Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

My friend, mentor, and longtime business partner Dan Conway was a near-scratch golfer. I was not. When we discussed the recent play of various pro golfers, he always said, “They play a different game than we do.” This means not just hacks like me but low-handicap golfers, too. Golf and business have a minority of idolized, out-of-touch pros who play the game at a different level. That’s not so bad for the golf industry, but the threats to small business from the higher levels cannot be ignored. When people have an idea to “build a better mousetrap,” a better product or service, they create a system and build a business around it. Like the average golfer, they may have little training and no coaching, and occasionally, they hit a hole-in-one. But they play a different game than the corporate elites and private equity types, who just make money off money.  Small business owners are the heart and soul of our communities. They create businesses and devote most of their waking hours to ...

As you might guess when reading my short bio below, I’m a bit of a newspaper junkie. In my traveling days, I collected newspapers of all kinds. Not only did they give me the flavor of the community, news from other places, and ideas for my paper, but the headlines also gave me smiles and guffaws. You know the type-- "Something Went Wrong in Jet Plane Crash, Expert Says,” or “Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead.”  Jay Leno made reading these a regular feature of the Tonight Show when he hosted. Writing headlines is a brutal assignment, often tedious, often rushed, and silly things get into print. My favorite of all time is a headline over a short story on the breakdown of an earthen berm that protects the Netherlands from encroaching seawater. Although the AP wrote it, it’s wrong for me to repeat it here. I’m culturally sensitive. Someday over a beer, maybe. I don’t see many newspapers these days. By that, I mean the ones printed on flimsy, rough paper where your fingers g...

Doesn't this look old to you? I’m tired of hearing people tell me, “You’re not old.” Surviving seven decades, something most of my ancestors and some of my contemporaries didn’t do, definitely makes me an old man. I know it, and I say it. I can handle my bodily care needs, such as eating, drinking, showering, and wiping. But the signs of being old—or omens, if you remember last week—are still there.  I have reading glasses placed strategically at various points in the house, a pair of bifocals for driving and expanding my mind with the finest cultural programming on the TV. Based on that statement, you might guess we subscribe to Brit Box and Acorn, and you’d be right.  Speaking of the telly, we now use close captioning all the time. My hearing ain’t what it used to be, and neither is the Bohunk’s. My fading hearing reminds me of this line that I relate to from Jimmy Buffet’s song “He Went to Paris,” about a man nearing the end of a long, less ordinary life.   Writin...

It's an OMEN Alas, the quadrennial event celebrating the changing of administrations in Washington, the "peaceful transfer of power" we are so famous for, inserted itself into my addled cranium and left me shaking my head. I wanted to write for this week's column about the Vikings league championship and their chance to shine in the glory of the Super Bowl. Explore why the NFL bothers with Roman numerals to identify the game when most of us get stuck at 10 in the artistic and archaic numbering language of the Roman Empire. We're Merika, for God's sake, not Rome.  Instead of football, my fingers go to the first 12 days of the term of the 47th President of the United States, the divided population, and the omens that might be influencing things. The Bohunk, the same one who dragged me back to Viking football, has Bohemian roots on her dad's side of the family. For centuries, Bohemia was an independent kingdom in Eastern Europe and is now part of the Czech Re...