John Tomblin
NIAR, Wichita
It’s a constant source of amusement and pride wherever John Tomblin goes. “When I introduce south-central Kansas or Wichita as a public speaker, I challenge people to go to any large airport anywhere in the world and show me a part not built in Wichita, Kansas,” Tomblin says. “I’ve never found someone able to do that.” And Tomblin knows airplane parts: He’s executive director of the Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University. A native of West Virginia who came to Kansas 18 years ago, he’s responsible for a research initiative that’s been credited with saving plane-makers millions of dollars in costs. The institute offers research and design services plus testing and certification, not just for aviation manufacturers, but for government agencies, universities and others. More than a dozen labs in the 135,000-square-foot center explore advanced coating materials, aging dynamics, composites and advanced materials, computational mechanics—there’s even a wind tunnel. Tomblin oversees all of that, and he’s a professor of aerospace engineering, as well.
Innovation is his stock in trade, but he’s also credited with a skill for consensus-building and collaboration that has brought manufacturers together. The key to getting that done, Tomblin says, is with compelling arguments that change can be in everyone’s best interest. “If we approach things a different way, and say ‘Here’s the benefit to you and the benefit to the person opposite you,’ and get all of them in a room, you can show them that this way, we can compete as an industry—and as a Kansas industry—rather than against ourselves.”
Nathaniel Terrell
Emporia State University
He’s a native of Oklahoma who earned his PhD at Iowa State University. And if you make the drive between Langston, Okla., and Ames, Iowa, you can’t miss Emporia—or Emporia State University, tucked up against Exit 130 on Interstate 35. When ESU was looking for an African-American to fill a tenure-track position teaching sociology in 1994, Nathaniel Terrell found the possibility intriguing—and challenging. Friends in Iowa suggested that a lack of black faculty could be an issue, but “as an African-American male, I thought they were joking,” Terrell recalls. “I was surprised when I came down that I didn’t get to interview with other African-Americans in the sociology track. But in 1994, there weren’t any others.”
Nor in the classroom, where for 18 years Terrell has tackled the tough issues of race, society and crime—even if his white students may have been discomfited by the discussions at first. But Terrell persisted, drawing on experiences honed by hands-on work with social challenges. He’s brought the homeless into the classroom to help students understand that experience, and judges in to discuss crime. He also serves on various boards at the local and state level, including community service as a mentor.
Jerrold Hoffman
Wheat State Telephone Co., Udall
Only a relative handful of them are left today, the survivors of May 25, 1955—the night “the small town of Udall, Kansas, died in its sleep,” as the wire services reported. Jerrold Hoffman, then just 20, was still a relative newcomer that night, when the tornado overtook his car. He and his girlfriend survived with minor cuts and scrapes, but the storm killed 83 people in a town of 600, wiping away nearly every commercial building and home. It’s still the deadliest twister in Kansas history, and a watershed in the state’s approach to storm safety. After that, considerable efforts went into warning systems; Udall even put up a watchtower that was manned 24 hours a day for a while. Hoffman had a better idea: At Wheat State Telephone Co., where he would become president, he developed a distinctive ring pattern to sound real-time warnings system-wide. Far more efficient than a calling tree, he said, “in 10 seconds, you could warn everybody in the whole telephone exchange.” It was in use for a while, but never caught on elsewhere. He also logged more than a decade as mayor of Udall, served as a Methodist minister and retired from Wheat State in 1994. Given six months to live after a pair of heart attacks when he was 39, he says his main goal at 78 is serving others: “I want to be around people and help however I can, because the Good Lord has given me 39 more years I wasn’t supposed to have.”
Chuck Comeau
Dessin–Fournir, Plainville
“Rural Kansas,” says Chuck Comeau, “is a great place to be if you want to be creative.” With high-speed Internet service in the farthest reaches the heartland, “you can do almost anything from anywhere.” You can’t yet squeeze high-end furniture through a fiber-optic line, but Comeau knows that if you’re going to ship it around the continent—along with lighting treatments and texiles for household use—nothing beats a central location.
And few places are as central as Plainville: 1,575 miles to San Francisco; 1,481 to New York. Mix in the famed work ethic of rural Kansans not long removed from the farm and you have exactly the ingredients needed to attract a forward-thinking business owner to move his interior design firm there from California—as Comeau did in 1996. Adding nearly 100 jobs to a community of fewer than 2,000 people was a significant boost to that town’s economy, but his experience is not an abberation, says the Plainville native. Kansas can encourage more Dessin-Fournirs, he says, with “higher incentives to address issues that concern business owners as they start to grow their businesses in a rural setting.”
Elizabeth Koch
Youth Entrepreneurs, Wichita
“There are no entrepreneurs in government,” says Liz Koch. “I’m sorry, but they’re not solving society’s problems; they’re just encumbering what would happen on its own.” Real solutions, she says, come when people marry a passion for change to the profit motive. And the results beat the state-sponsored approach every time. Her credentials in this area are impeccable: For one, she’s married to arguably the most successful entrepreneur in the history of the state, Koch Industries’ CEO Charles Koch. While he led the company’s growth into a $115 billion behemoth, she took an initiative of their family foundation and turned it into a force for business education that has touched thousands: Youth Entrepreneurs Kansas. From its beginnings as a simple eight-week program at Wichita North High School in 1989, what is now just Youth Entrepreneurs has evolved into a year-long course replicated at more than two dozen high schools from Liberal to Kansas City, and three more in Independence, Mo. As chairman of the organization for 23 years, she’s pushed back against forces that restrict business growth at the vital start-up level. The unintended consequence of big government, she says, “is that there are so many barriers to entry for our young people, unless you have deep pockets, venture capital or some other backing.”
Dolph Simons Jr.
The World Co., Lawrence
William Allen White has his name on the university’s journalism school in town, but make no mistake: When it comes to media, the dominant family name in Lawrence is Simons. The current head of the family is Dolph Simons, Jr., grandson of the company’s founder. But W.C. Simons wouldn’t recognize the empire today: The World Co. encompasses not only The Lawrence Journal-World, its flagship newspaper, but papers in eight other cities across northeast Kansas, plus Sunflower Broadband in Lawrence, and before selling it in 2010, Sunflower Cablevision. Simons, then, is as much businessman as journalist, and he has plenty of credentials there, as well. After early stints as a reporter in London and South Africa, Simons came home to the family business. His career has included 10 years as a director of the Associated Press, and he’s held offices with various state and regional press associations. He’s a graduate of the White school with long, deep ties to KU—as an endowment assoc-iation officer, chairman of KU’s board of trustees, and membership on the board of directors for the KU Alumni Association, contributions that earned him the university’s highest honor, its Distinguished Service Citation, in 1980.
Vaughn Peterson
Peterson Industries, Smith Center
Nearly 50 years ago, Vaughn Peterson went into business with two carefully chosen partners: His parents, Leonard and Blanch. More than two dozen companies in Kansas were turning out recreational vehicles in 1966, but the Petersons decided there was room for one more—especially in Smith Center, well removed from the population centers and their concentrated demand. “We had a friend who told us that if we’d started 10 years earlier, we’d have done pretty well, but he said his advice was to just forget it.” Not a chance: From $9,500 in sales with two others employees that first year, Peterson Industries has grown its Excel line that turns out four units a week—travel trailers and fifth wheels up to 41 feet long, with all the trimmings—and has short-term plans to get to five. Throughout its history, Peterson has endured recessions, gasoline crises and even a fire that leveled the plant in 1983. “After the fire, we took about 50 people, and built one building. We did whatever it took to put it back together
again,” Peterson says. “Everybody pitched in.”
Lynette Woodard
Woodard Group, Lawrence
Somewhere in the record books, an asterisk the size of a regulation basketball should sit next to the name of native Kansan Jackie Stiles, NCAA’s recognized career scoring leader in women’s hoops. For as good as she was, Stiles finished more than 250 points behind the true career scoring leader—Wichita’s Lynette Woodard. But women’s basketball wasn’t an NCAA-recognized sport when Woodard became a four-time All-American for the University of Kansas. From 1997 to 1981, Woodard dazzled and dominated, compiling 3,649 points for her career, and falling just 18 points shy of Pete Maravich’s men’s scoring mark. She’d likely have overtaken him with one more game: Woodard averaged 26 points a game for her career. The WNBA was still a far-off dream for women hoopsters in 1981, but Lynette Woodard wasn’t done playing. She turned pro in Italy, she led the U.S. women’s team to a gold medal in the 1984 Olympics, and followed that up by becoming the first woman to sign and play for the famed Harlem Globetrotters. The WNBA came along just in time to catch her final playing days, then she returned to Lawrence, served as assistant coach and interim head coach for the women’s team before moving on to financial services in Wichita and most recently, the town where she broke all the records.
Ed O'Malley
Kansas Leadership Center, Wichita
Bridging gaps—rural vs. urban, Sedgwick County vs. Johnson County—is Ed O’Malley’s prime directive as president and CEO of the Kansas Leadership Center in Wichita. He was there at the center’s founding in 2007, when the Kansas Health Foundation provided a $30 million grant to foster new levels of civic leadership across the state, with a broader goal of using that leadership to craft strategies for improving Kansans’ health. Five years in that role have brought additional balance to O’Malley’s perspective on the state—before that, he lived in Johnson County. The task confronting the state isn’t unlike that facing Kansas City as a metro area divided by a state line, he concedes. “It boils down to Kansans not really understanding each other,” O’Malley said. “In the 19th century, most Kansans lived a rural experience and could relate to the situations of most other Kansans. Today, the lifestyle of an Overland Park executive is very different from that of an immigrant working in rural Kansas.” Kansas City’s conflict is economic, he says; broader divides at the state level involve cultural and policy battles. Raising the next generation of leaders who can resolve differences with state-wide view, he says, is a big challenge. “Leaders generally are rewarded for thinking and acting in the parochial interest of their community,” O’Malley says. “Helping people see Kansas as a whole, rather than in bits and pieces, is an important part of our work.”
Richard Hawk
Gaslight Grill, Leawood
Creating the Gaslight Grill was not part of Richard Hawk’s plan. But when the man who served as owner-operator the Country Club Hotel and Spa in Lake Ozark ended up selling the venture, he displaced a pretty darn good jazz band. “I had no place for the band to play, so I created Gaslight Grill,” says Hawk. That was perfectly in tune with Hawk’s lifelong take on business: “My entrepreneurial drive,” he says, “is to create things.” That dates to his days at Emporia State University, where he was editor of the student newspaper and president of the student council; to serving as assistant dean in the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Education; to becoming the first director of the Minnesota state higher education board; and even to financial services, building a chain of banks and having branches in San Diego, Mexico City and Nairobi. A jazz lover, he started on the piano at age 60, and sits in for sessions on weekends in the back room at his Leawood nightspot, but “my keyboard skills are marginal,” he says. “I simply do an impersonation of a musician.” So he leaves the heavy lifting to the pros, much as he’s done with development of the restaurant itself. “The first challenge was defining the concept adequately,” he says. The next was attracting people to make it happen. “Seeing guests enjoy a quality experience,” he says, “has been very satisfying.”
