it’s not bureaucratic, not layered,” she said. “It’s entrepreneurial in making decisions and in making things happen. It’s very team-oriented. There is a groupthink of ‘Speed is life.’ ”

There is that word again. Speed.

“That’s not to say it’s relentless in pace,” Dorn said. “It also is very accommodating to your personal needs and your family needs. The jobs always have been based on merit and what you could contribute to the team. That propelled you forward.”

And as she would learn with a growing family that had special needs, both Target’s and Dorn’s flexibility in accommodating those needs has made all the difference in helping her find that elusive balance between work and home.

Dorn, it seems, always has been flexible. She probably     didn’t have much choice, growing up in Mankato as the youngest of 12 children of a firefighter dad and a homemaker mom.

“I joke that I went into public relations because as the youngest of 12 nobody ever listened to me,” she said, “and I wanted a job where people would have to.”

In all seriousness, though, Dorn fondly recalls spirited conversations at the dinner table about politics and religion. “We weren’t affluent by any means,” she said, “but we always felt we had enough to help other people. My parents were wonderful role models.”

She also found role models in the Jesuit priests and Notre Dame nuns who taught at Mankato Loyola High School. They instilled in her, as did her parents, the importance of giving back to the community.

Two of Dorn’s older brothers went to St. Thomas, and after one weekend visiting campus she told her parents that she intended to follow them even though   St. Thomas was an all-men’s school. Clairvoyant? Perhaps. St. Thomas became co-educational in 1977, and three years later Dorn found herself a freshman interested in finance as a major. She switched to English and studied abroad at the American University of Cairo.

After graduating in December 1984, Dorn spent a year based in Paris and mostly traveling before returning to Minnesota to look for a job. She got the Target internship, after which she intended to move to New York and look for a job in publishing or a related field.

Twenty years later, she’s still involved with Target, but that’s understandable. She was on that speeding train, remember, and it hasn’t stopped. The man running the train then and now sees in Dorn a communicator “who has common sense, is a critical thinker and always looks for innovation.”

“Gail is unflappable,” said Bob Ulrich, chairman and chief executive officer of Target and a fellow St. Thomas trustee. “She knows how to stay on message, and she gets her point across in a succinct way people can grasp.”

As vice president, Dorn also oversaw Target’s philanthropic efforts, and she described that as the best part of her job because “giving away a million dollars a week was fun. People liked you!” As Target has grown – the corporation today gives away $2 million a week – Dorn said Ulrich insisted on accountability for every dollar. “He wanted us to make a difference with the money.”

And she did. “Gail had a great sense of where we would be effective and that we would be getting value for our money,” Ulrich said. “She also had sound suggestions on how recipients could use the money well.”

Dorn also raised funds for other organizations. One was the Basilica of St. Mary. Its rector, Father Michael O’Connell, laughs in recalling how Dorn became involved in a new event in 1995 that has become a staple of summer and a factor in the church’s growth from 2,000 to 5,200 households in the last 15 years.

“Gail was a parishioner,” O’Connell said. “We were in the back of the church before her wedding and she made the mistake of saying, ‘If there’s ever anything I can do for you, let me know.’ And I said, ‘Well, yes, how would you like to co-chair our first Basilica Block Party?’ And she did.”

As smoothly as everything was running in her life, change was imminent for Dorn in 1999. The mother by then of two children and stepmother of two others, she sensed during her third pregnancy that her baby, Sarah, would have Down syndrome. “It was just a mother’s intuition,” she said. “I even told my husband on the way to the hospital.”

“That was my wakeup call,” Dorn said. As much as she loved her job, “sometimes life takes a different turn, and you know what you are meant to do.” After her maternity leave, she returned to work part time, and then Sarah got leukemia when she was two and a half. She is in remission at this time.

Dorn eventually gave up her vice presidency at Target but remains a consultant to the company in philanthropy and community relations. She serves on the boards of the Target Foundation and the Tiger Woods Foundation, and she hopes to work more as a consultant with family foundations and projects such as a school that her father-in-law established for children of cave dwellers in a mountainous region in China.

“These are the kinds of things I want my own kids exposed to,” she said. “I want to pass on things that have value. If you have benefits and advantages in life – and I have been blessed in this regard – then you need to pass them on and share them with others.”

As Dorn mixes family, work and volunteerism, she finds her life ever evolving, and she appreciates that. She also finds herself stuck on that train.

“Speed still is life,” she said. “It’s beautiful and it’s good. You can have it all, but not all at once.”

Beyond those reasons, however, was a central motivation. “I liked Elmira, a small, private college in upstate New York, but it did not offer the opportunities to strengthen my faith life the way I know St. Thomas does,” she explained. “I had gone to Catholic schools all my life and I missed the sense of Christian fellowship. Elmira was a good school, but I felt God leading me in another direction.”

At St. Thomas, faith opportunities are “made easy, with opportunities for Bible study, and traditional and contemporary worship. I live on campus, so if I don’t go to Mass, that is my fault. I’m involved with Ignite, a group with a more contemporary form of worship and music, so I have the best of both worlds. And I love the chapel with its atmosphere of reverence. It reminds me of an Italian cathedral.”

Jax has honor student credentials and St. Thomas scholarships that cover about half her tuition. So it’s natural that the other building she admires is the “gorgeous library. That and the chapel are the hearts of the campus.”

“I may sound like a nerd,” she laughed, “but I have a passion for learning and actually am excited to do homework. My classes offer the academic challenge I thought would come with St. Thomas.”

Philosophy of the Human Person with instructor Michael Rota is one of her favorites. “I had never taken philosophy so his class is very interesting. I get to ponder my own existence. I love to think about stuff like that.” Even an 8 a.m. class in sociology, “which I thought would be awful because I hate to get up early, is now something I look forward to because Dr. William Kinney makes it fun. He tells a lot of amazing stories.”

Then there is basketball. Jax, who played on competitive teams in high school and college, was impressed with the new women’s coach, Ruth Sinn ’84, and will try out next year. “I love sports. A player learns to think on her feet and interact with a team. It gives women an edge, I think, since athletes are seen as tougher people anyway,” said Jax, whose major is broadcast journalism. Her goal is to be an ESPN sportscaster.

In Minnesota, her grandparents, who own Zup’s grocery stores in Ely, “literally make me bring home food, as do my aunts and uncles. My roommate, Heather Pastorius from the University of Montana, also a transfer, likes that.” Each year, about 300 students transfer to St. Thomas.

Unexpected friends also welcomed Jax to St. Thomas. “Our campus tour leader was from my high school in Arizona, and another friend is a grad student here. I couldn’t believe it. They both warned me about winter, saying ‘Come November, you’ll regret this.’ We’ll see.”

- Pat Nemo

Senior citizen Dale Beihoffer finds it healthy to get intellectually involved
Dale Beihoffer, a retired attorney, always wanted to know if he could “handle undergrad classes in subjects that interested me, especially math.”

Apparently he can. A student through the Center for Senior Citizens’ Education, he recently co-wrote a refereed research paper on mathematics, “Faster Algorithms for Frobenius Numbers,” that was published in a math journal.

Beihoffer, 61, thought he had taken his last math class in 1963 when he graduated from Dartmouth College as a philosophy major. He earned his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1968 and practiced labor and employment law in Minneapolis. He has been active in community organizations and taught English with the Global Volunteers in China.

When he retired due to medical reasons, he took a Discrete Mathematics class with Dr. Melissa Shepherd. (For a one-time fee of $50, senior citizens can audit regular undergraduate classes on a space-available basis.) “She’s a very creative and knowledgeable teacher. The class of about 10 math majors worked collaboratively. The students are marvelous, polite and hard working. And when they started razzing me and called out, ‘Hey, Dale, nice haircut!’ (it was a bad haircut), I knew they accepted me.

“It’s trite to say, but it is very healthful to get intellectually involved with young people. It’s not just the social aspect of getting out and involved and connected; it’s also the real sense of contribution to learning in a class,” said Beihoffer, who takes courses in many areas, including the Geographic Information System, and Politics and the Supreme Court.

The Senior Citizen program is great, he says, a “no-risk way to see if you enjoy the work.” It has a wide variety of options, from auditing regular classes to $20 one-day Lunch and Learn programs or a series of $50 special programs (usually six to eight meetings) on topics ranging from World War II to Shakespeare. Each semester, about 1,000 people enroll in the center’s programs.

Beihoffer, who became interested in graph theory in Shepherd’s class, “rediscovered the sense of joy that comes from solving problems.” So he looked around for more number theory and found Stan Wagon at Macalester College, who let Beihoffer sit in on his class. Beihoffer submitted a research paper on number theory, applying graphs to solving problems. With the help of Wagon and Internet co-authors, it became “Faster Algorithms.” Basically, Beihoffer wrote a program that takes half as much time to tackle Frobenius problems.

A typical Frobenius problem is the Chicken McNugget problem. “McDonald’s only sells McNuggets in portions of six, nine and 20, and if you want only 13 without wasting any extras, how do you write equations that offer solutions?” Beihoffer said. “See, working with numbers is fun.”

Beihoffer and his wife, Janet, live in Lakeville. Staying “intellectually engaged” is important to them – which explains why they “threw the TV out of the house” a few years ago when the youngest of the four Beihoffer children went off to college.

- Pat Nemo

MBA student Amanda Reed has found a ‘lot of personal attention’ from teachers
Now fully entrenched in her St. Thomas MBA experience, second-year full-time student Amanda Reed is the first to admit she would never have imagined herself traveling to Minnesota from her native St. Louis to attend school, to say nothing of pursuing her M.B.A.

“I’d always envisioned getting my chemical engineering degree and then going directly to med school,” she said. With a brother attending the University of Minnesota, though, she started considering the possibility of moving north.

“I figured that in Minnesota, all it does is snow, so that would leave me with more time to study!” Reed joked. She completed her B.S. in engineering at the University of Minnesota but realized soon after graduating that she wanted something different.

Reed gravitates to and thrives in leadership roles, whether formal or informal. At St. Thomas, she sits on the board of the Twin Cities chapter of the National Society of Hispanic MBAs (NSHMBA).  Reed’s love of working with people and her strong sense of purpose and determination contribute to her belief that at St. Thomas she has found her niche.

A friend enrolled in the full-time MBA program introduced her to St. Thomas. “I’d already done the big classroom thing at the U, and I knew I didn’t want that again,” Reed said. She attended an information session and knew right away that St. Thomas would be a natural fit. “They told us that we’d get all kinds of personal attention whether we wanted it or not,” she said.

Reed was also very impressed that Dean Christopher Puto of the College of Business not only knows students individually but he also taught one of her first-year marketing courses. “That proved to me that he walks the talk.”

Reed especially appreciates that her St. Thomas MBA education is embedded with real-life experiences – and not just the pleasant kind. “We work through conflicts such as how to deal with someone not carrying his or her own weight. We sometimes have to learn the hard  way – through our mistakes,” Reed said.

That’s fine with her. “Professor Tom Ressler taught us early on that taking risks at school is the best way to learn.” That way, MBA students become more effective problem solvers on the job.

“His lesson hit home for me so many times,” Reed said. She had the opportunity to put her experience to the test during her summer internship as a store team “lead” at Target Corp.

When Reed completes her M.B.A. in May, she’s confident that employers will recognize that St. Thomas graduates have the whole package – not just the requisite accounting and finance skills, but also the critical communication and leadership skills that will help them rise to the top.

In the meantime, Reed will continue to capitalize on all that she’s learning. “I can’t say enough good things about St. Thomas,” Reed said. “I just love it here.”

- Kristy Blegen

Wise guy: Bob Douglas mixes music, mentorship, environmentalism
Novelists and moviemakers like stories where wisdom rests low on the ladder of recognition: The university janitor is the prodigy with the Ph.D. and the little guy comes off the bench to win the championship. In real life, more subtle versions of these characters abound: One is Bob Douglas.

Douglas, 57, is St. Thomas’ coordinator of recycling and central receiving in the Physical Plant. To find his office, you walk through a big garage door and wind your way around piles of flattened cardboard. But if you look closely, you’ll see taped to Douglas’ office window words of wisdom by Edith Stein, Thomas Merton, John Ruskin and John F. Kennedy.

“I’m a lifelong learner,” proclaims Texas native Douglas, who has a B.A. in philosophy and studio art from St. Paul’s Macalester College and has as many books in his office as most faculty members do. He’s one of those staffers who serve as willing mentors for St. Thomas students. He knows he’s earned their respect when they visit, years later, with their own kids in tow.

“It’s good teachers who will most influence your life,” Douglas tells the students, and he’s living proof. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he credits a respected teacher of Eastern religions for helping him to understand his own pacifism. Communal living and helping to found one of St. Paul’s early food co-ops honed his stewardship of the Earth’s resources. Studying in Europe stretched his interests in world culture and arts, including music.

Like a lot of kids in the 60s, Douglas took up guitar-playing in high school. But his musical career didn’t end in someone’s garage. He spent 13 years as a professional folk musician, including several with Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” Powdermilk Biscuit Band. He’s one of the regulars in St. Thomas’ Show’d Up Band, an entertainment fixture at a variety of campus events.

With a young family in 1983, Douglas needed more financial stability. He became a night custodian at St. Thomas and liked it – even became a night supervisor. And his wife, Susan, was able to quit her teaching job and stay home as their five children grew.

In 1995 Douglas was promoted to a day job: He was chosen to lead the university’s recycling program, which students started in 1988. The operation had moved out of an old Murray Hall trash room in 1993 to a 1,200-square-foot recycling center, an addition to the Physical Plant building. Last year, the university recycled more than 380 tons of stuff: batteries, books, cans, cardboard, electronics, fluorescents, food, glass, magazines, newspaper, pallets, paper, phone books and plastic.

Douglas supervises the university’s Recycling Team – students who pick up and sort campus recyclables – and advises the student Green Team, promoters of environmental friendliness. Together, they organize a twice-a-year Mississippi River Cleanup and a tree giveaway to celebrate Earth Day, which just happens to be Douglas’ birthday.

“I came to St. Thomas because of financial necessity, but I stay because this is an energetic place to be with faculty, staff and students,” Douglas said. “It’s a beautiful campus and has wonderful resources. There’s a certain synergy here that’s rewarding.”

- Pat Sirek

For biologist Jill Manske,‘teaching and doing research with students are my passion’
Receiving a $92,970 National Science Foundation grant in 2002 was very important for Dr. Jill Manske’s research in immunology. So was St. Thomas’ ability to match that challenge grant, as required by the NSF. And Manske’s appreciation of the Frey Science and Engineering Center, which opened in 1997, is heartfelt. “When I started teaching here, we were in Magnus Hall with limited room, so this is wonderful. We have more space to do research and we attract more good students. This speaks to the university’s commitment to the sciences.”

Manske, a biology professor who came to St. Thomas in 1991, said “teaching is my passion but I love doing research as well, so working in the Biology Department is perfect. I have three to seven students in my lab each semester. Part of the mission of St. Thomas is that students do real research.” Manske is studying how the nervous system interacts with the immune system to direct the body’s immune response to cancer.

“The most genuine way to teach science is to get students excited, hooked on asking questions, and doing the real work of science. That’s why St. Thomas is wonderful. At many larger universities, undergraduates don’t have the opportunity to do research. Here we consider research to be an important component of a science education. Even though it may be expensive as students can make mistakes as they learn, they gain confidence and come to a deeper understanding. Just as pianists learn by putting their hands on the keys of a piano, students learn by putting hands on scientific instruments,” she explained. Like many faculty, Manske co-authors professional papers with students and takes them to national meetings such as the National American Association of Immunologists. Travel is funded by her department.

Being able to do detailed cell analysis by using an expensive instrument such as a pulse flow cytometer is uncommon in an undergraduate science program. “Our labs are as well equipped as most immunology labs, so it is great to provide my students with the kind of research experiences that they would experience at a larger research university,” Manske said.

There are 170 biology majors and 68 biochemistry majors. Many go on to medical, research or teaching careers.  Because St. Thomas requires non-science majors to take one lab science, several hundred choose Human Biology.  “Understanding biological issues today is essential, so that educated citizens can make choices when it comes to everything from cloning to stem cells to vaccinating children to identifying dietary propaganda,” Manske said.

Manske also teaches courses such as Gender and Science and remembers “an adviser telling me I shouldn’t get married because it would be a distraction from my scientific work,” laughed the wife of attorney Michael Klutho and the mother of three children, ages 16, 14 and 11. “How many guys are told that? Right now, St. Thomas has more women than men biology majors. The culture of research science is time-consuming, but balancing life is something we all struggle with. Most faculty here put in about 60 hours a week – on campus or at home. Often after dinner at our house, we’re all five sitting around the kitchen table doing our homework.”

– Pat Nemo

Seminarian and football All-American  Ben Kessler focuses on faith and football
Ben Kessler is an unusual student with a remarkable passion for work and play.

Perhaps you know the St. Thomas senior from Janesville, Wis., for his 4.0 grade-point average in a double major of business and philosophy and his Academic All-America distinction.

Or for his tireless devotion to campus, community and church volunteer work. He earned a spot on the American Football Coaches Association Good Works Team.

Or his Tommie football exploits as a 6-foot-2, 245-pound starting defensive tackle. He recorded 21 quarterback sacks among his 165 career tackles.

Or for his high energy with his classmates at St. John Vianney Seminary and his plan to become what he has thought about for years – a Catholic priest.

Kessler’s combo platter has generated unheard of media coverage for a non-scholarship Division III student-athlete. Sports Illustrated, the Associated Press, Fox Sports, NCAA Sports.com and local outlets such as Fox Sports North, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and College Sporting News have told his story. Consider that the St. Thomas sports information office could only find two college football letter winners nationally in the last 20 years who became priests.

Kessler chose St. Thomas “because this was the only place I could do the three things I wanted to do most in college: study business, play football and give the seminary a try. Looking back on my decision four years later, I am not disappointed.

“Those three parts of my college life have each played an important role in my growth. The academics have forced me to be responsible in getting my work done. Football has helped me become a team player. The seminary has provided me with spiritual growth, and, really, this has been the most important growth of all in my years here.”

Asked to list his top memories of  St. Thomas, Kessler chose the expected – and the unusual. “One great memory is the St. John’s football game my sophomore year in 2003. Although we lost 15-12 on the game’s final play, this was a great experience; it was almost as if time stood still that afternoon. That game was like all St. John’s games – awfully hard to explain in words.

“Another great memory was that a group of four seminarians, myself included, entered a competition and were named to the Homecoming Court this year.”

Kessler has received a lot of media attention and thinks “it has been good for St. Thomas, St. John Vianney Seminary and the Catholic Church as a whole. I wouldn’t want that kind of attention my whole life, but I got the chance to meet many people and hopefully touch their lives. People have told me how surprised they are with my seemingly polar opposite football-seminary combination, but I just feel they have more in common than everyone thinks. I am doing things that any other Catholic man should do; I am simply playing football and discerning the priesthood. In reality, all men should discern religious life at some point, and all men should live out their dreams (such as football) to the fullest.”

His football experience will help him become a better priest because it taught him about being a team player, Kessler said. “Life in the church is not that much different. Each part of the Body of Christ, each member of the church, plays an important role in building the Kingdom of God. If any kind of team is missing a part, the whole suffers.”

Kessler, who will begin major seminary in Rome this summer, would advise future St. Thomas students to “place yourself out of your comfort zone. I’ve had the most fun and seen myself grow the most when I have entered uncomfortable situations.”

– Gene McGivern

Cathy Augustin ‘knew St. Thomas would be the right fit’
Cathy Augustin, graduate student in music education, came to St. Thomas in 2002, knowing this was where she belonged.

“Many of the other students are in-service teachers,” she explains, “encountering many of the same things I do.” Her encounters with faculty quickly confirmed that she had made a good choice. “Each faculty member took the time to get to know me and treat me as not just a student, but as a valued colleague in the field of teaching music.

“We all had the same goal,” Augustin concluded, “of passing on the knowledge and love of music to our students.”

A band and general music teacher at Berea Lutheran School, Augustin received her bachelor of music education from South Dakota State University in 1988. She enjoys her work and plans to continue at the same school after she graduates.

“Some day,” she adds, “I would love to be able to teach music education courses to college students as they prepare to go out and inspire others in music.”

Augustin’s first experience at St. Thomas came not long after she moved to the Twin Cities. “I was interested in taking a music workshop which was only to be found at St. Thomas: Orff Schulwerk.”

Orff Schulwerk uses music and movement to teach children about music, and St. Thomas is well-known throughout the United States for its instruction in the method. Augustin enjoyed the course and was impressed by the people she met.

Years later, she attended a graduation ceremony for a friend who was receiving a doctor of musical arts degree at Arizona State. “When I got to the campus and attended the ceremony, I couldn’t help but think about how much there was still to learn about music. Why would someone not want to continue learning about something they love?” It wasn’t long before she enrolled in the master’s in music education program at St. Thomas.

Now finished with her coursework and working on her thesis, Augustin recalls her classes with warmth. “We all learned so much from each other in a very ‘give and take’ way. People are so willing to share what works for them.

“I also feel that I have developed my personal musicality, which helps me to be a better musician and teacher,” she said. “I will miss the connection and opportunity to talk about music education with others – to the extent I was able during my classes – when I graduate.”

- Kate Norlander

Trustee Ann Winblad ‘made the time’ to devote to St. Thomas
Innovation never has been more important to Ann Winblad’s career than it is now.

The 1975 alumna always has had a fast-paced life, thanks to her involvement in the high technology industry for three decades and the risks that her company has taken in financing 95 software startups.

But the last five years have been particularly frenetic in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, the collapse of many dot-com companies and the emergence of global competitors as chronicled in Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat.

“At Hummer-Winblad, the focus is on innovation,” Winblad said of the venture capital firm that she co-founded in 1989. “We are working in an information economy worldwide. What has changed is the rapid globalization and participation of so many up-and-coming economies. They have accelerated the pace of innovation and served as a challenge to the rest of us.”

As entrepreneurial as Winblad has been, she finds inspiration in pioneers such as her longtime friend, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Richard Schulze, founder of Best Buy and a fellow St. Thomas trustee.

“When you watch people like Bill and Dick, you know it’s possible to find more time to make a difference, to be a contributor,” she said. “You learn how to be a good trustee, a good civic leader and a good philanthropist and still be successful in business and spend time with your family.”

The Red Wing native grew up in Rushford and Farmington, where her dad taught history, coached basketball and was a counselor. He received a master’s degree in guidance counseling from St. Thomas in 1968 and encouraged his oldest daughter to attend the College of St. Catherine.

She majored in mathematics and business and took many classes at St. Thomas, graduating in 1973 and earning a master’s degree in education two years later from St. Thomas. Using a $500 loan from her brother, she co-founded Open Systems, which wrote accounting software, and sold the company seven years later for $15 million.

When Winblad joined the St. Thomas board of trustees in 1998, she worried she might not have the time to devote to her alma mater. But she has made the time, and she looks back on her decision as a wise and fruitful one.

“All graduates have a responsibility to help, to give back,” she said. “I want to bring alumni back to campus to contribute – financially, as mentors to students, as participants in events – and to understand our aspirations and how hard we work to deliver the best-possible education.”

Winblad backs up her words with action. In addition to her work as a trustee – she is on the Institutional Advancement and Academic Affairs committees – she is a leader of a “Next Generation” effort to involve alumni from the 1970s and 1980s in the life of the university.

“There are so many opportunities to be engaged,” she said. “What we get back from St. Thomas is far more than what we have put in.”

- Doug Hennes ’77

‘No one is left out or forgotten here’ say Ugandan students
For Ugandan students Humphrey Tusiimirwe and his sisters, Doryne Tunanukye and Mavreen Anaura, their journey to St. Thomas came through the intervention and generosity of Father Dennis Dease, president of St. Thomas.

Humphrey, 23, a junior psychology major, had pursued distance learning on organizational behavior with Dr. Martin O’Riley at Martyr’s University. O’Riley met Dease at an international conference of Catholic universities, recommended his bright student, and Dease brought him – and later his two sisters – to St. Thomas.

“My visa was delayed for months because of the aftermath of 9/11. I came here Jan. 20, 2004,” Humphrey recalled. “It was through the efforts of Father Dease and Sen. Norm Coleman that I finally got a visa. We are all grateful for their generosity. A university education is a priority in Uganda, which has about 14 universities.”

English is the official language in Uganda due to former British colonization, so Humphrey has adapted to university life well. He enjoyed class with Dr. Nancy Zingale, “who inspired me to be interested in political science and encouraged me to think globally and act locally. I became passionate about American government during the presidential elections.” Dr. Buffy Smith “explored social problems across the world. The greatest dangers in the world today are connected – poverty and AIDS – a vicious cycle in which the world’s hardest hit areas are entangled in a culture of poverty that is breeding ground for a deadly scourge.”

He also educates St. Thomas students. “At least, they now know that Africa is not just one country. I encourage them to travel and see the world. It changes one’s perspectives and paradigms on so many different levels.” Humphrey’s plans include a graduate degree in industrial psychology and a return to Uganda to implement what he has learned in the United States.

Doryne, 21, a sophomore majoring in electrical engineering, has been at St. Thomas since September 2004 and would like to get home soon to visit her widowed mother and younger brother and sister. And she invites friends to come to Uganda: “It’s beautiful – we say we have 1,000 shades of green, just like Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes,” she laughed.

Doryne, who one of her professors described as one of the brightest mathematics students he has taught at St. Thomas, hopes to do an internship, work and go to graduate school.

She volunteers, plays intramural soccer, sprints on the track team and observes. “Education is different here, as teachers involve students more in class rather than just lecture. My advisers, Dr. Jeff Jalkio and Dr. Jeff McLean, keep me dreaming big and help me to define my goals. I feel very comfortable here because everyone on the faculty and staff at St Thomas is always willing to put their services at your disposal and also go an extra mile,” she noted.

Mavreen, 19, also a sophomore, and vice president of the Globally Minded Student Association, believes in “students exchanging cultures through fun activities. We learn more and we grow more.”

A possible double major in accounting and computer science, Mavreen works 10 hours a week on campus, as do her two siblings. She was glad to have the 2005 Professor of the Year, in Dr. Bernard Brady, for theology. “In his class, learning is all about involvement,” she said.

An international student mentor, Mavreen notes foreign students “offer different perspectives in classes. We bring more to the table in terms of thinking globally.”

What impresses her is that “everyone here is catered to, from commuters to transfers to international students. No one is left out or forgotten. And in class, you can learn because the professors focus their attention on you. That’s St. Thomas.”

- Pat Nemo

Patrick Schiltz made a career “leap of faith” as founding associate dean of School of Law
Describing what Patrick Schiltz does when he makes a career change as a “leap of faith” does not quite do it justice. When Schiltz takes leaps of faith, he takes them big.

Schiltz was a young partner at a law firm in Minneapolis when his firm won the Exxon Valdez oil spill litigation – a multibillion dollar verdict that was sure to make Schiltz and his partners wealthy when it was collected. But in 1995 Schiltz left behind his share of the verdict – as well as his partnership and a life of economic security – in order to start over as a junior faculty member at Notre Dame Law School. There, he quickly became a popular teacher and a nationally recognized scholar. He was elected Notre Dame’s “Professor of the Year” in 1999.

One year later, Schiltz took his second career leap of faith and signed on with the University of St. Thomas School of Law as its founding associate dean. At that time, there were no students and no faculty, except for David Link, who had recently retired as Schiltz’s dean at Notre Dame and had agreed to serve as founding dean at St. Thomas until the new law school opened its doors. Although he had help from Link and two lawyers who had served on St. Thomas’ Board of Trustees – Sister Sally Furay and Professor Thomas Holloran – Schiltz had primary responsibility for the day-to-day work of creating the new law school.

“It was a big risk,” said Schiltz. “But I felt it was worth it. I loved Notre Dame, but I knew that only once in my life would I get an invitation like this. The chance to build a law school, literally from the ground up, doesn’t come along very often.” Schiltz worried that, if he didn’t seize the opportunity, he would spend his life wondering “what could have been.”

Another draw for Schiltz was the fact that this new law school would be a part of the University of St. Thomas. Schiltz had visited St. Thomas as a high school student, but he could not afford to attend, so he went to college in Duluth, where he could live at home and work during the evenings. However, when Schiltz visited the St. Thomas campus in 1999 to speak at the annual Red Mass, he was amazed at the academic and physical changes that had taken place. Having a stable, established university supporting the new law school was crucial for Schiltz. “I called friends and former colleagues in the Twin Cities, and I kept hearing that St. Thomas had ‘the Midas touch’ – that everything it did, it did well,” remembers Schiltz.

Once Schiltz decided to change careers a second time, he threw himself into getting the new law school open.  He had 13 months before the students arrived – if students arrived. He worked to recruit that first class of students, while also working to shape the mission, hire the faculty, recruit a permanent dean, design the new building, plan the budget, draft the policies, shape the curriculum, and accomplish many other tasks. At times, he worked 80-hour weeks.

Mission always came first. “It wasn’t enough to open another law school, or even another good law school,” said Schiltz, who holds the St. Thomas More Chair in Law. “Our charge was to open a good law school with a meaningful Catholic identity – an identity that would inspire our graduates to use their legal training to make a real difference in the world.”

The leaps Schiltz has made were called “crazy” by many of his friends, but, looking back, he has no regrets. “For the rest of my life, I will be able to walk into this beautiful building, and I will be able to read about the great things that our graduates are doing, and I will be able to ask myself, ‘Aren’t you glad you took the risk?’ ” said Schiltz.

As content as he is, Schiltz’s days of leaping may not be over. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported in November that he is President Bush’s “probable pick” for a federal judgeship in Minnesota.

Confirmation hearings will be held early this year.

Physics major, Middle Eastern minor Rebecca Lucast enjoys diverse interestsBy her own admission, Rebecca Lucast ’06 thinks like a scientist. Good thing, too, since she received a full tuition science scholarship from St. Thomas. “My humanity classes are great, but it’s not what I want to study – it’s not how I think. I think like a scientist.”

Lucast has been thinking that way for a long time. Even as a sophomore in high school in North St. Paul, she already had visions of becoming a biochemistry major and launching a career as a forensic scientist. Luckily, her academic dreams meshed with St. Thomas when she received a full tuition scholarship in science from the university, and started toward that goal as a freshman.

As part of the coursework for her degree in biochemistry, Lucast chose a 2004 J-Term class in Costa Rica that introduced her to field research. After a month, she decided that field research was “not my thing,” and quickly ended her pursuit of a bio-chem degree. While that realization could have crippled some, Lucast instead found herself enjoying another aspect of the course: physics. And a new major was decided.

Lucast’s comfort in the Physics Department was almost immediate. “I would walk through the Physics Department and profs said ‘hi’ to me and knew my name,” she said. The level of involvement and familiarity from the physics faculty impressed Lucast and put her at ease. She credits Dr. Paul Ohmann and Dr. Marty Johnston, department chair, as the reasons she became a physics major. Ohmann worked with Lucast on a biophysics research project, modeling nerve axions as electrical circuits to study things such as multiple sclerosis. Johnston’s teaching style kept her interest: “He showed us how physics and physics research works in the real world.”

Physics isn’t Lucast’s only academic interest. While earning her physics degree, she was minoring in history, psychology and Middle Eastern studies, the latter as an ACTC minor with classes at Hamline and Macalester.

Her fascination with the Middle East led to a summer spent in Cairo as the result of winning an $8,000 National Security Education Program scholarship. She considers that time to be her greatest personal accomplishment: Her digital camera was stolen on her first day in Cairo, her Arabic was shaky, and the environment was not as she expected: “It was not the culture I had hoped to see. I was seeing the elite, wealthy, European side of Egyptian society.” Yet she hopes to return to the Middle East at some point and spend time studying the culture she missed.

For now, Lucast divides her time between her friends, her studies and her position as an apartment coordinator in Selby Hall. “It’s the circle of friends that makes the experience, not the location.” But if one throws in Lucast’s diversity in her studies and interests, she can look forward to a lifetime of exciting experiences.

- Peter Breuch

Tim and Beth Murphy stay connected through volunteerism
Your college years are over. You remain somewhat involved in campus activities but as time goes on, that gets tougher. You’ve become fully engaged in the “real world,” which might include grad school, job requirements, family life and all those major expenditures. It can take its toll, and what do you lose the most? For many, it’s their valuable time and the ability to make commitments.

Like many others, Tim ’86 and Beth (Doyle ’85) Murphy faced the same situation when their St. Thomas years were complete. But the Murphys decided early on that even though they weren’t on the St. Thomas campus on a daily basis, St. Thomas would still be a significant part of their lives. For them, the university was a major influence from the start: “St. Thomas was probably the number one reason we chose to live in the neighborhood – because of how close we could be to campus,” Tim said.

The Murphys met while in school and got married two years after Tim’s graduation. With the exception of living in Atlanta for a couple years due to a job transfer for Tim, they’ve lived in the Highland Park area of St. Paul ever since. The proximity to campus is just one reason they’ve become active St. Thomas volunteers.

“We’re a busy family – like many other families – but we really try to make the time to contribute something back,” said Beth, adding, “We see St. Thomas as giving us, and our kids, a true sense of community.”

The Murphys know that time is precious and don’t take it for granted. Tim, who majored in quantitative methods and computer science, works in sales for Printware, a small manufacturing firm, while Beth, a business administration major, works as a first grade teacher’s assistant at Highland Catholic School. Their children, Elizabeth, 13, Katheryn, 10, and Charlie, 6, maintain active schedules typical of a growing family, including school activities, sports and music practices, and church events.

But the Murphys have made volunteering a priority, even in the midst of hectic lives. Tim is in his third year on the Alumni Board of Directors and heads the Alumni-Student Relations Committee. Working with the mentoring program, Tim helps match up alums with students with similar career interests and aspirations. He’s also volunteered with Take a Tommie to Lunch, helped organize alumni soccer games and has participated in Homecoming events and the First Friday Luncheon Series. Away from campus, he’s active as a lector at Lumen Christi Parish in Highland Park, a member of the Serra Club and a soccer coach for St. Paul youth leagues.

Beth has an equally busy schedule. Besides working at Highland Catholic, she puts in many volunteer hours with its home and school association. Last fall, she was a committee member who helped organize her 20-year college reunion.

In addition to volunteering, personal relationships also have helped create that special sense of community the Murphys have experienced through St. Thomas. “We’re lucky enough to have known many faculty and staff members – Father James Lavin, Steve Fritz, Father Peter Laird and others,” Beth said. “Plus we’ve met some of our closest friends through St. Thomas.”

Giving of one’s time can be a sacrifice, but for the Murphys, it’s a natural decision to make. “Volunteering isn’t only a very personal thing, it’s fun,” said Tim, adding, “We’ve received more from St. Thomas than we’ll ever be able to give back.”

– Jeff Kasimor ’86