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GARY EICHTEN: Catch up on the latest news. Now here's Greta Cunningham. Greta?

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Thank you, Gary. Good afternoon. An Iraqi judge has issued a murder arrest warrant for an anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric. Coalition officials say he's accused of killing another Shiite leader shortly after the US-led invasion of the country. US troops today have sealed off the city of Fallujah, West of Baghdad.

Some 1,200 US Marines and two battalions of Iraqi security forces are poised to launch an operation aimed at pacifying the city. Violence broke out this morning in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, where members of the cleric's militia clashed with a US patrol. An armored vehicle was set on fire. Militiamen also fought with British troops in two Southern cities. Witnesses say the clashes left three Iraqis dead. Followers of the cleric also held sit-in protests in some cities.

President Bush is in North Carolina today and is, again, vowing to stay the course in Iraq. Bush is in Charlotte to unveil a new jobs program but has focused some of his remarks on national security. Bush says he's still committed to the June 30th deadline for transferring power in Iraq and won't be deterred by violence.

At least 15 people are dead and another 60 missing after a flash flood struck a border town in Northern Mexico today. US Border Patrol helicopters helped to rescue people from rooftops. US Border Patrol helicopters have been plucking people off of rooftops, where local officials are declaring a state of emergency.

In regional news, US Commerce Secretary Don Evans is in Saint Paul today for the grand opening of the Bush-Cheney campaign office. US Senator Norm Coleman, Congressman Mark Kennedy, and State Auditor Patricia Anderson also will address supporters at the event.

Jury selection is underway in Moorhead in the murder trial of Christopher Earl. Earl is charged in the killings of a Long Prairie woman and her two teenage children. Holly Chromey, her daughter Katie Zapzalka, and son Jared Zapzalka were found dead in their home last April. Earl faces several counts of first-degree murder. His friend Jonathan Carpenter of Minneapolis hanged himself in prison last July after pleading guilty to charges. The trial was moved out of Long Prairie because of extensive pretrial publicity.

The forecast for Minnesota today calls for a chance of afternoon showers in the Northeast and in Central Minnesota. It will be windy and warm in the Southwest with high temperatures ranging from 45 in the Northeast to near 70 in the Southwest. Tonight, partly cloudy skies statewide. There is also a chance of evening showers in Eastern Minnesota. Low temperatures ranging from 22 to near 42 degrees. And for Tuesday, mostly sunny skies around the region. High temperatures ranging from 47 in the Northeast to near 67 in the Southwest.

Checking conditions around the region at this hour. Worthington reports sunshine and 61 degrees. Skies are sunny in Rochester and 54. It's fair in Moorhead and 55. Duluth reports sunshine and 41. And in the twin cities, mostly sunny skies, a temperature of 53 degrees. From Minnesota Public Radio News, I'm Greta Cunningham.

GARY EICHTEN: Thanks, Greta. It's four minutes now past 12 o'clock. And this is midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. Glad you could join us. This is our midday-- as part of our Voices of Minnesota Interview series, we're going to hear from two prominent Minnesotans who are helping shape the quality of life in Minnesota.

Later this hour, we'll be hearing from Edgar Hetteen, one of the inventors of the snowmobile. At 83, he's still developing new products for his Northern Minnesota company. First up this hour, though, is banker Jim Campbell, the retired chief executive officer of Wells Fargo Bank Minnesota, who is now co-chair of a new high-powered Twin Cities public policy group. Here's the producer of our Voices of Minnesota Series, Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: Jim Campbell is co-chair of the Itasca Project, heads of 40 of the Twin Cities' largest companies-- 3M, Northwest Airlines. Hubbard Broadcasting, to name just a few-- created the group. The goal is to address issues facing the region. Jim Campbell explained his role during a conversation in his 49th floor office in the IDS Center in downtown Minneapolis.

Campbell grew up in Byron, near Rochester in Southeastern Minnesota. His father was the town banker. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1964. Campbell became head of Wells Fargo Bank Minnesota when the California-based Wells Fargo company bought Minnesota-based Norwest, once known as Northwestern National Bank.

Jim Campbell, why did you create the Itasca? Why did you help create the Itasca project?

JIM CAMPBELL: I really didn't create it. It was some other folks that created it. And I accidentally went to a meeting one morning. And all of a sudden, some CEOs looked at me and said, he doesn't have anything to do anymore, I think you'd be a good one to do it, Campbell. And I was looking at my shoes. And they finally said, will you look up? You've got a McNerney and Anderson from Northwest Airlines and Stan Hubbard. And a few said, hey, Campbell, this would be good for you to do.

So I spent a few days thinking about it. And the reason I did it is-- let me just describe what it is. The Itasca Project-- and I should underscore the word project, because this is not a new organization. We hope that this will come to an end as soon as we've accomplished what it is we set out to accomplish.

So the description is it's an employer-led project to drive regional efforts to keep the Twin Cities' economy and quality of life competitive with other regions. Who's doing it? There are 40-plus community leaders, including CEOs, the governor, the mayors of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and the president of the university.

What is it we're trying to do? And these words to me are very critical. The first is provide leadership-- provide leadership for long-term regional development and competitiveness; accelerate-- accelerate efforts that are underway to address critical issues from a regional perspective; and three, encourage organizations to work together and better leverage their resources. So provide leadership, accelerate, and encourage.

DAN OLSON: Jim Campbell is reading off pages from Itasca Project documents. He's sitting at a small round conference table in a modest office. However, there's nothing modest about the view from his IDS Center office window. It's a panorama of the Twin Cities. Appropriate, given the scope of what Campbell says are the Itasca Project's goals.

JIM CAMPBELL: The three that we're focused on this year is to support the creation and implementation of a broadly supported, comprehensive regional transportation plan. Two, to help the university develop systems and mechanisms to engage meaningfully in regional economic development efforts. And the key here is that we've got this half a billion dollars of research being done at the U. But when we ask the CEOs about how they felt about it, if they knew about it, in some instances, organizations are very well connected.

3M is very well connected with the Institute of Technology and Biosciences and whatever else is going on. But then you get to some other major employers. And they say, well, I'm not sure what it is they're doing. So if we can get the university and the major employers to get more on the same page and collaborate, cooperate, communicate more, we think it can have significant impact on the well-being of this community.

And third, to support and expand the current efforts to retain-- underscore the word retain-- and grow leading employers. With the massive consolidation that's going on in the business world, sometimes we will win, and sometimes we lose. When I woke up one morning and someone said, we're going to merge with Wells Fargo and call it Wells Fargo and move the corporate office to San Francisco, I thought to myself, whoa, what does this mean?

And so I embarked on a program to say that the new Wells Fargo is going to be as important to Minnesota as the old Northwest had been. And today, we employ 4,000 or 5,000 more people in Minnesota than we did before the merger. Because we found it's a good place to hire people. It's centrally located in the US, which is kind of an interesting factor. If you live in San Francisco, you have to fly five or six hours to get to the other coast. You can get to either coast from here for a day's meeting and return.

And so there's all kinds of-- it's sort of the-- so we have to pay attention. When Cargill merges with a fertilizer company in Florida as to whether this is good or bad for Minnesota or whether Target decides it's going to do something with Marshall Field's, is this good or bad? And do we care? And the answer is, yes, we care.

And so that third point of supporting and expanding the efforts to retain and grow leading employers is critical. The other three, what we call foundation building initiatives, which we're doing some work on, but the real work will come probably in a year or so is one, to create and mobilize the plan for business community to improve quality of access to early childhood education programs.

That gets back to really getting the business sector involved in early childhood education. There's a lot going on now, but it's not coordinated. And it's duplicated. And we're saying, let's not do that.

The fifth one is develop business perspective on addressing regional economic disparities between races. We talked about that. And lastly, to align and coordinate efforts to support and grow small companies and nurture nascent industries. This is this cluster concept that a Research Triangle in the Carolinas, for example, has decided that it wants to be good at a certain thing.

And there's a kind of an affinity of some of these businesses to come together. The medical device business here and the health science businesses here, the Medtronics and the St. Juste and all those folks, there's a sort of a cluster that's here. And of course, now with the new cooperation between the Mayo Clinic and the university, to me, that is very exciting, where you get those two powerhouses, which are world-class organizations in themselves, and you put them together. The impact that the two of them can have in creating exciting new future for Minnesota is exactly what it is we need to focus on.

DAN OLSON: I talked with Jim Campbell while the Metro Transit drivers strike was on. Bus ridership is a small and declining part of the total number of daily commuter trips in the Twin Cities. Most people travel alone in cars. Campbell is reluctant to say much about his personal views of what a Twin Cities' transportation system should look like. He says the debate over transportation is too contentious, and the participants have lost sight of the big picture.

Metro Transit ridership has been declining three years running. It's a very small part, bus riding, of daily commuting. So what does this say about a fast-growing metropolitan area that so many people aren't interested in using transit?

JIM CAMPBELL: Well, I think it's a combination of many factors. It's has to do with the way the community has developed. It has to do with the commitment over the years of alternate forms of transit available for folks to learn to utilize. It to me has a great deal to do with the question of whether or not we really do have a plan for all of the above.

DAN OLSON: Do you think we have a plan?

JIM CAMPBELL: Well, there are many plans, which is probably the issue. We have plans that have emanated from all sorts of various constituencies and geographic areas. And candidly, I've heard over and over again that all these plans say the same thing, which the fact that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot happening would lead me to believe that there's probably quite a bit of conflict and contention amongst these plans.

And so I think one of the things that needs to be done is lay all these plans down on a table side by side and say, can this be shaped into some kind of a master plan? And then I think it comes down to the approach to how we implement the plan. It seems to be an attitude that, well, all these things cost a lot of money. From my experience in the business world, there's a very different approach to things when you refer to things having a cost as compared to making an investment.

And so it would seem that from public welfare's perspective that perhaps what we should do is begin to think about investing in what it is we need to make this a liveable, competitive place to live, work, raise our kids, do business, et cetera, et cetera.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota Conversation with Jim Campbell. He's the retired chief executive officer of Wells Fargo Bank Minnesota, one of the region's largest banks. Now he's co-chair of the Itasca Project. The group's members are 40 CEOs from the Twin Cities' largest companies. One of the issues they're studying is education. In Minnesota, from preschool to higher education.

We spend a lot on education in Minnesota. Are we spending about the right amount?

JIM CAMPBELL: Well, I think from-- and here again, you're pressing me on specific issues. My tummy tells me that we're spending a lot. And we probably redid some of the way we're spending it. We may get a better outcome.

DAN OLSON: All right, let's take that piece by piece. Early childhood, those are very needy children, sometimes from some very needy families. And they don't have a lot of money. Sometimes they don't have a way to get to the early childhood centers. The families need what the professionals call stabilization-- housing, jobs. How do you approach that?

JIM CAMPBELL: Bob Bruininks from the university has agreed to be the task force leader in early childhood. And here again, Bob is in the process of assembling a task force that will look at all these issues. In some respects, this ties back a bit to what Carmen and I have done in creating the chair in urban education over at the college of education.

Because we believe that there are many young people who leave high school very enthusiastic about working in education in an urban setting. But the stresses and the strains of that task are so significant that after a few years, they tend to burn out.

And so our focus here is to work hard to get young people ready for this experience, to have them continue to have a retooling experience in the first few years or perhaps throughout their entire careers if they decide to stay, just from the standpoint that this is a difficult area for people to want to stay for a long period of time.

And I just think that one of the things we have is that-- there's all kinds of things that enter into this. Housing is a big piece of it because I was talking to some people at the Minneapolis and Saint Paul school districts the other day. And it's amazing how many children move back and forth between the Minneapolis and Saint Paul districts simply as a result of housing that's available for them.

And so really, this all gets down into the fundamental aspects of a family's well-being. And it's jobs. It's housing. It's the whole thing. And I think all those things will have to be looked at.

DAN OLSON: How much should government muck around in that? I mean, I'm trying to get a compass reading on a little bit about your political philosophy, but also the political philosophy of some of the folks in the Itasca Project. I mean, do you see a balance emerging? Or do you feel a balance both within yourself, within the Itasca Project of, look, government can do this, but it can't do that? Do some things come to mind?

JIM CAMPBELL: I've always been a sort of middle of the road person. I've never really been interested in party labels. I think I'm pragmatic to the extent that you have to wander back and forth across the spectrum if you want to get something done.

One of the frustrations to me is that the community we lived in has been sliced and diced into so many small pieces, all with an opinion on their relatively narrow view. And there's so much contention and confusion in how these views overlap or touch each other that people lose sight of the big picture. And the human energy is all expended in debating what, from my perspective, seems to be rather insignificant issues.

DAN OLSON: Jim Campbell and his wife Carmen are major donors to the University of Minnesota. They recently announced a gift of $5 million over a period of time. Some of the money goes to the U's business school. Another portion is being used to create a chair in urban education at the U's College of Education. Campbell says an investment in the U has a big payback.

We give as taxpayers in Minnesota a lot of money to the University of Minnesota. We're a relatively small state. Pretty big university. We're having some contention here about how much more to spend on the university. Should we say, in your opinion, we should spend a fair amount more in the University and make it really good? Or we should ask the university to slim down a bit and become excellent in a fewer number of-- in fewer areas? What's your view?

JIM CAMPBELL: Yes, I think that the university is really the engine, the economic engine that drives the state. It's not as well packaged and communicated to the citizens of Minnesota as it needs to be. But the bottom line is that there's a half a billion dollars that comes to the state of Minnesota every year in all kinds of different forms of research. And the multiplier that's been calculated is, I don't know, $16 or $18 to 1 on the ultimate economic benefit to the estate. Now any time you can pick up 6, 15 more dollars for putting $1 on the table, it seems to me that that's a pretty good transaction.

I do believe that there does need to be more focus, not just in the university system, but higher education across the state. And I know the governor, I think, has a similar belief and has actually assigned Susan Heegaard to a project to work at this. We're living with a higher education structure that was defined 35, 40 years ago when driving 35 miles to a location was really what drove the system we have.

And I'm not suggesting that-- by that comment, I'm not suggesting that MnSCU is not important. I believe that MnSCU and the university collectively are fantastic. I just think there's some updating to the system we have in both organizations that when we talked-- when your first question to me was, should we spend more, should we rechannel it, I mean, it seems to me that we talked about early childhood.

We talked about K to 12, but, it's higher education. I mean, I can walk over to there to that computer and basically take a class from literally any university, any place in the world. I don't need to even get in my car. And so my point is that I think it's time for us to update the model and probably reinvest in the system that we do have.

DAN OLSON: Jim Campbell, the retired CEO of Wells Fargo Bank Minnesota. He's the co-chair of the Itasca Project, a Twin Cities' study group founded by the heads of the region's largest companies. You're listening to voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

Campbell supports vouchers for schoolchildren. His wife, Carmen, is a former public school teacher. She taught for years in the Minneapolis school system.

So when she's educated you about what should be done, what shouldn't be done in public education especially, has that shaped your thoughts? I mean, we continue to hear the contention between people saying, come on, let the kids have the voucher and go off to where they need help. I mean, do you-- you shy away, and understandably so, from making kind of strong personal pronouncements on these issues. But what do you think?

JIM CAMPBELL: Well, personally, I think children should have the option. Our children were in public school. And then they were in private school. And we saw the benefits of both, candidly. And it depends to a great extent on the child.

People that do have financial resources, obviously, have the option. It would seem to me that there are children that do not have the option that could benefit significantly. So my sense is that we should open it up to some extent.

And I grew up in a-- my father was a school-- he chaired the school board for 25 years. And my mother was a teacher. And my mother-in-law was a teacher. And my father-in-law drove a school bus. And my sister's a teacher, and her daughter is a teacher. And so an awful lot of our perspective comes from the teacher's perspective. And candidly, I have enormous empathy for the teacher's role.

DAN OLSON: Jim Campbell says there's a cycle to business ethics. He says the recent spate of lawbreaking by corporate executives in this country is a low point. Campbell says he got most of his values from his parents while growing up in Byron, a small Southeastern Minnesota town near Rochester.

Jim Campbell, you've retired, but it doesn't look like a very retiring job to me that you've taken on now. You've got lots of duties with the Itasca Project, different things. Now as you do, though, take time to reflect on the corporate experience in running a big company, what are your thoughts about business ethics, morality in business? I don't want to take a shot at bankers. But I mean, bankers, along with all kinds of people in business, do draw criticism from folks saying, there's concern about business ethics. What are your thoughts?

JIM CAMPBELL: Well, we don't have a lot to feel good about the last few years. The track record, I think, speaks for itself. I would say that I don't think the headline stories necessarily reflect the standards that have been set in the vast majority of businesses across the country.

There's ebbs and flows in everything we experience in life. And you go from very, very tight control to being fairly lax from time to time. And I think that the unbelievable years of the stock market in the '80s and '90s, the returns were so incredibly significant that perhaps some people lost sight of the balance and perhaps what the real scorecard needs to be.

And it became driven by earnings per share and stock price and wealth accumulation as compared to being recognized as a great place to work or one of the best managed companies or the philanthropic benefit in communities or jobs created or new products developed. And I can go on and on.

And I think it's-- as I say, that's what life is. It goes from scarcity to excess and all points in between. And then when you realize that you've gone too far over, you come back and correct. And I think that's what we're going through now.

We lived through a period of incredible excess. And we're moving back into more of a controlled environment. We always tend to-- human nature is to always tend to overdo it. And as we then go through a period of control and good solid business ethics and not any serious problems, then we'll probably lighten up a bit. And it'll flow back the other way, I mean, go back into the '20s and '30s with the antitrust activities in the country and all the government regulation that was put in back in those days to control it. And in some respects, this is the new wave of that sort of thing.

I honestly believe that the headline stories are a very small fraction of the good work that's being done by business in this country today. And in some respects, we need to celebrate the good work of all the CEOs and all the boards of directors and all the employees of all the good companies that don't get the press but are doing a great job.

DAN OLSON: Should Americans take as a warning sign the fact that the wealth accumulation in this country is trending more and more towards fewer and fewer people at the top of the income scale? Is that worrisome? Or is that part of the cycle and it will even out?

JIM CAMPBELL: Well, I think it does have-- I think it does have a concern. I think that it creates a much greater dichotomy between the ends of the spectrum. I know we always worked hard. And this was a specific that where we granted stock options to all of our employees-- tellers, phone bankers, I mean, you name it. And they ended up had a chance-- have a chance to experience the excitement of being on a team that was successful. And there was real economic benefit in it.

Now, because of the way stock options are now being priced, I haven't heard of anyone that's done company-wide stock options for some time. But I think it is an issue. I'm not sure that I have a solution of how to deal with it.

DAN OLSON: I mean, does it bode ill for a country or well for a country that a relative handful of people, groups of people are doing very well? And are they the leaders? Are they the engines of the economy? Or are they leaving more and more people behind?

JIM CAMPBELL: My hope is that they would be the engines and that they would be the drivers. And in some cases, they really are. I mean, look at some of the most wealthy people in this country and the amount that they've given back and the good that they're doing.

On the other hand, there are others that are sitting on the sideline and not participating whatsoever. And my philosophy has always been is that we've been blessed by the experiences we've had in life. And it's very important to give back and to have impact.

And I think that's one of the special things about Minnesota and the special things about the Twin Cities is I think there is an attitude here of giving back, of assisting to make this a special place, whether it's education, whether it's the arts. It's all part of the amenities that collectively add up to give us a feeling of who we are.

DAN OLSON: Who schooled you in that? Was that your father, your mother? Who gave you some of those values?

JIM CAMPBELL: Well, people are sick and tired of hearing me tell this story, but I grew up in a very small town. There were 386 there until I went off to the university. And there were five leaders in the community of which my father was one. He was the president of the bank. And I was the-- there was the guy that ran the grain elevator and another one that ran the lumberyard and the bulk oil business and the grocery store.

And those five really cared about what happened to the community. I mean, their success in their business was totally dependent on making Byron, Minnesota, a successful community in which to live. And so they knew what their day jobs were, but they also knew that their night jobs were chairing the school board and being the mayor. And in the case of my parents, did doing the janitor work at the Methodist church.

And when I became the campaign chair for the United Way here, I got to thinking that my dad had chaired the Red Feather Drive and Byron in probably the late '40s or early '50s. And I got to thinking about, Byron really didn't need a United Way because it was such a small microcosm of society that everyone knew who had and everyone knew who was in need.

And there was an informal-- I remember my mother taking meals to people and taking care of elderly people. And I mean, she had a daily checklist of things that she did for the community. And the United Way was an informal connecting of giving back and taking care of friends and neighbors.

And so the answer to your question is, yes, I think that's-- I learned that, and I observed that. And I enjoyed watching my father build new schools and go through consolidation, which was a very contentious thing when I was a young boy.

DAN OLSON: School consolidation.

JIM CAMPBELL: School consolidation. And my wife grew up on a farm 7 miles south who spent the first eight years of her education in a one-room school with her mother as a teacher who was consolidated into Byron. And they didn't like the consolidation.

So talk about contention. I mean, I had it between my parents and her parents, and we were the products of school consolidation. But I think I-- I always tell my children that they missed an incredible opportunity, and that was to see small town America work. Because it's pretty simple, and it works.

Now Byron is 8 miles from the Mayo Clinic. It was 8 miles from the Mayo Clinic then, but they were separate communities. Now it's a Maple Grove to Rochester, and it's very different. It's not got a population of 4,000 to 5,000. They're building a couple of hundred houses a year. And it's very different. But it was incredible. I will always treasure the opportunity of observing and learning from that experience.

DAN OLSON: How do you cultivate, how do you recruit that kind of civic engagement that you learned as a young person growing up in Byron that you've adopted, continue to practice as an adult and now a retired CEO? I mean, you're a role model. You have young people looking at Jim Campbell and saying, well, look what he does. We could do that too, or we should do that. How do you recruit that?

JIM CAMPBELL: Well, we were all given opportunities at a young life to do things we were not ready for. Greatest learning experiences come when you're at the greatest risk. And so I think the key is to invite young people to jump in the water and start to flail away.

I always say, you can't learn to swim sitting on the edge of the pool. You can't learn to ride a bike if you're sitting in a chair. You got to get on the bike and tip over a few times. You got to jump in the pool and swallow a few mouthfuls of water.

But once you've done it-- and some people love it, and some people don't. It's like anything else in life. So my philosophy has always been give young people an opportunity to jump in the water and try it.

And I just had lunch with a fifth generation family member in this community who's the previous four generations were incredible leaders here. And his question to me is, how do I do this? How do I-- I want to do it. I need to-- but I need-- I'd like to be involved in Itasca, but I don't know quite how to plug in.

And so I went to the meeting, Itasca meeting last Friday morning. I said, I've just observed a whole new experience here of a next generation who wants to get involved. And that's really exciting. So I think it's encouraging. My son's graduating from law school in New York City in a couple of months. And Manhattan is very different than Minneapolis or Byron or Saint Paul.

But I hope that when Peter starts practicing law, that he'll find something in New York that is outside the office that he can get excited. And my daughter and her husband living over in Western Wisconsin, they found a couple of things that I think is going to help them establish their lives with animal, humane societies and whatever it is. But that's all good stuff.

DAN OLSON: Jim Campbell, thank you so much for your time.

JIM CAMPBELL: You're welcome. Dan, I enjoyed it.

DAN OLSON: Jim Campbell, the retired chief executive officer of Wells Fargo Bank Minnesota and the co-chair of the Itasca Project, a study group founded by Twin Cities' business executives. For Voices of Minnesota, I'm Dan Olson. And this is a special Voices of Minnesota edition of Midday, coming to you here on Minnesota Public Radio.

GARY EICHTEN: Arctic cat, Polaris and Ski-Doo, three companies that manufacture nearly all of the snowmobiles sold around the world. And two of them, Arctic Cat and Polaris, started right here in Minnesota. Now if you're not up on your snowmobile lore, you should know that the basic design hasn't changed much in 50 years, but the machines have gotten bigger and fancier. No doubt about it.

These days, you can pay $10,000 for a new snowmobile. Back in the early 1960s, you could buy one for as little as $500. They have more powerful engines, too, as much as 150 horsepower. In the early days, more like 7 horsepower. Edgar Hetteen remembers those old machines because he built them. He is the gentleman who founded both Polaris and Arctic Cat.

Edgar Hetteen was a pioneer in designing snowmobiles and in figuring out how to sell them. He was also instrumental in developing snowmobile trails here in the state of Minnesota. These days, he lives outside of Grand Rapids, and he spoke recently with Minnesota Public Radio's Chris Julin for our Voices of Minnesota series.

CHRIS JULIN: Edgar Hetteen is 83, but he still likes to weld.

EDGAR HETTEEN: I keep a certain amount of equipment here so that if an idea should, by some miracle or another, present itself, I can go out here and put it on the board or put it into iron.

CHRIS JULIN: Edgar Hetteen's shop is in his garage. It's full of metal frames. They look like industrial strength chairs.

EDGAR HETTEEN: This is the embryonic stages of new machines, all of them.

CHRIS JULIN: These will be padded and upholstered wheelchairs for people in nursing homes. Edgar Hetteen calls them wheel loungers. He co-founded the May Corporation that sells them. That's just one of the companies he's founded or co-founded over the years.

His first company built heavy farm equipment that was up in the northwest corner of the state up in Roseau back in the 1940s. By the 1950s, the company was called Polaris. And Edgar Hetteen was one of a handful of entrepreneurs who were making newfangled machines called snowmobiles. He spent nearly all of his eight decades in Northern Minnesota.

EDGAR HETTEEN: I tell people I'm from south of the border. Yeah, just south of the Canadian border. Fortunately, I had a little knowledge of farming, and farmers had to be self-sufficient. They had to learn how to fix, how to cultivate.

That little one-room schoolhouse, that brought me through eighth grade. It was great. It was country teachers went so far beyond the required ABCs. I don't look at my formal education as being lacking in anything. And I see the great education people are getting now. But it would be awfully nice if they could have had maybe a four or five months of some of my good teachers and seeing those 30, 40, 50 kids in one room and all the grades. It was great.

No apologies from me because mine was a country schoolhouse. I'm proud of it. I'm proud of my teachers.

CHRIS JULIN: Edgar Hetteen did a turn in the Navy during World War II. Then he came back to Roseau and started the company that turned into Polaris, and he started making snowmobiles.

EDGAR HETTEEN: Probably would not have been possible perhaps in some other times. In 1944, 1945, with the war over, all these people coming back to Roseau, some of the jobs that were supposed to have been waiting for them were gone. There were defense workers in there. There were soldiers. There were sailors. There were WACs. There were whatever.

And here is this guy, me. Because these wild ideas and-- but no money. So the timing was great because so many of those people said, we believe, we'll wait, we'll wait forever if we have to. There's nothing else to do anyway. And they put a lot of themselves into the snowmobile.

I remember the first lady I hired. She'd just come back from the shipyards. And she was a certified welder. You had these big, burly guys. Here's Fern with her hair down here and very feminine. Well, you laughed at her. She knew she had better produce, and she did. She outproduced the guys. And they knew they better produce. So they worked harder to outproduce her in. What a deal, huh?

We had a little gal there. Her name was Ruth. She was a blonde. Every night that she went home, she went home a redhead. She came next morning as a blonde again. Or if we were painting with black paint, she went home a brunette. Whatever the paint color of the day was would be what she went home with.

What would happen if that happened today? People thought it was funny, even those that had to wash their hair many times. That's what these people were willing to do. And they just came and said, hey, we'd like to be part of-- this is fun.

Yeah, I can remember the nights we sat there in a basement corner. There were six or seven of us. That was the whole gang. And we'd had a tough day, but we were happy. And we wanted a six pack of pop, but we didn't have money enough to buy a six pack.

So between all of us, we got about three or four bottles of Coke or whatever it was and sat there on that corner talking about our day and the small successes and some of the problems.

CHRIS JULIN: As I understand the story, the core idea for the snowmobile had been around for 40 years by the time you got hold of it.

EDGAR HETTEEN: And that is-- that's a good one. Man had been trying for years to make a machine that would work in snow. People had made machines way back before us. However, we probably were the-- I shouldn't say probably. We were the first ones who made the first commercially successful snowmobile.

CHRIS JULIN: This is Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. We're talking with Edgar Hetteen. He founded both Polaris and Arctic Cat in Northern Minnesota. He says it was tricky to design a functional snowmobile, but it was far trickier to sell them in the early years.

EDGAR HETTEEN: When we finally got these machines going where we could go out with them and have some fun on them, I came up with a slogan. We said, they were the next best thing to girls. That is in fun, in sport, in seeing that beauty of it. It was fantastic. It was great.

But suppose you lived in a cabin up there. And I came and knocked on your door one day. And I said, hey, would you buy a snowmobile, we can make one at a little open air deal. It's kind of got a washing machine motor on it. Would you buy one for sport?

CHRIS JULIN: Yeah.

EDGAR HETTEEN: The consensus was that anybody who would buy one for sport had probably suffered severe brain damage at birth or at least from falling out of a tree chasing a squirrel up there or something. We had to then change course.

I remember I get a phone call, Northwest Bell, sleet storm in North Dakota. They wanted to lease a machine. I said, hey, fellas, I can't lease it. I ain't got money enough. But I took a chance. And I finally-- I said, yeah, I'll lease you, you got to take two machines, though, not one and our lease, and you got a guarantee to lease them for two months.

And at the end of those two months of lease, somebody can own those machines. And it was just a handful of dollars cash. And they would own them. My theory was that the operators who used those for repairing lines would find it was fun. And they would put the cash in and on them. We never got them back. People owned them.

So some of the things we did then to get recreational use, we entered that door through the need, the commercial market type deal.

CHRIS JULIN: Now, I've heard that your trip to Alaska was what really promoted the idea of recreational use of a snowmobile.

EDGAR HETTEEN: Yes, it was. I like adventure. And I was testing a lot of different things on that snowmobile. And one of my friends said one day, gee, it would be fun to go from Bethel, Alaska, on the Bering Sea Coast to Fairbanks on the snowmobile.

That was in November 1959. He said that in my kitchen. March 1960, we're on the Bering Sea Coast, three machines, four people, money boats, GI parkas, all that old heavy gear. There were plenty of times we fell through the snow and into the slush and the water. And we had our share of problems.

But we had some ingenuity. And all of us were outdoors people, so we made it. 40 years later, we did it again. But we plotted it. And we were-- can you imagine? Same trip 40 years later, we sat there with our little box like this. And we uplifted to the satellites. And everybody knew who we were all the time.

So that had come a long ways, but it established the fact that this machine can work, can do a job. And we got a lot of print media. We got a lot of electronic media even back in 1960. We got that. So it was the beginning of a turning point of public acceptance for the snowmobile.

CHRIS JULIN: You're listening to Voices of Minnesota, and we're talking with Edgar Hetteen. Some people call him the "grandfather of the snowmobile." Even after the publicity from the Alaska trip, Edgar Hetteen says it was hard to find people to be snowmobile dealers.

EDGAR HETTEEN: Sparky Myers, Highway 45 at G Street, Neenah, Wisconsin. He had a little place of business there, and he had become a dealer. Had some machines out there. Nobody-- nobody-- nobody bought one.

And Sparky knew that if you would try one, you would buy one. And this was really true. Because in a family where you bought one, you didn't need that first one, but you needed the second one for your wife or your husband. It needed to keep peace in the family.

But Sparky was resourceful. He does what used car dealers still do today. And I have been one. You change that front line around. You hide a few machines, take them back, hide a few machines. And you create an illusion.

So one evening, a guy walked in there. Sparky, you sold one? Yeah, he said, they're starting to move, business has sold one, starting to move. He hid them. And he started to sell them. He started to sell them. And we couldn't get a dealer in all of Wisconsin. And we were desperate for dealers.

So we said, Sparks, we want you to be our wholesalers for the whole state of Wisconsin. And he did. He became it, except that, who do you go and get a dealer? Oh, there are no snowmobiles there, so you can't look them up in the yellow pages. Who do you order? With a car dealer?

Well, the floor salesmen are not about to put overshoes and stuff on and go out and start that cold machine and give you a demo, are they? And the other dealers are same way, Marine dealers. Most of them are locked up in lawn and garden, locked up, motorcycle. Hey, who do you go to?

And this is where man's ingenuity shines. I'm very proud of this thing that Sparky did. Sparky and I are good friends. He has since died. But he created another illusion. Sparky knew that where Miss Wisconsin was, there were the cameras. There were the reporters. You could sponsor Miss Wisconsin. She could take a sponsorship from a car, from a snowmobile maker. And so Sparky sponsored her.

And it wasn't that expensive, but he knew she would be traveling at these functions all over the country. Miss Wisconsin was a big deal, as Miss Minnesota was. So he made sure that every function she went to, she had an Arctic Cat in the picture with her. I can show you. I still got a clippings.

And pretty soon, you're reading the paper, and there is snowmobiles. He created an illusion, a legitimate illusion. Miss Wisconsin was there. She had a snowmobile, and she rode it. And the reporters took pictures. And the writers wrote stories. It was akin to our trip across Alaska in what it did. You know what I mean, the results.

CHRIS JULIN: Did you know in the 1950s that it was going to work? Did you foresee this?

EDGAR HETTEEN: Going down the Yukon River there, one cold, miserable day in 1960, and what inspired this thinking, I don't know. But all of a sudden, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the snowmobile will be a success. It will be a big thing.

Obviously, I didn't dream in technicolor because I was still in black and white. And I couldn't envision how big it was to become, but I knew it would be successful.

CHRIS JULIN: Have you always been an avid writer yourself?

EDGAR HETTEEN: Oh, yeah. My wife, she's the first one out in the morning on the snowmobile. And she's the last one in at night. She makes me mad. I don't want to be out that long. She does. So yeah, we snowmobile. And we attend a lot of-- or we used to attend a lot of public functions.

Because I was the-- as we made industry-- we created industry associations for them, oh, some lobbying. And I've been a registered lobbyist and creating fair and equitable, not punitive, legislation. We went to the state of Minnesota and said, hey-- we selected the DENR rather than the Department of Transport, which was the auto division-- we want you to license us. We want that to be dedicated money that it be spent, creating a trail system.

So organized snowmobiling came about in that manner. It is the only industry in the world that I know of where the consumer, the guy that bought the snowmobile and his neighbors got together, built trails, got permission from the county to use this land, fought with the city councils to use the street, worked hard, built clubhouses; the only sport-- and this was a sport-- where the people created the sport, where the sport created the industry in that procession.

CHRIS JULIN: Why are people so passionate about those machines?

EDGAR HETTEEN: I used to think that the snowmobile created some tremendous people. Obviously, the snowmobile didn't create these people. The snowmobile attracted these people. A snowmobiler is a fiercely independent person. He's a hard worker. Assign him a job, then get out of his way so he can do it OK, he or she, the man.

And so the snowmobile was a thing for these outdoor people that they loved. And that's passionate. Yeah, they fight for it. You better believe they do. But they also pay their own way-- gas, tax, license fees.

Continually, we attracted more people and more people and more people. And they all got in there and fought, you see. So it wasn't a one-man show.

CHRIS JULIN: There are a lot of people out there who probably don't think of you as a hero, as the person who was instrumental in making snowmobiles as prevalent as they are now. I mean, there are people who don't like snowmobiles at all.

EDGAR HETTEEN: Well, when I meet strangers, before I start with my stories, I said, are you a friend or foe? And usually, they're friend if they talk to me about-- sometimes you run into force.

Many years ago, just outside of the city of Toronto, there was a college training young people to be attorneys. And they had a symposium there one evening. And we were the only snowmobilers there. There was a lot of people there, people getting up and testifying. And we came in the night before. And we'd met this nice guy. And he was a nice guy, doctor.

The next day, he wasn't so nice. He got up, and he talked about the snowmobile, that it really had to be the invention of the devil. And he was going to lobby for the passage of a new law. The law would state that every dealer, when he sells a machine, shall furnish-- I don't know how many, but a great supply of contraceptive devices. Because he says that way, the breed will eventually die out.

So we had, and still do today, people who do not want snowmobiles. I think some of our lawmakers at one time, not too long ago, advocated that we really should be with the horse and buggy. And there are still groups of people who, for some reason, believed they could go back all those years in time and be happy.

In the snow belt areas of this world, the snowmobile has changed people's way of life totally. They are now geared to the snowmobile. And maybe one drastic illustration would be up on the Yukon River in Alaska. People up there all summer long, they fished and put up fish for their dogs to feed on over winter. So in the summer, the man worked for the dogs. In the winter, the dog worked for his owners. And that's true.

That culture has changed drastically. The little kids are riding snowmobiles to school. Mama goes shopping in a snowmobile. They're everywhere.

CHRIS JULIN: Edgar Hetteen says snowmobiles are here to stay. He founded two snowmobile companies, Arctic Cat and Polaris. Both of them are still based in Minnesota. These days, they sell billions of dollars worth of snowmobiles and ATVs and personal watercraft. Edgar Hetteen sold both companies soon after he founded them. He says he likes starting companies, not running them.

In Grand Rapids, this is Chris Julin, Minnesota Public Radio.

GARY EICHTEN: And that does it for our Midday program today. Gary Eichten here. Thanks so much for tuning in. By the way, if you missed either one of our Voices of Minnesota interviews that we featured this noon, we'll be rebroadcasting this program at 9:00 tonight. And of course, all of our Midday programs are available at minnesotapublicradio.org. Gary Eichten here. Thanks for tuning in today. Hope you can join us tomorrow.

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TERRY GROSS: It's just before sunset in an alley in Manhattan. And Robert Sullivan is in the shadows, waiting for the rats to come out. On the next Fresh Air, Sullivan tells us about his adventures, doing the research for his new book, Rats. I'm Terry Gross. Join us for the next Fresh Air.

GARY EICHTEN: 8 o'clock tonight here on Minnesota Public Radio. You're tuned to 91.1 KNOW FM, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. At last report, we're up to 57 degrees, undoubtedly warmer than that, with a high forecast today near 70 now. Also a 30% chance for some showers later this afternoon. Tonight, partly cloudy, maybe some more rain with an overnight low near 40. Then tomorrow, sunny, warm, and dry. High tomorrow, 60 to 65 degrees.