Today's Featured Biography

 
Jim Kvikstad

50 years !! I can hardly believe it. It seems like only yesterday we were cruising up and down Main Street in Bob Netteland’s “Green Hornet”.

So what has my life been like for the past 50 years? After graduation I enrolled in the University of Minnesota and studied chemical engineering. Along the way to my degree I met with a young lady from Mahnomen and we married right after graduation and headed off to my first job as a new chemical engineer with DuPont in Buffalo New York.

As soon as I arrived, the natives tried to warn me about the Buffalo winters. I told them that I grew up in northwestern Minnesota, and I know all there was to know about snow and cold. Well maybe I knew a little bit about cold, but you have never seen snow until you have been in Buffalo in the winter. There I learned what a “snow squall” was – an eight inch snowfall – all in one flake.

So what do you do when snowbound much of the year – take up downhill skiing which I did and it has been my passion ever since. My family heads off to the mountains in Colorado every year for our annual ski vacation.

In 1969 I completed my master’s degree in chemical engineering, and my wife, Gretchen, completed her masters’ degree in English. Since DuPont was closing the Buffalo site I left DuPont and headed to St. Paul where I went to work for 3M, and I have been there ever since. While living in Minnesota I decided to give sailing a try and bought a sailboat. This became my other passion We spend much of the summer sailing on White Bear Lake, and have chartered sailboats in Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, and the Bahamas.

Gretchen and I raised a son, Christopher, who is now 34 years old, married, and lives in south Minneapolis, and a daughter, Erika, who is married and completing here PhD in genetics at Penn State University. This is the little girl who I used to help with her freshman chemistry when she was an undergrad and now I cannot even pronounce what she is doing, let alone understand it.

When we are not skiing or sailing, we attend the Guthrie theater where we have had season tickets for 35 years, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra concerts, or engage in a round of bridge (poorly played at best).

I am really looking forward to our reunion and seeing all of you again. Until next July- take care

Jim

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