Rotary Rounds March 22, 2017

While we normally don’t sing during Lent (did we agree to give it up along the way?) in honor of the simultaneous start of the Otters game at the State Tournament those in the know sang the Otter fight song.  Alas, we did not win the first game but the team dominated in its next two games to take home the Consolation Championship.  Congratulations!

 

We had two visiting Rotarians at our meeting, both from Detroit Lakes – Dirk Ockhardt a member of their Noon club and Doug Gillam, in the Breakfast club.  President Katie reminded us to sign up for distribution of Josh the Otter books on April 12th, while Josh Heggem told us that our annual golf tournament will be held on June 15th and made available a form to identify something you wish to donate for either the raffle or the live auction.  Buzz Lundeen passed around a sign-up sheet to support him in this year’s MS Walk.

 

We heard from our Student Guests from Hillcrest, Tara Ferenczy and Nate Larson, both seniors.  Nate gave us his college choice for next year – Arizona Grand Canyon University (in Phoenix) and Tara confirmed she is looking at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, as reported last week.  We learned a little more about each of our students during The Rotary Minute, this writer dispensing with a quiz on the last edition of the e-Rounds, hoping he would be liked at least one week. 

 

Pete Wasberg led off the bragging by talking about how easy it was for doing these e-Rounds on ClubRunner using instructions put together by Randy Kempfer and added to by Josh Heggem.  He also reported that his nephew Sam (whom Pete made a Paul Harris Fellow a few years back) has now reported for pilot training at Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma.  Wally Cole reported he missed a couple meetings because he was off lobbying for the chiropractic association in St. Paul and Washington D.C.

 

Ryan Welle then introduced our program, Maurice Skogan, who talked about his business, called Vintage Voltage.  Maurice graduated from Detroit Lakes High School in 1972, and followed his life-long fascination with taking electrical gadgets apart by getting a degree in electronics and also engineering.  Maurice’s father was Cal, who owned a television shop here in Fergus Falls for many years.  Maurice retired from his job at Concordia College in Moorhead and in the last five years has started his own business, making vacuum tube amplifiers.  Vacuum tubes came out in the 1920’s and were gradually improved over time but now have given way to circuit boards where when something goes wrong you just get another one.  You can’t beat the sound produced from a vacuum tube amplifier and there is a niche market out there that Maurice is accommodating.  One of his amplifiers will start out at about $2,000 and to date he has marketed about 36 of his amplifiers.  Russia and China still make the vacuum tubes but there is a wide disparity in quality and he tries to buy only the best.  The tubes still burn out and aren’t very energy efficient, but Maurice reminded at least this writer of his parents’ old television set, saying if “it smells hot, it means its working properly.”  Maurice said if you understand how electricity works you can harness it and he obviously loves doing that with his unique business.  Thanks Ryan for arranging a great program.