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I have to be the luckiest guy on earth, throughout my life, incredible people have shown up on a regular basis with life experiences that are extraordinary and extraordinarily inspirational. As I have searched for what my true purpose is in life, I always thought I wanted to inspire people through books, audio programs and public speaking, I was foolish enough to think that I had done something inspirational and that I could speak from personal experiences. While I have had many successes, many challenges and many comebacks in the past and hopefully in the future, my experiences are nothing compared to the people that have shown up in my life that truly were an inspiration and whose examples of conquering challenges in their lives have kept me going and made my challenges minor in comparison.
As I thought about all the incredible people that have come into my life at various times to inspire me, it became clear that the best way for me to inspire others was by sharing with the stories of those that have inspired me over the years. In an earlier post on my blog I spoke about some of the people that inspired me as I was growing up through my high school years, including former Minnesota Twins Shortstop Danny Thompson, my American Legion Baseball Coach Ted Leuer and many others. Today I had an opportunity to think about those who have inspired me in the years after I graduated from High School and one of the first persons that came to mind was a life insurance salesman from Spearfish, South Dakota. I moved to Spearfish in October of 1979 after taking a job as the mid-day announcer at KBFS Radio in Belle Fourche, one of the first people to welcome me to Spearfish was Harvey Krautschun, I was just 20 years old and Harvey was the most positive and energetic person I had met in my life. At first, I thought Harvey was just being so cool because he wanted to sell me life insurance, which I bought shortly after our first visit, but I soon discovered that Harvey just loved people and loved making a difference in everyone’s lives. Over the 2 years I spent in Spearfish, Harvey and I had the opportunity to become good friends, heck Harvey even returned the favor, and bought some radio ads from me and had me record his commercials.
After leaving Spearfish in the Spring of 1981, Harvey and I stayed in contact, or should I say Harvey kept in touch with me, every time I would think about calling Harvey, he would call me before I had the chance to call him. Harvey’s calls were always different than any other calls I would ever receive, Harvey never called to talk about himself, he always called to check on me and more importantly my family. After every call I got from Harvey, I always found myself wondering why I hadn’t taken the time to find out how Harvey and his family were doing. In the 90’s when I had started a fairly significant company in the Floppy disk replication business, Harvey tried hard to convince me and my partners to move the company headquarters to South Dakota, he made arrangements for a trip that flew me to Sioux Falls and Spearfish where I met with City and State Government officials who wanted to do anything they could to get us to move our company, I was all for it but my partners just didn’t think it made sense. That trip was the first time that I realized what a great business builder and supporter of local communities Harvey was. Later in the 90’s Harvey became be a state legislator and ultimately the Speaker of the State House of Representatives and many thought he would end up as Governor.
Here’s where the story gets interesting, throughout the 90’s Harvey called me on a regular basis and as usual was only interested in checking on me and my family, and again I always wondered why I never asked about Harvey and his family. Harvey never missed a beat calling including throughout 1995 and 1996 which I would later find out was a very difficult time for Harvey, even though he didn’t mention his challenge even once to me during his calls of 1995 and 1996. In July of 1995, when a newborn colt jumped into an 8-foot pond, Harvey’s wife Joy jumped in to save the colt. While trying to save the colt, Joy’s heart suddenly failed, Harvey rushed to her side and began mouth to mouth resuscitation. Harvey and Joy’s son, Bart, rushed to find additional help, calling an ambulance. Bart returned to his mother’s side and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on her. Father and son together fought to save Joy’s life. The massive heart failure pushed her into a coma. Harvey stood by Joy’s hospital bed as she lay comatose for a month, fighting for her life. Because of his constancy and commitment to his wife’s life, even as doctor’s began discussing terminating life support, Harvey’s devotion remained unmoved. He was determined to see his wife awake again.
Joy awoke from her coma. Her recovery from the massive heart damage would entail months of hospitalization and therapy. Joy did recover, and today she is living with her family even though doctor’s had believed she would not live. Harvey and his family made a commitment to Joy’s life and it was that commitment that saved her. Harvey is truly incredible and an inspiration, even while faced with incredible turbulence in his own life he still found time to call and check on me and my family without mentioning the challenges of his own family.
I found about Joy’s accident and illness in the summer of 1997, I had done quite well with my sales career and had taken 3 weeks off to travel the west with my wife and two young children. I had a tire blow out on my 31 foot RV that was towing an SUV as I was driving down a mountain in Wyoming at 80 plus miles per hour, while it scared the heck out of me, I was able to pull the vehicle to the shoulder and get the help that was needed to tow the RV to Spearfish, South Dakota. The first thing I thought of was, I am going to call Harvey to tell him how successful I have been and how much fun I was having taking a long vacation with my incredibly healthy family. Of course, I would also have to tell him of the trauma caused by the one day delay in our trip because of the flat tire. I called Harvey and of course Harvey was thrilled to hear from me and offered to take me to lunch. While having lunch, I bragged about my success and the health of my family and could tell Harvey was sincerely happy for everything that had come my way. I finally had made it a point that this time I was going to ask Harvey about his family, I did and he finally opened up and told me Joy’s story. I can’t tell you what a wake up call that was, I was so caught up with myself that I had forgotten about those who had done so much for me over the years. Harvey was always there to check on me, to lend me advice and be sure my family was doing well and I never returned the favor. Inspirational people like Harvey help remind us of what is important and most importantly their stories remind us of how trivial most of our daily issues are. I have spoken way too often in this blog about the challenges I have faced financially over the past three years, but my family is healthy and while we had a very tough time with the death of my mother in-law, none of our daily challenges come close to those of the people who have shown up in my life like Harvey Krautschun, Terry Lyles, Marian Braun and Kathlyn Hunt. I want to share more with you about the people who have inspired me and continue to inspire me on a daily basis. I hope their stories will inspire you and help you realize that challenges of any size are manageable and that miracles do occur when you KNOW they will.
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