Baby Boomers: Today's American Innovation Force
When people think of America's new start-up businesses, they often think of digital companies, e.g., Facebook begun by the 18 to 34 year-old demographic. But guess where the most entrpreneurial activities are coming from? Baby Boomers. That according to a new report by the Kaufmann Foundation. That bodes well for the future of aging. Dominic Basulto writes more in his Washington Post article: Why Baby Boomers are the Innovators of the Future
In Honor & Memory: Melvin Babcock, Ecumen North Branch
Ecumen North Branch lost a lovely soul this week, Melvin Babcock, age 92. It has been an honor to serve Melvin the years he was with us and we are grateful to his family for the love and care they showed him. Melvin and fellow Ecumen North Branch resident Hazel Eng were featured in a KARE 11 TV feature about Ecumen's Awakenings initiative.
From his obituary: Melvin R. Babcock, of Ecumen North Branch, formerly of Stanchfield, left us for heaven on Sunday evening, June 17, 2012. He was 92 years old.
Melvin was born May 26, 1920 in Webster, Wisconsin. His family moved to Markville, Minnesota, where he attended school and graduated in 1938 from Cloverton High School. He married Irene Witt in 1941 and they celebrated 70 years together. In 1949, their family moved from Markville to Sandstone. In 1959, the family moved to Stanchfield.
Melvin’s many skills included school bus driving, welder, mechanic, and all around handyman. Mel loved hunting, fishing, family, friends, and helping others. He will be greatly missed, but will be waiting for us at the gates of heaven with open arms
Melvin is preceded in death by his parents Herman and Olga (Fosmo) Babcock; 2 brothers and 2 sisters; son-in-law, Donald Shade.
He is survived by wife, Irene; children, Gary (Marie), Diane Shade, Roshan (Shivani), Lonny (Denise), Dan (Debbie); 9 grandchildren; 8 great-grandchildren; sister, Rosalyn (Leonard) Haus; sister-in-law, Lois Babcock; many nieces, nephews, other relatives and friends.
Godspeed Mr. Babcock.
Ecumen Detroit Lakes: Ducks Deliver the Mail!
Life's more fun at Ecumen Detroit Lakes! Mail delivery volunteer Steve Score occasionally brings his ducklings, Peeper and the Pipettes, along for a visit when making the rounds. Watch the sweet story about their special delivery service at KVRR Fox TV.
Ecumen: 150 Years of Creating Home
These companies have history on their side
Article by: KATY READ
Star Tribune
June 17, 2012 - 5:44 AM
Computers have pushed aside paper ledgers and quill pens. Office windows that used to frame bucolic scenes of grazing cows now look onto streets bustling with city traffic. Employees nowadays are far more likely to hold advanced degrees and far less likely to wear bowler hats. Dollar sums that once seemed a fortune now look more like your average cell-phone bill.
Workplaces, in other words, have changed in the century-plus since some of this year's Top Workplaces started doing business. The companies have switched tools, locations and, in some cases, even whole business models. But their values and goals remain relatively constant, company representatives say, along with the employees' commitment that propelled them from the 19th century into the 21st.
Two workplaces began as orphanages, for example, but are now doing something else entirely: Washburn Children's Center serves children with social, emotional or behavioral problems, and Ecumen serves seniors. "Whether providing a home for orphaned children, or now providing an array of senior services, we've really stayed connected to that mission of creating home," said Eric Schubert, Ecumen's vice president of communications and public affairs.
Cargill, which began as a single grain-storage facility in 1865 and now does business around the world, focusing not just on agricultural commodities such as food, but also for manufacturing substances used in paint, adhesives and couch-cushion stuffing. An early Cargill president wrote that "our word is just as good as our bond," said Jennifer Johnson, the company's associate archivist. "Cargill's still committed to its business ethics and how we act and perform, not just in the U.S. but in every country around the world."
Superficial details have changed since the Volunteers of America-Minnesota opened in 1896, said President and CEO Paula Hart. Employees used to wear military-style uniforms, and one early VOA leader, among the first Minnesotans to earn a master's degree in social work, would don hers on Friday nights and hit the bars -- to pass a hat for donations.
Today's employees are no less dedicated, Hart said. "They're tackling some of the toughest issues people have in life, doing hard, gritty work and finding great fulfilment in doing it."
Profinium Financial shares the goal of helping people, in a somewhat different way. The Fairmont-based financial services company began as the Martin County Bank in 1875. Founder Albert L. Ward invested $700 for a two-story, clay-brick structure "roughly the size of our [current] teller line," said Michael W. Riley, Profinium's chief retail and marketing officer. Helping celebrate its opening were a marching band of employees lined up in suits and bowler hats.
Today's employees dress a little differently, but they're still "trying to help people achieve their dreams," said Fred W. Krahmer, a Profinium owner and history buff.
Two St. Paul colleges among the Top Workplaces opened within a few years of each other. The University of St. Thomas was founded in 1894 by the archbishop of St. Paul. All male until 1977, it taught men to "become teachers and priests and businessmen and occupations of that nature," said Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations.
Rasmussen College opened in 1900 to provide men and women with technical skills for accounting, business, administrative or secretarial work, said Rasmussen President Kristi Waite. Now spacious and high-tech, the school once held overcrowded classrooms, old typewriters and a cash register that only went as high as $10.
Washburn Center for Children opened in 1896, when Minneapolis milling magnate Cadwallader C. Washburn left $375,000 in his estate to start an orphanage, said Executive Director Steve Lepinski. Though kids don't live there now, Washburn still serves kids at risk.
The pay probably wasn't great, and it still isn't, Riley said. "People don't come into this work to make a lot of money. They do it out of passion, love and commitment."
With similar motivations, Gillette Children's Specialty Healthcare started when a Carleton College student who suffered from scoliosis and a St. Paul doctor persuaded the 1897 Legislature to approve a hospital for disabled children, said Dr. Steven Koop, Gillette's medical director, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon and author of a company history.
Antibiotics didn't exist, surgery was dangerous, and early doctors knew little about treating severe disabilities. Since travel was slow and difficult, children moved into Gillette until they got better -- 400 days, on average. But the mission, Koop said, is timeless. "I have to believe in this world we live in today, which is polarized for lots of reasons, that the love of children still draws us together."
When Securian Financial began selling insurance in 1880, a life-insurance policy might total $2,000. In 19th century St. Paul, "it was a great place to start a venture like an insurance company ... a time of putting down roots and new growth and lots of opportunity," said Mark Heir, second vice president for communications and research. "It's fun to be working in a place that was really part of history."
Katy Read • 612-673-4583
© 2011 Star Tribune
Ecumen named Top Workplace!
Ecumen has again been named by the Star Tribune as one of Minnesota’s Top Workplaces for 2012, based on an employee-based survey. The Top Workplaces special section was published in the Star Tribune on Sunday, June 17. Having just missed the Top 100, Ecumen was one of 60 companies named a “National Standard Setter,” which puts Ecumen ahead of most companies nationally based on a measurement for the Star Tribune by WorkPlace Dynamics.
Top Workplaces recognizes the most progressive companies in Minnesota based on employee opinions about company leadership, communication, career opportunities, workplace environment, managerial skills, pay and benefits. The analysis included responses from nearly 71,200 employees at more than 1360 Minnesota public, private and nonprofit organizations.
Ecumen truly lives its promise to Innovate, Empower and Honor. Thanks and kudos to Ecumen employees for the good work they do every day.
Jim Klobuchar - Remembering Dad's Only Flight
Editor’s note—In 1986 Jim Klobuchar was a finalist in NASA’s projected Journalist in Space flight. Shortly before the candidates were to enter a training regimen in Houston, where NASA would make its choice, the program was canceled in the wake of the fatal accident of the shuttle Challenger. One of his qualifications for the flight was his prior experience as a licensed pilot. In a few days he plans a reunion with the light plane he flew then—and an unforgettable hour with his dad.
My friend Mike owns a single engine plane called the Cessna 172, not all that much changed today from the same plane in which I trained and flew for nearly ten years in the 1970s. A forgiving plane, it was called by the manufacturers and pilots I knew, meaning it was and I’m sure still is relatively uncomplicated and can absorb most of the predictable mistakes the amateur pilot is likely to make in his or her early seasons.
Mike is well beyond his early seasons with the plane, and he’ll be the pilot. Chivalrously he may offer me a few moments at the controls and I’d be amazed if I don’t accept. Yet that wasn’t the main inducement for me.
It wasn’t until later that I told him about my father’s first and only experience in flight more than 40 years ago, his burst ofexuberance seeing his hunting and fishing grounds from the air. He didn’t blush to show his wonderment; sounding like a kid, experiencing something very close to a fairy tale.
For most of his adult life he had been an iron ore miner, part of the first generation of men and women whose parents had emigrated from what they called “the old country.” In their case it was the Balkans in the late years of the 1800s. Many of the families settled on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota. In the ledgers of the time they were carried as Cheap Labor. The immigrant families might have been aware of that unflattering description. It wouldn’t have mattered if they were. America was huge and full of energy and ambition, offering a new beginning for families whose sons in the old country were being conscripted to fight the wars of the foreign monarchies that ruled them. But this was America and they would become citizens. America had public schools their kids could attend and learn to read and write English and some day they would graduate from college.
My dad was part of that first generation. He didn’t have the opportunity of college but he wanted to go to sea. He brought home geography books when he was a kid. His grades were good but when he reached 15 in the early 1920s his parents had both died and he was the eldest son with eight younger siblings. Social workers said they could place the children in foster homes and orphanages. He had a better idea. The mines needed workers. America had adopted the beginnings of child labor laws in those years, but the mining company superintendent listened to the teen-age kid who was trying to keep the family together. He offered him a job in the underground mine, where the iron ore lay in caverns 1500 feet beneath the surface. Within three or four years he became a foreman, married when his siblings had finished high school and had two sons, my brother and me.
The regret of my life is that we were never close. He provided, he was devoted to our mother, insisted that we study and examined the report cards. He established rules of behavior in the house, and in our personal lives as we grew older, but this was 60 years ago and more, and the habits of family in “the old country” clung. Small talk, laughter and tears, were pretty much consigned to the moms. When Dick and I became adults the distance closed and I now understand the sacrifices he had made and the direction he and mother had given us. But it was still hard to confide, and to understand the true measure of his gifts to us.
So one day in the 1970s I flew up to my home town of Ely in northern Minnesota in a rented Cessna 172 and hangered the plane for the few days of our visit. On the second day my father took our two girls fishing, a skill that somehow had escaped me despite the presence of 75 or 80 lakes within a few miles of the town. They got back in mid afternoon and I said to the undisputed head angler of the house: “Dad, have you ever flown?”
He said he hadn’t. “Have you ever wanted to?” Uncertain silence. He had the usual paternal wariness about some of the wilder schemes of their offspring. But he had also seen me land the plane, understood I was licensed and said, rather valiantly I thought, “well, sure.”
So we took off into the west from of the sand runway of the rinkydink little airstrip that then served as the community airport.We had climbed only a few hundred feet when the great expanse of Shagawa Lake on the town’s edge erupted in view, and my passenger gasped. He had lived there his entire life, fished the lake hundreds of times, but had never seen it in full dimension, miles in length and radiant blue, motor boats flitting on the water with wakes hundreds of feet wide.
I handed him an aerial map and told him he was the officially designated navigator of the flight. We went through a 30-second orientation. Not unlike a train conductor, he began calling out the names of the lakes and rivers where he had fished, swiveling in his seat, suddenly a kid again, excitement building up into to a runaway exuberance, soaking up the great green spread of spruce and Norways below, and the blue threads of the streams and the sprawling lakes. After a half hour he had a proposal, “Would it be okay to fly a few miles into Canada?” I couldn’t honestly tell him it was but I doubted that the Royal Canadian Air Force was going to scramble a squadron of attack jets at us for violating its airspace with a Cessna. So we flew a few miles into Ontario and came back to Minnesota using the Echo Trail of my childhood as our check point to the air strip in Ely.
The town’s airport today is lit, paved and modern. In those years the airstrip resembled a weedy gravel road. It also had power lines nearby and the town cemetery flanking the north-south runway. As we made our approach into the south wind, my father offered an estimate of the situation, trying not to sound worried. “That runway,” he said, “it doesn’t look very long from here.” His shoulders looked a little hunched. I slipped into my flight jargon. “Affirmative your last transmission,” I said. “It doesn’t look very long from here, either.”
But we landed uneventfully and taxied back to the hanger. Before we got into the car he put his arm around me and thanked me, his cheeks dampened.. “I never thought I’d fly,” he said. “That was something. Seeing Snowbank Lake from the air..” I hugged him.
I don’t know what took me so long.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Ecumen CFO Dennis Johnson appointed to Minnesota Veterans Health Care Advisory Council
Dennis Johnson, Ecumen's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, was recently appointed to the Minnesota Veterans Health Care Advisory Council. Mr. Johnson leads Ecumen’s accounting operations, financial budgeting, planning and reporting, and investment management. Before joining Ecumen, he was vice president and controller of International Multifoods, a multi-national Fortune 500 company.
The Veterans Health Care Advisory Council was created in 2007 to provide the Department of Veterans Affairs with advice and recommendations from professionals experienced in providing quality long term care, who are familiar with current and anticipated future needs of veterans. It is comprised of nine members appointed by the Governor. Read the Governor's Executive Order creating the Council.
Mr. Johnson's term will run through January 4, 2016.
Baby Boomers Driving Social Media
Baby Boomer have been a topic of conversation since – well, since they were born. By sheer numbers alone, they’ve been trend-setters and change agents, and now they’ve taken to technology and social media like teenagers. Over half of Baby Boomers use a computer as the primary way to communicate. They’re smartphone users and using technology to job hunt, shop and date. Check out “Plugged In: Boomers on Online in 2012” – a fast-paced and fun video from AARP.
Jim Klobuchar - Sweaty Fingers in Minneapolis, and an Election
Our table talk at a restaurant luncheon got around to the trials and joys of the workplace we most remembered: its satisfactions, pratfalls pressures, rewards, all of that. It came my turn to testify, and I offered a long-ago morning on a November day Minneapolis.
We’d been yakking about politics, and the story seemed to fit. The day I remembered was all about American politics in one of its most excruciating hours of suspense.
The race was for the American presidency, John F. Kennedy vs. Richard Nixon. My employer was the Associated Press, the world-wide news gathering organization. My role in the Minneapolis bureau was to write the stories based on election returns as they progressed in Minnesota and neighboring states, involving not only the presidential election but other statewide contests. The year was 1960, than 50 years ago. Exit polls were still years into the future. So were the speed of light computerized returns of today. The county auditors actually phoned in their results. Eric Sevareid’s scowling analysis of the trends on black and white television was handicapped by the trudging tempo of the results from the nation’s voting booths.
There were status stories to write: trends and results in congressional races. But in the presidential race, from ocean to ocean, nothing definitive. The Kennedy-Nixon race was volatile. By midnight the electoral college projections were not decisive. In Minnesota, the vote was large but still inconclusive. At 1 a.m. George Moses, the AP bureau chief, suggested I drive home for a couple of hours sleep and to return at, “well, how about 3 a.m?” George said helpfully.
By 6 a.m. , John Kennedy had climbed to within six electoral votes of clinching the election. Only three states remained uncommitted—Illinois, California and Minnesota. The world was clamoring for the identity of the new American president.
In those years, it was considered a kind of original sin in wire service coverage to project returns on the basis of past voting trends. Everybody remembered the early edition Chicago Tribune headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Associated Press staffers remembered its own premature dispatch ending World War One. In our second floor newsroom in downtown Minneapolis, all that separated us from our wire service competitor was an office wall. George Moses now organized a huddle. Adolph Johnson, our veteran political expert and I joined him. The large bulk of the uncounted Minnesota votes were in northeastern Minnesota, Duluth and the Iron Range, historically strong Democratic turf.
With Kennedy leading but much of the northern Minnesota vote still out, Moses didn’t think Nixon could overcome Kennedy’s ultimate count. He asked for our opinion and we agreed. Moses then called the AP’s general desk chief, Sam Blackmun, in New York. “We’re going to elect Kennedy,” he said. A kind of dark silenced followed on both ends. And then “I’ve got two words for you guys in Minneapolis.” Silence again. Then, “ be right.”
It was now breakneck stuff. Moses handed me some copy paper. There wasn’t time for the usual carbons. Moses began pulling the copy out of my typewriter—computers were still years away—one paragraph at a time and running it to the teletype. Touch the bases, I told myself: The significance of the election, Kennedy’s campaign themes, the closeness of the race, the first Roman Catholic elected to the White House, Kennedy’s probable agendas.
Moses kept running the copy to the teletype operator, Bob Mexner, with each new paragraph; and now without a carbon I had to yell to Mexner, “how did that last paragraph end?” With fingers flying, Mexner tried to be helpful and yelled over his shoulder “With a period!”.
The story stood up, the global suspense was over, John Kennedy did in fact become the president, and color returned to the cheeks of the bureau chief.
I walked down to the end of the block to a small Swedish Café and had a sandwich and a cup of coffee for lunch. When I got back to the office the first call I took after we had elected an American president was from one of our wire service contributors in southern Minnesota. The story told of a mini-crisis in a little farm town near Mankato. Three pigs had fallen into a deep mud hole and it took all of the town’s resources to get them out.
Life goes on. We put it on the wire.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.
New Twist on Senior Pictures -- Ecumen Bethany Community in Alexandria does Glamour Shots
Today at the Ecumen Bethany Community Home in Alexandria, a group of senior citizens were spending the day dressing up to get their photos taken... Read the full article and see the KSAX-TV coverage of Ecumen Bethany Community's Glamour Shots.