(light upbeat music) (logo whooshing) (light upbeat music) - And welcome to "Prairie Pulse."

Coming up later in the show, we'll see a new Artifact Spotlight.

But first, joining me now, is our guest, Bruce Gjovig.

Bruce, thanks for joining us today.

- Glad to be here.

- Well, we're here today for you to talk about your new book.

Of course, it's called, "The Innovators from North Dakota: The Change Agents!"

Before we get into that, tell the folks a little bit about yourself and your background maybe.

- Sure.

I spent 35 years in innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of North Dakota as a founder of the Center of Innovation and working on innovation, entrepreneurship, angel investment, and sort of the entrepreneur ecosystem in North Dakota.

So I retired five years ago and this is my, in retirement, my third book in this series on innovators and entrepreneurs.

- Third book in a series, that make a trilogy, I don't know.

(Bruce chuckles) Remind us about your first two books.

- First two books are the...

The first one was with Hiram Drache.

I teamed up with him and it's the "Innovative Entrepreneurs from North Dakota and Northwest Minnesota," and that was the people who actually rose to national prominence and innovation entrepreneurship in North Dakota and Northwest Minnesota.

And the second one was the "Innovative Entrepreneurs from North Dakota," those people who left North Dakota, around the world and did significant things.

And the three books, we've now profiled 150 people with roots in North Dakota and Northwest Minnesota.

- All right.

So then let's get into, tell us about your newest book, "The Change Agents" here.

- Yes, well, the innovators, I know it's confusing for a lot of people, the innovators or entrepreneur, right?

And the innovators are folks who quite often have entrepreneur tendency, but they're not.

Typically, they think of them more as engineers or scientists or explorers, or the first time people, you know, they do something, so they're an innovator by being a pioneer in a field or in an industry.

So that is what makes the difference on this book versus the others.

This one, so there's a lot of engineers, explorers, and people who worked in the education sector, non-profit sector, who are the first to do something.

- Well, we're gonna try to do some teasing, I guess.

- [Bruce] Okay.

- Let's talk about some of the people you profiled and maybe it'll give some insight to "Innovators in North Dakota."

Start with one, some people know: Carl Ben Eielson.

- Absolutely, from Hatton, North Dakota.

He was obsessed with aviation ever since the Wright Brothers took off the plane.

And so he was just driven to go into aerospace and aviation.

And he was a banker son and also, the son of a merchant in Hatton, North Dakota, whose dad really wanted to see him be an attorney.

So he ended up at the University of North Dakota.

And then World War I occurred, so he volunteered to be a member of, at that time, the Air Corps, and in trying to get in aviation.

And he was a flight instructor, but he never got sent overseas to France, which he very much wanted.

So he come back, but his enthusiasm for aviation then discontinued.

And he convinced the people of Hatton to invest in a Jenny aircraft that had been used in the war, in World War I.

And he did it basically got in at the Hatton Aero Club, the first aero club in the state of North Dakota, as he went and gave people rides and did exhibitions and went to county fairs.

And he was just very active in that whole area.

And then of course, he crashed the plane.

He got in a muddy field and missed it in.

So the Aero Club had made some real money 'cause he was giving people, he did everything from medical rides, people with medical emergencies, or he was doing, you know, giving them rides in airplanes at county fairs and doing this exhibition aviation.

So they had to sell the motor and that was thinking, but then he fixed up the plane and went back to UND.

And at the end of the day, then he just, and he decided to follow his, again, his dad's advice.

He went to law school, and met the congressman from Alaska, and he invited him to come to Alaska.

So he went up there as a teacher and a coach.

And again, immediately he got the people there to invest in a Jenny aircraft by wing.

And he's back in the aviation and becomes a pioneer in aviation in Alaska.

And really is one of the... That's why Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska is named for him.

As he becomes a person he... And founded the Alaska Airlines an he was the first one to fly from Alaska to Spitsbergen, Norway over the Arctic pole.

He's also the very first one to fly over Antarctica.

So he's really a very much a polar, both polar explorer with aviation.

And so it was extraordinary.

Unfortunately he lost his life, and I think it was '29, looking to save some passengers off of a boat that were up there doing, getting furs from Alaska, from, excuse me, from Siberia off the Russian coast.

And he crashed into a mountain, and that and then died.

But his home is preserved in Hatton, North Dakota.

It's a great little museum, if you haven't visited, I'd really encourage it.

They're open during the summer months, on the weekends, and it's really quite an extraordinary life as a aviation pioneer.

- Yeah.

Well, that's just one name and we're gonna try to get through a few.

How long did it take you to do the research on all the innovators in your book?

- This book took a little over a year and a half to research and write and edit.

And each one of those, I mean, and some chapters are easier to research than other 'cause the availability of information, or getting family members or whatever the case may be.

But it's, I'm sure I'm close to 2,000 hours in the book.

- [John] Hmm.

Wow!

- And that would be true with my other books as well.

But it's really interesting.

There's 36 chapters in this book.

- All right, 36 chapters.

Well, let's get some other names.

What about John Hutchinson and Ray Heising and Harry Nyquist?

- Well, these are all very interesting because at the heart of it, one of the chapters is not on Arthur Hoyt Taylor, who was a professor of physics at the University of North Dakota from the turn of the century till 1917.

And these are some of his students in electrical engineering as he was teaching physics.

But he was the inventor of military radar, Arthur Hoyt Taylor is.

And all three of those gentlemen never went to national prominence with this professor in radar and radio technology.

And it, as a matter of fact, Harry Nyquist is perhaps the most famous of those 'cause every electrical engineering student has to know the Nyquist theorem.

And so everyone studies it.

Matter of fact, I just had a fellow from the Pentagon out in Grand Forks last week, and he was stunned to find out that Harry Nyquist graduated from the University of North Dakota 'cause he knew the name very well, knows him, so it was very interesting.

But all three of them... Military radar in World War II help save this country.

And is very important where we can figure out where the enemy was.

Whether there was an aircraft or a submarine, or a ship.

And these three gentlemen, in three different companies, in Bell Labs, in RCA, and AT&T, developed a technology that really made us go forward.

And Hutchinson came to great prominence 'cause he's also one of the founders of the RAND Corporation.

And RAND stands for R, AN, D: research and development.

And now RAND is one of the largest military contractors there is out there, and also a think tank for the military, for the Department of Defense.

- Hmm, interesting stuff.

But so us go to some women here.

I got Margaret Kelly and Mae Marie Blackmore.

- Margaret Kelly was very interesting 'cause she did not have a college degree.

She went to a technical school in Minneapolis.

She was born in Crookston went to Minneapolis.

But when the engineering professor at UND wanted to figure out the use for North Dakota clays and in a practical aspect, he had Margaret Cable in to take a look at a pottery.

And so she became one of the most well-known potters in this United States.

And Margaret Kelly Cable's pottery is a very much a collectives item.

Some of them go for as much as $20,000 an item.

And so then she taught there, but never having a college degree.

But ended up heading up this department, taught there from... Well, I forgot what year she came, but it was in the teens, and she was... And she didn't retire till like 1960.

So it's a very long career at the university, having national prominence and really put out a tremendous amount of pottery in an Art Nouveau, Art Deco, also Native American themes, which really become very much collector's items.

So it's very interesting that somebody is so prominent, and yet, didn't have all the academic credential.

I think it's terrific.

Now, Mae Marie Blackmore is a similar story, in that she grew up in Emerado, and went to attend the University of North Dakota, and interesting, she was a home ec major.

So her first job, interestingly, was International Harvester right after World War II hired 70 women nationwide to basically... And they had come up International Harvester with freezers.

And then, it was a brand, and there's, if you're in the rural area, the international frigerator and freezer is well known, in the state.

But she was one of the first 70, nationwide, hired to go out and demonstrate to women why they should give up canning and do freezing of their vegetables and fruits.

And so that's started in there.

Then her husband who she met in college and they married right outta college, then got called back into then the Air Force and they traveled like 19 places in 10 years, and he died in a plane accident in Duluth.

And so she was widowed with four children under the age of eight.

And at that point then she moved back to Grand Forks, where her parents were, so she'd have grandparents support finances as a widow.

And she ends up going to work at the nursery at the University of North Dakota, but really develops one of the first prominent early childhood education programs in the United States, and was an early leader in that.

And so she was doing early childhood education several years before the national program, the day care program there was set up.

The whole idea is not to do nursery, but to do early childhood education, right?

And it's really... And that was in response quite frankly to Sputnik, because we fell behind in the race and space, and they recognized that we needed to be a better job of education.

So they really put a focus on an early start in education, so early childhood education.

And so she ended up being a national leader.

And matter of fact, before she retired about 1990, she was featured in every front cover of every early childhood magazine there is in the United States.

- My good, yeah.

Something we work on here at Prairie Public.

And remind us, how do you classify someone as an innovator?

- An innovator is somebody who is a change agent, right?

Who changes the way things are.

And that can be done through technology, it can be due through a method, it can be through an invention.

So the innovation process is pioneering something new.

Doing it a new way.

And I think it all starts with there's gotta be a better way to do this, right?

And so finding a better way to do something, whatever it is.

And so it's a pioneer in changing the way things are done to a new way that turns out to be better and gets to be prominent.

- Sure.

- Is that straight enough?

- I think yeah.

So now let's do some more people in your book here.

Who is Mancur Olson?

- Mancur Olsen comes out of Buxton, North Dakota.

And he ends up, he's one of the most prominent American economist of the last century.

And really, he grew up on a farm east of Buxton, between Buxton and the Red River and a very Norwegian American family, a graduate of NDSU, end up being a road scholar, taught, also, at the Air Force Academy, but then spent really his whole career on the East Coast in Maryland, and it become a very prominent and understanding really how groups work together.

And really he got a lot of his insights, interesting by watching the Farm Bureau and the Farmers Union in North Dakota as a lad and as a boy.

And then how they have to offer the large when you have a small organization, everybody works hard 'cause everybody benefits.

But the larger the organization, you get people who are free riders, they don't really put in the effort.

So how do you keep them engaged and how do you keep them with the movement ahead?

And it's quite often through incentives and benefits.

Could be a discount in gas, it could be a discount of something, it could be in a, you get a points or money-back 'cause lots things.

So he really was looking at how the incentivize groups as an economy and that was really a great insight.

He died young, unfortunately, of a heart attack, like his father did.

Probably there's many people and I read them out, speculated that he would've gotten a Nobel Prize in economics had he lived.

- Hmm.

Maybe.

- And he wrote several books that fascinating and mastering that.

Luckily, NDSU you still remembers him, and they have programs around Mancur Olson, and his free market enterprise principles there, and so I'm very happy that he's being remembered.

- Yeah, so again, a lot of other names we'd like to talk about here.

- But there's a case where innovation and economics, right?

(John and Bruce laugh) - Exactly.

But one of the ones that's on your cover and probably wanna talk about this, Emery Mapes and Cream of Wheat.

- Cream of Wheat, started in North Dakota in Grand Forks.

They started out as a flour mill in 1890, right after we were a state.

But in 1893 there was an economic downturn, severe recession, depression.

And the company almost went bankrupt for three years in and it is, so they had to figure out and pivot and their miller, Thomas Amidon, recommended that they switched from flour to cream of wheat, which was the first hot breakfast cereal made from wheat.

And so he recommended that and they were at that time sending their flour to New York, and they included some boxes, the handmade boxes to go to New York and then they got a telegram back from them, "Send us more Cream of Wheat" and the next day they got another ten or, "Send us no more flours, send us box cards of Cream of Wheat."

So they pivoted immediately from the flour business into the hot breakfast cereal business.

And it became an overnight succession.

Matter of fact, it was in a matter of a decade, it was a number one hot breakfast cereal in the market, nationwide, beating the oatmeal products.

So which is very interesting.

Emery Mapes, then, really made his name two places.

Number one, he was an advertising genius.

One of his jobs, now he was sort of a ne'er-do-well, and he tried many things in North Dakota, not a particular success at any of 'em, but until he got into this company.

But one of his previous things, he was a printer of a newspaper out at Mapes, North Dakota, named after, obviously, him and not far from Lakota.

And he has this print, not print, what do you call the, a copper plate, right, for printing left and it's got the chef with a sauce pan overhead.

And that's the only thing they had.

So that's how the chef becomes their trademark, which is, and until 2020, just three years ago, was their national symbol, 'cause it's the only plate they he had related to food, and that become Cream of Wheat.

But he becomes best known for two things.

Number one, using original art in advertising.

And on the book is one of the art pieces that has done from, it's actually Edward Brewer, from St. Paul, and those are the neighborhood kids he painted on, which makes me one of my favorite.

But he using original art in advertising, but everything before then was text intensive, all the whole thing was you needed to say what was good about your product in advertising using text.

And he went, "No, you don't.

You can say the same story in a piece of art or in a visual presentation."

And so he changed advertising by going to advertising art.

The second thing he changed is he refused to pay magazines for the issues they printed.

He would only pay for the issues they sold.

So in other words, if you didn't have eyeballs on that magazine, it wasn't worth a dime to him.

So he didn't wanna pay for it.

So he did auditing.

So he only paid, and in that time, a lot of the magazines overprinted 'cause that way they could overcharge their advertisers.

So he forced them to only pay for, if somebody bought it.

- Yeah.

Obviously you've done a lot of research.

Talk about your research and how much fun is that for you to do the research?

- Well, it is, 'cause several of these I learned a lot.

I knew something about them, then I just started discovering other layers, which is very interesting.

And then you do that through magazine articles, newspaper articles, sometimes you reach the family, sometimes I wasn't able to find the family, but it's this constant researching and I'm very happy that so much has been digitized, (John chuckles) 'cause it makes the research so much easier.

But then you have to figure out how to put it also in context.

So some of this is about, okay, how do you figure out this time in history, what was going on, and what does this mean, then versus today, right?

And sometimes that context today is very important.

Is it still important today and why?

And so that's all part of the research and I've very much enjoyed that.

- First, I've got 30 seconds.

Who else would you wanna talk about?

- Oh, Tom Clifford.

- [John] Tom Clifford.

- Tom Clifford is a college president, right?

And we knew here very well at UND from 1972 to 1992.

And you don't think of him much as a college president and being an innovator.

But today UND is known for aerospace, right?

It is known for the four-year medical school and being the national leader in rural medicine, and also the Energy & Environmental Research Center.

And he played a huge hand in each one of those, as well as my Center for Innovation.

And UND could not have innovated without him giving that top cover support.

Marvelous human being.

- Bruce, I look down, there's many, many more names on here we wanted to go through, but so if people want a copy of the book, where can they go?

- You can go to the independent bookstore across North Dakota.

They're most of them, especially like Ferguson Books, but also online as wwwdakotabooknet.com.

Dakotabooknet.com.

- Well, Bruce, thanks so much for joining us today.

Look forward to hearing more in your next book maybe, (Bruce and John chuckle) but get this one.

- [Bruce] Thank you.

- Stay tuned for more.

(light playful music) In this Artifact Spotlight, we take a look at the long history of the Fergus Falls, Minnesota Regional Treatment Center, also known as the Fergus Falls State Hospital.

- Hi, I'm Chris Schuelke with the Otter Tail County Historical Society, and this is our Artifact Spotlight.

(lively music) So in the summer of 1885, a Minnesota Legislative Commission visited Fergus Falls with the intent of finding a location for the state's third state hospital.

Fergus Falls was awarded that state hospital and in 1890 the Fergus Falls State Hospital opened.

So the state hospital represents treatment of the mentally ill in which people were in an asylum type setting.

Now, in previous generations, they were often kept in almost prison dungeon-like settings.

But the state hospital was definitely an innovation and that patients were treated well, and they wanted them to move on out of the hospital and into general society.

So the hospital is designed based on the principles of a man named Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, who was an innovator in the mental health landscape in the mid 19th century.

He believed in having lots of windows, lots of air, lots of ventilation for patients.

So his design was really based on a central administration area, flanked by patient wings.

And they were connected almost in a U-shaped facility.

The state hospital in Fergus Falls is one of the few remaining examples of Kirkbride inspired architecture left in the United States.

For over 117 years, the hospital was a cultural economic icon in the community.

It dominated the landscape.

Over 2,000 patients often at one time were at the hospital.

It was essentially, a self-contained community.

So for instance, you had to do laundry, thousands of pieces of laundry, and so here's a laundry basket that someone just donated to the Historical Society a couple weeks ago.

Of course, it says Fergus Falls State Hospital.

It's a canvas laundry basket.

One, of course, many that were used.

And so it's just a piece that shows the daily operation at the hospital.

There were three superintendents at the state hospital.

The third one was a man named William Patterson.

He was educated out in Boston, came to Fergus Falls in 1912 with the intent of just staying a few months and going back out east.

But he ended up staying until his retirement in 1968 at the age of 88 years old.

So we have a couple items that belong to William Patterson.

One was his doctor's bag 'cause he was hired as a physician, and another item that he had was a cane.

Now, William Patterson was well-known for taking daily walks around the hospital with his dog and his cane.

Legend has it that he would actually greet patients and staff alike by their first name.

Now, when you consider there were anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 patients there and hundreds of staff, how in the world could he remember people's name?

But that's the legend that William Patterson garnered.

So the hospital offered a variety of services.

It was really an innovative institution.

For instance, one of the items we have here is this unbelievable clipper ship that was made by a state hospital patient, a Norwegian man, in about 1920.

We believe he was a sailor and that for some reason he came to the state hospital for mental health issues.

And as part of his occupational therapy, he constructed this ship, which again, to the detail is unbelievable.

Part of the occupational therapy program was also art.

In fact, just a couple years ago, we unearthed several paintings and these were done by a woman named Chloe Richards.

One is labeled 1932.

We're not sure, was she a patient or did she work in the occupational therapy department?

That's more research that has to be done, so we're not sure.

And another piece that I would like to point out that was donated to the hospital was the cemetery.

Now there was a cemetery over 3,200 people are buried at the Fergus Falls State Hospital Cemetery.

And there were no markers when people were buried.

What was put in when people were buried at the hospital was a wrought iron marker with a number in the middle.

And this is it.

No name, no date, just a number, number 31.

We do know there was a map, and we do know the people who were buried there.

And we are doing research to try to bring back the names and lives of people that are buried at the State Hospital Cemetery.

So the state hospital, it represents a part of our history that really is gone.

And for the Fergus Falls State Hospital, these pieces that are here represent a part of our heritage that needs to be saved so we can learn from that hospital, learn from the treatment, learn from the daily operations that were there, because if we didn't have them, that piece of our history would otherwise be gone.

The hospital closed in 2007.

It was given by the state to the city of Fergus Falls.

It's kind of a reminder of the importance of that complex to the city of Fergus Falls.

(somber music) - Well, that's all we have on "Prairie Pulse" this week.

And as always, thanks for watching.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.

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