Jody Horner
Cargill Meat Solutions, Wichita
Fresh out of college, Jody Horner found her match: Cargill, the nation’s largest private company, which put her to work as a commodities trader. “I like to say my first job was buying wheat from farmers,” she says. So for this Minnesota native, it was a seamless transition to Kansas—twice—in a varied career that has cast her in leadership roles throughout the company: In flour-milling operations, at Cargill Salt in Hutchinson, in Thailand on long-term projects, in global diversity leadership within the HR wing. “My career has probably been broader than it has been deep,” says the president of Cargill Meat Solutions. “One of the things that I appreciate most about the opportunities I had is that I can carry into various leadership roles a really deep understanding of Cargill, the culture we operate in and the values we have.”
Her duties in Wichita have exposed her to before-and-after snapshots of a city that that has remade its downtown and strengthened its quality of life across the board. “Wichita is a great place to raise a family,” she says, “and the cultural aspect—opera, music theater, sports, the (Wichita State’s) Shockers, shopping and dining venues—I can look anybody in the eye and say it’s a great place to live.” She and her husband of 21 years, Blair, have raised a son and a daughter.
Jerry Farley
Washburn University, Topeka
Jerry Farley is a native of Oklahoma, but only an authentic Kansan knows the charms of Cottonwood Falls, in the Flint Hills. “It’s one place Susan and I love to go to,” says the president of Washburn University. “The Grand Central Hotel, the restaurant in the hotel, small town, great courthouse—and, of course, the ‘falls,’ which only fall about two feet” along the Cottonwood River. It’s a great little place to get away and quintessential Kansas prairie town.” Farley’s Sunflower State bona fides don’t stop there. In 15 years at Washburn, he’s come to fully appreciate what it took to found the college in 1866, and he sees it in people yet today. “Kansas, the state, and if I may be so bold, Washburn are inextricably intertwined,” he says. “Both, if entities can be this way, have an indomitable spirit about them.” Tornadoes are a good example of that spirit; almost no one coming here from Massachusetts in the 1800s, he said, would have experienced one before. Still, they built. Not unlike Washburn itself—the campus was wrecked by the famed Topeka tornado of 1966. It reinvented itself, and continues to do so today, with programs like the Washburn Institute of Technology. Kansans today share the vision of pioneers who, Farley says, saw education “as I think we do today, as the pathway to future success.”
Bob Bunting
Bunting Magnetics, Newton
Newton is nobody’s idea of a one-stoplight town. But neither is it the first place most people think of for high-tech manufacturing. So meet Bob Bunting, slayer of conventional wisdom: “Being based in Newton allows us to offer employees a great quality of life, wonderful schools, strong family-life values and proximity to Wichita, while still being in a charming small-town,” says the owner of Bunting Magnetics. The company produces much more than its name implies—industrial magnets, sure, including some rare-earth strands with exotic elements like neodymium and Samarium cobalt—but also metal-detection units, materials-handling systems and more.
His parents founded the company half a century ago in Chicago, but moved to Newton in 1979, where “it’s been about four or five different businesses since then,” Bunting says. That successful evolution, in large part, is tied to the quality of his staff. “We are fortunate to benefit from the long tenure our work force provides,” he says. That average tenure: 14 years. It might be higher, he said, but Wichita’s gravitational pull means that “our biggest challenge is competing for the labor force, especially in engineering.”
Gary Classen
Pancake Day Race Museum, Liberal
Gary Classen earns not a dime from the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Races every year in Liberal, or from his role with the Pancake Day Race Museum. Like the dozens of others who bring global attention to this unique competition between housewives in Liberal, Kan. and Olney, England, he’s a volunteer. His day job as a real-estate broker pays the bills, but flapjacks on the run are his passion. “Pancake racing,” he says, “is serious here.” Classen, 44, doubles this year as chair-man of the museum, which celebrates a competition more than half a century old. The two-town venue was the brainstorm of a Liberal resident who had read the stories of how Olney started its own race—purportedly inspired by a 15th-century housewife who was cooking breakfast but dashed off to church, skillet in hand, when she heard church bells ring. Classen came to his duties through his ties to the Noon Kiwanis Club, which, like the Jaycees and others, has demonstrated a cohesiveness that defines life in rural Kansas, Classen says. “It pulls the community together,” he says, economic value follows: “They may be small impacts here, but there are a lot of them, and it does affect a lot of different businesses—on Pancake Day, the downtown area is pretty full.”
Duane McCoy
Grandma Hoerner's, Alma
Entrepreneurship—and his grandmother’s applesauce recipe—made Duane McCoy a businessman. Family heritage made him a Kansan. A native Californian, McCoy grew up to launch Grandma Hoerner’s, built on a foundation of … Mabel Hoerner’s applesauce. Her recipe with slices and chunks of apples contrasted sharply with mass-produced bowls of creamed apples. He launched the company in California and with his wife, Regina, worked for years to build it with grass-roots marketing that involved knocking on a lot of doors. “You have to believe in your product, and I believed in ours,” said McCoy, 51. “It was something I grew up eating as a kid, and there was nothing on the market like it.” They found a receptive audience in California and began broader distribution. Then, in 1994, they moved the company to Kansas, where they would raise their young son and build the business not far from the family ranch near Alma. Through the years, they’ve expanded the company’s offerings to include fruit preserves and butters, pie fillings and barbecue sauces, desserts, relishes and more. Grandma Hoerner’s success is not an isolated instance, and McCoy says Kansas can harvest more of it by aggressively tacking the business-capital puzzle. “More financing through various programs would certainly be helpful,” he says.
Jordy Nelson
Green Bay Packers, Leonardville
Yes, Jordy Nelson’s paycheck is signed in Wisconsin, where he plays wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers. And yes, his wife Emily works there, too. But he still comes back to work on the family farm in Riley County, and if the Kansas Society of Washington, D.C., can see fit to declare Nelson its Kansan of the Year for 2012, who are we to keep him out of this roster of distinguished Kansans?
The fleet-footed kid from Riley County High School, overlooked by most major college football recruiters, wanted to play Division I football and walked on at Kansas State, where he excelled his senior season. That was good enough to get a look from the Packers, who made him a second-round pick in 2008. Just as he did in Manhattan, Nelson spent time raising his game to the next level. He got there in 2011, with 68 catches for 1,263 yards and 15 touchdowns. And in Super Bowl XLV, he had nine caches for 140 yards—and a touchdown that gave Green Bay a 7–0 lead. The Packers never trailed, defeating he Pittsburgh Steelers, 31–25.
Johnny Rowlands
KC Copters, Overland Park
Since the 1970s he’s been a DJ (Johnny Rockin’ Rollins), an on-air reporter, telethon co-host, college instructor, storm-spotter, business owner, and, if you don’t know him already, helicopter pilot. Is there anything Johnny Rowlands doesn’t do? A fixture in the Kansas City skies for years, Rowlands is the eagle-eyed traffic reporter for KMBC-TV on weekday mornings, and he provides breaking news coverage for the evening broadcasts. When he’s up there, he’s not just advising motorists on logjams ahead; he’s been an invaluable asset to law enforcement, first responders and even the National Weather Service in times of natural disaster and man-made mayhem. He’s logged more than 20,000 hours in the air, and every one of those has been incident-free. He also founded KC Copters, providing scenic and romantic tours as well as flight training, and Hi Def Helicopters, offering video services. He’s on the go with his free time, too, as an avid cyclist, scuba-diver—and flying fixed-wing air craft.
Tim Emert
Kansas Board of Regents, Independence
Here’s how you quite the critics: Years ago, Tim Emert and his colleagues had to fill a vacancy on the Independence school board. He pushed for—and secured—a seat for a woman who had been one of the board’s harshest critics. Why? “When you’re outside the boat, it’s easy to shoot at it; when you’re inside, it’s more difficult.” That new member, it turned out, learned that public service requires hard choices—and diplomacy. Emert has been no stranger to either in his rise from “a simple country lawyer” to a legislative career in both the House and Senate, and most recently the chairmanship of the Kansas Board of Regents. He’ll have to draw on the diplomacy part, in particular, with a sharply more conservative Legislature trying to make hard choices of its own this year. A graduate of both KU’s journalism school and its law school, Emert says he was a middle-of-the road politician who believed that the best results from compromise, not brute force. The deal-making ability and common sense of a Nancy Kassebaum, he says, are commodities that would come in handy in Topeka this session. Emert background helps when advising university officials on policy challenges, but the most important advice he can give is to have them get the governor’s ear before the budget-talk ball is rolling: “If you want something, and you don’t get it in the governor’s budget, you’re not likely to get it.”
Kirstie Alley
Actress/Author, Wichita
Posted outside the site of Wichita’s Tallgrass Film Festival, the sign bore a favorite quotation from native daughter Kirstie Alley: “I’ve learned that you’ll never be disappointed if you always keep an eye on uncharted territory, where you’ll be challenged and growing and having fun.” True to form, challenges, growing and having fun have all been part of her career since Alley made it big in Hollywood in the 1980s. After earning a role in the TV miniseries North and South, this former interior designer got her big film break in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The Look Who’s Talking series of three films tracked with her role as Rebecca Howe in the hit Cheers! on the small screen into the early 1990s. For a while, Kirstie Alley was everywhere. And then she came back to Wichita, buying a home not far from Downtown, where she still hangs her hat today when she’s not marking time at residences in Florida, Maine or California. Her house in the College Hill neighborhood earned wide acclaim as Wichita’s best Christmas display when she set up Santaland, a set from one of the Look Who’s Talking movies. She’s weathered a pair of divorces and has overcome battles with substance abuse and her weight, but she’s shed 100 pounds and is back in action at 61. Most recently, she’s been touring to promote a new book, “The Art of Men (I Prefer Mind al Dente),” and finishing runner-up in Dancing With the Stars.
Rick Stephens
Retired Teacher, Wichita
Few people walk away from a plane crash, and Rick Stephens was no exception. When the Wichita State University football team plane plowed into Colorado’s Mount Trelease on Oct. 2, 1970, the impact threw him clear of the wreckage—with two compound fractures in his right leg. Stephens was one of nine who lived, but 31 others died that day, including some trapped inside when the wreckage ignited.
“I was spared, I think, some of the psychological turmoil the other survivors had,” Stephens recalls, by not witnessing the fire. “I can’t help but be grateful, but I never felt the guilt that I was spared and others weren’t. At the same time, I never believed, as some might want you to, that there was some special reason I was saved. That would mean there was no special reason the others weren’t, and I couldn’t elevate myself above them.” But he did determine that he would do something important—not sensational, but important—with his life. He found that after departing from an early path in juvenile corrections to address youth needs by preventive means—in a classroom. He taught industrial arts for most of his career in Wichita’s public schools, then in a suburban district, before retiring. Today, he’s an avid bike-rider—he’s ridden from Wichita to Winnipeg, in Canada, three times—and in 2011, he rode to the Colorado crash site as a tribute to the victims. “I tend to focus on the blessing I had,” he says, “rather than the other.”
