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RUDY BOSCHWITZ: Bob, I must tell you that losing is-- what do they say? character building. It's not something I'd recommend. Character building is fine, but it's difficult. It's a Major League rejection. And so it took a number of months to get over that, I must say.

And during that time, I didn't do so very much at the beginning. Then I got back into my business very shortly after. But the level of intensity in my business was not as great at the beginning as it has since become. And then in the end of April or middle April, I got involved in this Ethiopian business and went as President Bush's emissary to Ethiopia. And that was a Major League mitzvah, as they say in Yiddish, may a good deed of great scope.

BOB: What did you accomplish there?

RUDY BOSCHWITZ: Ethiopia and Eritrea and the provinces of Ethiopia were consumed in the Civil War. Eritrea had been revolting for nearly 30 years and the rest of Ethiopia for about 15 years against his fellow Mengistu, Colonel Mengistu, who was one of the cruel people of the second half of the 20th century. About 6 million Ethiopians died either through starvation as a result of this war, and Colonel Mengistu would take some he didn't like down into the basement and dispatched them himself.

And so eventually, there was quite an uprising against him. And we brought that to an end, and we also went there specifically to seek the exit of a small Black Jewish community, 16, 17, 18,000 people. And we were successful in getting a major airlift done. And they all went to Israel, and the Civil War was ended.

BOB: And those folks are doing well now?

RUDY BOSCHWITZ: Well, Ethiopia is doing better, certainly, than it did. Eritrea is doing quite well, though there have been some dry periods in Eritrea. And as a result, those societies are largely agricultural. And they've been doing better, to be sure. Their government has not been oppressive.

They have departed from the idea of collective farming, and but they're very poor. And they remain very poor. And they're the neighbor of Somalia, but they're in far, far better shape than Somalia.

BOB: When you came back from that mission, then you became more involved in the business.

RUDY BOSCHWITZ: Yeah, by that time, I mean, that was a real turn-on. I mean, that was a-- that just consumed me for about a two-month period. And then President Bush was nice enough to give me an award. And we're here at our house. I'll show it to you.

Really, they had a Rose Garden ceremony in my behalf. And I've been to a lot of Rose Garden ceremonies, never thinking that there would be one for Rudy Boschwitz. And so that was-- that helped the recovery from the loss.

BOB: When did you get into the business? You said in 1963. What prompted you to do that?

RUDY BOSCHWITZ: Well, if you go backwards in my lifespan, you know that I was a lawyer. And then I went into the army, and then I practiced law for about a year and a half. And I can't sit still long enough to sit behind a desk and read all the cases, and so I decided to become a client rather than a lawyer.

And my brother had married a young woman. We, as you know, were immigrants, and we all married immigrants. My wife is from Germany to Switzerland. And my brother's-- he's quite a bit older than I am, a dozen years. My brother's wife's father was in the plywood business in Poland before the Second World War. They started up again over here.

And I was anxious. I was living in New York at the time, and both Ellen and I were didn't want to make our life in New York. It's a very, very difficult place to live. And so I went out to work in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for my brother, who had a small plywood factory at that time. And I became a sales manager. My friends in New York thought that I had gone berserk, I mean, going to Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

And so I worked for my brother in Oshkosh for six years, and he and his father-in-law and mother-in-law and brother-in-law and seven children between them, my brother's three and his brother-in-law's four, all part owners. And my brother, frankly, advised me that-- that you ought to go into business for yourself. He saw my stirrings and so forth.

And so I had to figure out where to go, and I didn't want to go somewhere where my brother had a strong customer. I didn't want to interrupt one of those relationships because he became my supplier, and I became his largest customer. So we went to lots and lots of cities looking around and picked Minneapolis because we both liked it. And we thought that there was a good potential here, and we thought that the lifestyle was most civilized.

BOB: Was it tough getting that business going, or did you have enough capital at the time to do that?

RUDY BOSCHWITZ: Oh, I didn't-- I sold my house that I bought in Oshkosh. Whenever I my brother gave me a bonus, I left it in the company and accumulated it. And I sold-- I had a great, big Buick Invicta, and I sold that and bought a Model A Ford instead. And that was $1,200 that I put into the bank.

And so I started with about $30,000 which was a fair amount in 1963. 32,000, I think, was the total. My father advanced me. Of that 32, I had 23. And my father advanced me 9.

And I said, you ought to make my sons partners. So they became-- I had three sons at the time. The fourth one came along later. So they were shareholders with the gift from their grandfather from the very outset.

BOB: You mentioned the fact that you were an immigrant. In fact, you were a child in Berlin during the Nazi era, weren't you?

RUDY BOSCHWITZ: Yes, so we left very shortly after Adolf Hitler came into power. My dad, who would now be 116, I was a late arrival in his life, was very perceptive. And he had read Mein Kampf by Hitler.

And the day that Hitler came to power, he came home and told my mom-- I was two, so I have no recollection of it, of course-- that we would leave Germany. And we left six months later, so we got out quite a bit in advance. But then we had a hard time coming to the United States.

BOB: Do you have any recollection of Germany at all?

RUDY BOSCHWITZ: No.

BOB: No.

RUDY BOSCHWITZ: No. I went back, and I even went back to the house, which was an apartment house where I was born. And I had some vague recollections, but I think they were recollections rather of conversations that had with me rather than actual recollections.

BOB: Why did you have a tough time getting the United States?

RUDY BOSCHWITZ: There were quotas. And you know that my dad came from a little town called [? Filene ?] where the Filene's at the--

BOB: Oh--

RUDY BOSCHWITZ: Those people are from--

BOB: The department store people, yeah.

RUDY BOSCHWITZ: Yeah. And it was right on the border of Germany and Poland. After the First World War, it became Poland and right on the river that divided them. So my father always was said-- told he has to come on the Polish quota, even though we came from Berlin, where he had lived virtually all of his life.

And my mother was from Poznan, which is also now Poland. And so that the Polish quota was always full. The German quota was empty. And so that we-- at that time. And so we had to find an American consular officer who would say, you're German. And it took going to six or seven countries to do that.