U.S. ELECTIONS | Guide to the 2008 Election
30 November 2007
Many Famous Americans Hail from Minnesota 1st
District has produced statesmen and industry giants
Minnesota's 1st Congressional District has been home to leaders in business, medicine and government. Information on some of the district’s most well-known “favorite sons” follows.
Walter Mondale was born in 1928 in the Minnesota 1st District town of Ceylon. A lifelong Democrat, he served in the U.S. Senate from 1967 to 1976, as U.S. vice president from 1977 to 1981 in the Carter administration and U.S. ambassador to Japan from 1993 to 1997. A military veteran and attorney, Mondale also served as Minnesota's attorney general from 1960 to 1964. He currently is a lawyer at a large firm headquartered in Minneapolis.
Richard Sears, co-founder of the giant retail company Sears, was born in 1863 in the 1st District's Stewartville. In 1886, when the 23-year-old was working for a railroad company, he received permission from a watch manufacturer to sell goods that had been refused by a Minnesota retailer. From that humble beginning arose the R.W. Sears Watch Company, which by 1893 evolved into the Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck and Company -- one of the 20th century’s largest retailers.
William Worrall Mayo was born in the United Kingdom in 1819 but went on to found one of world’s most famous medical clinics in the Minnesota 1st. By the late 1800s, the doctor had settled in Minnesota and raised two sons who also became doctors. When an 1883 tornado devasted Rochester, Minnesota, the Mayos and local Catholic nuns organized treatment for the injured in a private medical practice that became the not-for-profit Mayo Clinic in 1919.
Frank Kellogg, a New York native who moved to Minnesota in 1865, taught himself law, history, Latin and German with the aid of borrowed textbooks and established a successful law practice. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Kellogg as a Justice Department prosecutor, launching a political career that included service as a U.S. senator (and one of the few Republicans who supported ratification of the Treaty of Versailles), U.S. ambassador to Great Britain and U.S. secretary of state during the Coolidge administration.
George Hormel was born in Buffalo, New York, but settled in Austin, Minnesota, where he established his meat packing company in 1891. That company, Geo. A. Hormel & Co., developed the world's first canned ham in 1926, and in 1927 initiated a unique distribution system for its products involving vans driven by salesmen who sold and delivered products on specific routes rather than relying on distribution by refrigerated railroad cars. The company, which now has facilities and distribution centers across the United States, is known for inventing the luncheon meat Spam, first produced in 1937.
