Autumn in Minnesota: Where Apples Meet Entrepreneurship

Autumn in Minnesota is a season of contrasts—moody skies, sudden temperature swings, and the unmistakable buzz of Vikings football. But for many Minnesotans, fall also means one thing: apples. Whether you're strolling through a grocery store, browsing a farmers’ market, pulling over at a roadside stand, or wandering through a picturesque orchard, you're bound to encounter one of the state's most beloved seasonal treats in peak form.

Growing up in neighboring South Dakota, I knew Minnesota had apples. But I didn’t fully grasp the depth of the state’s apple obsession until I lived here. It’s a passion that rivals the fervor for the Minnesota State Fair—and perhaps it’s no coincidence that these two institutions intersected back in 1866. That year, the Minnesota Fruit Growers Association was founded at the State Fair, with a mission to develop apple varieties hardy enough to survive the state’s brutal winters. Just two years later, it evolved into the Minnesota State Horticultural Society, which still thrives today, supporting growers and gardeners across the state. 

The Tragic Fall of the Tupperware Brand

Most children of my generation are quite familiar with searching through a cabinet filled with plastic Tupperware containers and lids to find the right match for packing up leftovers. The ubiquity of the Tupperware container defined the experiences of generations of families from the post-World War II era through the Seventies and Eighties and up through the turn of the Century. Spurred to tremendous popularity by a revolutionary marketing strategy that introduced easy-to-use and often unusually colorful products aimed to keep foods and drinks fashionably fresh, Tupperware containers seemed to be in every household in America. Unfortunately, the Tupperware Brand, once it lost its market leader status, was unable to keep up in the modern-day, post-pandemic market. It recently filed for bankruptcy protection in Delaware.

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Little, Brown and Company, 2023)

Malcolm Harris lured me into this book, a history of the area now encompassing Silicon Valley, with his very first sentences: “Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate; the people educated, rich, healthy, innovative.” Check—this matches my initial impressions, formed when I arrived in 1979 to attend law school on the campus of the university Leland Stanford formed in 1891 in memory of his son, a victim of typhoid at the age of 15.

One detail immediately stood out for me. It was difficult for me, a middle-class son of the Midwest, to come to terms with the fact that the undergraduate parking lot was filled with cars newer and more expensive than those I encountered on a daily basis in the suburban Twin Cities neighborhood of my youth. Nonetheless, I came to see Palo Alto as a wonderful place to spend three years, even if throughout that period I had a nagging feeling that there was something not quite “real,” for lack of a better term, about the place. It turns out this is a feeling I share with Harris, who grew up there. “There were signs,” he writes, “that, if Palo Alto was normal, it was too normal, weirdly normal.” Again, right on target.

Philip Bump, The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of America (Viking, 2023)

I write this sitting in front of a window open on a fine summer’s morning. On any other day, I’d be in an equally fine mood, but today I find my internet connection has suddenly gone missing and, after seven hours on the phone with my “helpful” ISP, I am still accessing the online world through a supremely unstable iPhone hotspot. Insert “OK, Boomer” comment here.

Yes, this is a first-world problem, but it’s one problem those of us in the Boomer generation would never have anticipated—let alone imagined—30 years ago. It is a problem, as Bump argues here in this biography of my generation, that arises from the shift in society’s focus away from us old-timers. “Younger Americans,” he writes, “now dominate a cultural conversation that often depends on the sort of technologies that have emerged only relatively recently.”

Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, 2011)

The years between 1973 and 1979 took me from high school through college, a time during which I worked in my first job, cast my first vote in a presidential election, and generally prepared for life as an adult. Historians have labeled the era “a kidney stone of a decade,” but, from the perspective of teenage me, they were pretty great times. Between the end of the Vietnam War (I fortunately fell into the age group that avoided having to register for the draft) and the onset of the Reagan years (during which I engaged with life as a yuppie), life felt carefree, as I imagine it did for many a young person raised in suburban middle-class comfort during those years.

Lately, as I’ve mused over the way we were (to borrow the title of a 1973 Oscar-winning film), I’ve started to recall some not-so-great things that were only at the very edge of my consciousness at the time: an oil embargo, stagflation, unrest in the Middle East, and post-Watergate distrust of and weariness with politicians. No doubt, in retrospect, these were weird times, characterized by, as historian David Kennedy once observed, “the odd blend of political disillusionment and pop-culture daffiness that gave the 1970s their distinctive flavor.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

It’s been a long pandemic. While there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, it still feels like we’re limited in what we might otherwise feel comfortable doing wherever there are a lot of other people around. For a reader like me, you’d think that would be great news, right?

Except that, for purposes of entreVIEW, I seem to be running out of books that have any real entrepreneurial content to them. When’s the last time you saw a book proclaiming that this is a great time to start a business? Yeah, I thought so. (But do check out this post from a fellow EntreVIEW editor.)

Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (Little, Brown and Company, 2021).

Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors, as evidenced by my earlier reviews here, here, and here, but it’s been a while since I’ve dived into something new from him.

A few weeks ago, while browsing mask-free (alas, how short that interval was!) at my favorite big-box bookstore, I stumbled upon Gladwell’s latest offering, The Bomber Mafia. The World War II subject seemed a bit beyond his usual psychosocial playground, but the book looked like a quick read, and besides it was in the “50% off” bin.

Gladwell does not disappoint, coming through again with lessons for the entrepreneur. Though framed as a war story, he seeks an answer to a question with much broader reach: “How is it that, sometimes for any number of unexpected reasons, technology slips away from its intended path?”

Bill Flanagan, Fifty in Reverse (Tiller Press, 2020)

OK, I’ll admit that I have a particular penchant for tales of time travel. That said, I have resisted visiting this genre for almost nine years, with my review here being my last that touches on a story of this type. I’ve revisited another favorite topic, the 1970s, much more recently here. A whole host of Wonder Years have flowed under the bridge since I’ve read something that has combined both favorite topics.

But here’s the thing: Fifty in Reverse is more than the sum of these two parts.  Here’s the story of a sixty-something empty nester who goes to sleep in 2020 and wakes up as his 15-year-old self in 1970, fully aware of his circumstances and the future that lies ahead of him. This is a story for all of us for whom the past year has seemed somehow unhinged in time. Show of hands: who else has experienced a perpetual Groundhog Day feeling as they’ve gone about their daily business over the past year?

The fantasy, of course, is that, with fifty-some years of foreknowledge going for you, you’d be set to profit handsomely from both the ups and the downs of the economy. It would be an entrepreneur’s dream. Imagine knowing what the next big thing is going to be before anyone else is even three steps behind you. Maybe that’s what it was like to be Steve Jobs (or maybe he was just seemingly always able to create the next big thing…)

That’s not how this story works out, though. No spoilers here, but this is a fresh take on the time-travel theme, particularly suited for pandemic homebound readers.

Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It (Simon & Schuster, 2005)

As we sit in our homes in isolation in an attempt to “flatten the curve,” it’s helpful to remember that this is not the human race’s first rodeo.

A little over a century ago, in the midst of the world’s first experience of total war, a virulent virus raged through every corner of the globe, killing an estimated 100 million people. Most families were touched by the pandemic. My grandfather was spared from service in World War I because the second draft in which he would have been called up was canceled as a result of the pandemic. A strong and healthy young man, he later nearly died from the virus; his aunt suddenly came down with the influenza and was gone within a few days, leaving behind a bereaved husband and several young children.

Such experiences were commonplace, as Gina Kolata, a science journalist for the New York Times, recounts in this book. But this is more than just the story of the 1918 pandemic. Until relatively recently, scientists had no clue about the genetic makeup of the 1918 virus or what made it so dangerous. The search for the answers to these questions about the Spanish Flu, eerily similar to the frenetic search for knowledge about COVID-19 currently underway, makes up the heart of Kolata’s story.

My Valentine to the Presidents

It is February. Entrepreneurs are all about competition, so while we celebrate the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, and enter the 2020 presidential election season in earnest, let’s have some fun and test your knowledge about our past presidents. (Answers are below)

Family Relations
1. Two pairs of father-son presidents.
2. Grandfather and grandson presidents.
3. Distant cousins.
4. Related to 11 presidents by blood or marriage (according to genealogists).

Birth
5. First American-born president
6. First president born outside of original 13 states
7. First president born west of the Mississippi
8. Presidents that were adopted
9. First president born in a hospital

Physical Attributes/Age
10. Tallest president
11. Shortest president
12. Youngest president (at time of taking office)
13. Oldest president (at time of taking office)

Marriage
14. Only bachelor president (never married)
15. Three presidents married while in office
16. Three presidents whose wives died while they were in office
17. First divorced president

Children
18. Only president to have a baby while in office
19. Most children
20. Only president with twins

Education
21. Nine presidents who did not go to college
22. President taught to read and write by his wife
23. First president to hold a doctorate degree

Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock (Dey Street Books, 2018)

Occasionally we have moments of clarity, times when something in our environment reaches out and whacks us in the head and we wonder why we didn’t notice it before because it was so obvious.

I had one such moment of clarity some time ago as I went about running errands on a typical Saturday morning. A stop at Walgreen’s to pick up a prescription: I briefly tune into the background music — hey, that’s Queen — and for a moment I’m transported back to 1976. Off to the grocery store, where Styx greets me. A quick stop into a fast food restaurant. You guessed it: my dining experience is accompanied by tunes from the 1970s and 1980s.

It’s been this way for a long time. It’s like I’m moving through life in a bubble in which music that was popular during my young adulthood is continually cycling. This didn’t happen with my parents’ music, as good as some of it is in retrospect. No, this must have something to do with demographics, the economic power of my bulging boomer generation. Play our music, and we’ll more readily open our wallets. For younger folks, it’s enough to fuel an “OK Boomer” response. But, if you’re an entrepreneur with potential customers in the Boomer generation, you may want to think about incorporating some classic 70’s rock into your marketing (just don’t do it without consulting a knowledgeable IP lawyer before you do). 

Let’s face it: without the memories, some of this stuff just isn’t that great, as Steven Hyden observes in his Twilight of the Gods. In a nutshell, Wikipedia informs us, this new elevator music comprises “commercially successful songs by white male acts from the Anglosphere, expressing values of Romanticism, self-aggrandizement, and politically undemanding ideologies.” Yup, that’s pretty much it. And I suspect it will be with us until my generation’s buying power dwindles away.

The Great Minnesota Get-Together: A Brief History

If you’re like me, at this time of the year, you have one thing on your mind: the Great Minnesota Get-Together (also known as the Minnesota State Fair).

The fair, located on a massive 322 acres, is a highly popular event, attracting more than 2 million people annually. It employs over 80 full-time year-round individuals, adding 450 seasonal staff members in the summer. It also hires over 2,300 fair-time staff members. In 2018, the fair brought in $57.3 million in revenues. The fair is further estimated to have generated a whopping $268 million in economic impact for the Twin Cities as a whole.

Have you ever wondered how this great event came to be? Its roots trace all the way back to 1854, where it first began as a territorial fair. The fair as it’s known today was first held in 1859, a year after Minnesota was granted statehood. At that time, the fair’s location changed annually, moving between Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester, Red Wing, Winona, and Owatonna. It wasn’t until 1885, when the Ramsey County Board of Commissioners donated 210 acres to the State Agricultural Society, that the fair found a permanent home at its present location in St. Paul. Because the fair’s original purpose was to encourage farming in the state of Minnesota, the fair in its early days was comprised of mostly agricultural-related exhibits and competitions.

Over the years, the fair has expanded its activities. 1899 saw the introduction of grandstand shows and fireworks. Theodore Roosevelt spoke at the fair in 1901 and delivered his famous line, "speak softly and carry a big stick." In 1947, the Pronto Pups (and other tasty foods on a stick) were first introduced. The Princess Kay of the Milky Way competition started in 1954. The beloved Sweet Martha’s cookies hit the fair in 1979.

Despite the fair’s expansion in activities and in size, agriculture has consistently remained the primary focus and heart of the fair. There are still several exhibits and competitions dedicated to just that — agriculture. This year, consider stopping by these exhibits or take a moment to watch a competition to pay homage to the fair’s roots and to appreciate how far the fair has come since then.

Luck of the Irish?

It is March and St Patrick’s Day is just around the corner. My mother was proudly Irish — possibly full-blooded, although family lore has it that there might be a little French in the mix. With the DNA capabilities these days, I could maybe get some clarity, but part of me likes the mystery. 

My Irish ancestors were so poor that several left Ireland in the early 1800s, before the potato famine. Some came in through Canada because Canadian ship fares were often cheaper; others came through New York. They didn’t linger long on the East Coast, but got jobs building the canals and railroads going west. They were settled in Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota by the time the potato famine forced other family members to leave Ireland.

I remember events with my mother’s family, which at the time of my childhood still included grandparents and great uncles and aunts that were the first generation born in America. The gatherings were noisy and animated — a constant cacophony of “discussions” regarding current events, politics, and religion. In the midst of the din, it was not uncommon to witness a spontaneous recitation of some well-known poetry, or occasionally something more obscure or even original. It was a time for books to be recommended and shared. My uncle Johnny played the guitar and sang what songs were acceptable having spent 20+ years in the navy. The food was mediocre. 

What I don’t remember are conversations about business, industry, careers, or even work. In fact, I’m not really sure what most of my Irish relatives did for their livings. It simply wasn’t a topic of conversation. Was it because it didn’t matter or because they had no historical connection to "business?” Their families came to America with no money, education, or skills. They were looking for jobs — not business opportunities. The same persons that could quote Yeats or Wilde or Joyce never spoke of great Irish industrialists or inventors.

Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir (Random House, 2018)

One characteristic shared by all entrepreneurs is a drive to overcome obstacles in following a dream. Like most entrepreneurs, our clients at Gray Plant Mooty dream on a daily basis of pushing boundaries, building businesses, and creating value … and perhaps getting away from the polar vortex and unrelenting winter weather we’ve been having!

Others demonstrate the drive to improve, to expand, and to create in other spheres of endeavor. Such is the case of Tara Westover. Raised in rural Idaho, she was supposedly home-schooled (but actually left to her own devices) by survivalist parents who mistrusted the government, the medical profession, and formal education in equal measures. Family dynamics routinely encompassed physical and mental abuse.

A spark of curiosity develops into a quest for knowledge that leads her, via Brigham Young University, to a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, a fellowship at Harvard, and a doctorate from the University of Cambridge, but not without some bumps in the road. The strain of straddling two worlds leads to a mental breakdown along the way, but in the end the dream is within her grasp.

Included in former President Barack Obama’s 2018 summer reading list, this book is a remarkable memoir of a young woman caught between two worlds as she works to follow her dreams in the face of great obstacles.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Santayana

I’m going to depart from discussing my usual intellectual property and technology subjects and step on my colleague Dave Morehouse’s toes with discussion of a book. Actually three books—Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy.  

The first book, “Fall of Giants,” follows five interrelated families from Wales, England, Russia, Germany, and the U.S. as they experience social and political issues at the time of the First World War. The second book, “Winter of the World,” continues with these five groups through the rise of the Third Reich, World War II, and the beginning of the Cold War. The third and final book, “Edge of Eternity,” continues the families’ stories in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.

I first read these books as they were published between 2011 and 2014. While I don’t often reread books, particularly when they are this voluminous, I was recently drawn to them for a second look. If you have read Follett, you are familiar with his creative and interesting use of fictional characters and occurrences to illustrate and explain actual historical events. But unlike dry historical narratives, he gives you a sense of the human side of why things happened. In my initial read, I found the human stories to be most compelling, but viewed them largely in their historical context—things that happened 100, 80, and 50 years ago. In my second reading, I am drawn to the broader backdrop and some striking relevance to current social and political behavior.  

JUSTICE NEVER RESTS

I usually write about legal issues relating to privacy and data security. The long anticipated new European privacy law known as the GDPR took effect this past May. It was quickly followed by the California Consumer Rights Act, which takes effect in 2020. Earlier this year I wrote about these new protective laws and what they mean for businesses.

For this post, however, I am going to share a personal story that in some ways demonstrates the huge difference between European and American privacy laws and regulations.

On November 21, 1944, my mother, Judy Meisel, was in line with her mother, Mina Beker, as they approached the gas chamber at Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. A Nazi guard pulled my mother from the line just before her mother was ushered into the small and dank brick structure where she was poisoned with Zyklon B gas. We know the exact date Mina was murdered as the Germans kept a detailed record book. You can find the page and see where, on row 4, they recorded my grandmother’s birthdate and hometown. The last column displays the date they ended her life.

Jot Your Thoughts

We are all familiar with Field Notes, those rather basic, yet timeless, notebooks in which you can do what the name implies, take notes. Beginning a few years ago, the Field Notes people came out with their own Field Notes Brand Books, the first of which was “A Drive into the Gap” by Kevin Guilfoile. It’s a nice, little, fits-in-your-back-pocket-sized book set against the backdrop of Roberto Clemente’s 3,000th and final hit before his early death, the stories and memories that have created a mystery about which bat Clemente actually used for his historic feat, and the relationship of the author to his father who worked with Clemente while with the Pittsburgh Pirates and eventually had a career with the Baseball Hall of Fame before falling victim to Alzheimer’s. 

This little book caused me to reflect on my own memories and ability to remember. Sometimes it seems that our brains pick and choose at random what they want to retain and discard (or hide from us).

Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons: A Memoir (Little, Brown and Company, 2017)

Anyone who has chanced upon my blog posts and actually read them has likely noticed that my reviews usually invoke a certain reminiscent quality. Something in a book triggers a personal memory, or an experience leads me to read a book, so that the act of reading actually becomes an interaction between ideas, experiences, and memories. Having recently entered the seventh decade of my life, I have a lot of memories (and, fortunately, I can still remember them, even in my seventh decade).

Usually, any given book has just a handful of such points of contact—a song I remember, an incident I recall as if it occurred yesterday—but in the case of Sting-Ray Afternoons, we’re talking about a whole decade of life. This book came highly recommended by one of my partners, a person who is of similar vintage, and it doesn’t disappoint. Steve Rushin, a writer for Sports Illustrated, has produced a book that captures the feel and fabric of adolescent life in suburban Minneapolis during the 1970s.

One aspect of that time that I’d forgotten is how quickly technology changed. We started the decade with vinyl records, transitioned to 8-track tapes, then to cassettes, and, by the end of the decade, we found our way to the first compact discs. The entrepreneurial activity that led to this revolution in how we listened to music led to waves of change within both the music industry and the entire economy. Digital music platforms such as iTunes and Spotify would not even exist today had it not been for the technological development and entrepreneurship that led to digitized music by the end of the 1970s. Without this evolution, Apple and Steve Jobs could have ended up being just footnotes of incredible entrepreneurship in the bygone era that led to the development and proliferation of personal computers. 

The author’s father, who starts the book as a salesman for 3M’s 8-track tape department, is, by the end of the decade, looking at an industry that is quickly dying. Like any good entrepreneur, he needs to figure out how to adapt to changes in the industry around him. 

I wonder what he’d think about the resurgence of vinyl?

Jack Mayer, Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project (Long Trail Press, 2011)

I have been known to find—or perhaps more accurately, create—an entrepreneurial angle on some pretty esoteric topics, so much so that my co-editor has from time to time challenged me to do so with some topic out of left field.

It just so happens that the day on which this blog post comes due is Holocaust Remembrance Day (also known as Yom HaShoah). A reasonably enlightened person might wonder how an entrepreneurial lesson might be drawn from the marking of the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

For starters, consider the definition of “entrepreneur.”  Those of us who practice corporate law have a very specific idea of what an entrepreneur is—we know one when we see one.  But our use of that word is, in fact, a very narrow interpretation.  According to Dictionary.com, an entrepreneur is “a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.”

Ray Kroc, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016)

It’s one of the first memories I can identify by time and place. There I am, sitting in the back seat of my father’s red 1960 Buick LeSabre, gazing up at a sign featuring a jolly Mr. Speedee, who is cheerfully informing us that he has sold over 100 million hamburgers as of this mid-winter evening in 1962. Yes, this is even before McDonald’s had the golden arches, though as I recall they followed shortly thereafter. 

It seems that this restaurant chain has always been around, morphing somewhat from time to time but always growing and grabbing ever-greater market share.  But Ray Kroc’s entrepreneurial autobiography, recently reissued in advance of the recently released movie, The Founder, with Michael Keaton in the starring role, reminds us that the leviathan that is McDonald’s has been around only for a little more than a half-century.

This is the story of a paper cup salesman who graduates to selling milkshake mixers. He stumbles on the idea of franchising a California hamburger joint as a way to increase mixer sales.  Along the way and through persistence, he builds an empire based on hamburgers, French fries and milk shakes—and a brand (and color scheme to make us hungry?) instantly recognizable around the world.