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Published: April 11, 2008 11:30 am
Cover story: A team united; a team of many
Originally published in the April 4, 2008, print edition.
By Kevin Schulz
The Land Editor
Teamwork.
That’s the strength that the 1982-83 Minnesota Future Farmers of America officer team had going for them.
“It was really hard to find a picture of just the six of us (state officers),” said Steve Koziolek, president of that team. “Every picture we could find had us with a number of the regional vice presidents. ... we looked at ourselves as a team of 14.”
In addition to the six state officers, there were also eight regional vice presidents chosen to lead the state FFA organization.
“We often split up the state and we all worked together to do camps, the goodwill tour,” said Carolyn Koziolek, wife of Steve and reporter on the 1982-83 officer team as Carolyn McNamara.
Audrey Westergren-Skoczen remembers the time that the team spent together, especially their first summer as officers.
“We practically lived together,” said the vice president from that team in her pre-hyphenated days. “We would just jam into cars and head off to the camps we were doing. ... it was a lot like being siblings, obviously there were disagreements, but we really gelled.”
Joining the Kozioleks and Westergren-Skoczen on that state officer team were David Starch, Kevin Krieger and Ray Pliscott. Serving as regional vice presidents that year were Kent Rockstad of Ada, Barb Thesing of Brainerd, Brian Haugen of Hawley, Mark Nelson of Rush City, Lisa Lippert of Danube, Lori Jones of Lake Crystal, Kevin Kaiser of Blue Earth and Kristine Knudson of Houston.
Though the 14 people mentioned above made Minnesota FFA click that year, this feature will focus on the Kozioleks, Westergren, Starch, Krieger and Pliscott.
Pliscott says it’s fun to think back to his FFA days, and wonder.
“I probably would not be where I’m at right now if I hadn’t joined FFA,” he said. “It helped me build up courage to take chances. ... if you don’t succeed, it doesn’t mean that you failed.”
Westergren-Skoczen lived that motto, as she didn’t make the cut her first try at being a state officer. “It’s hard to step up to the plate after failing because you might fail again ... the best lessons are the ones when you get your knees kicked out from under you.”
Achieving a state officer position on her second try gave Westergren-Skoczen a greater appreciation for the office, since she knew how hard the process actually was.
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Steve Koziolek, President
Many personal builders stress the importance of making and writing down your goals. Steve Koziolek did just that, and he accomplished everything on it.
“I remember going to Greenhand Camp in October and a month later the state officers came around and they talked about all you could do, and they encouraged us to write down our goals,” Koziolek remembers from his freshman year in high school at Wells-Easton.
He went home and wrote a goal sheet that looked something like this:
• Be a chapter officer as a junior
• Be a district officer
• Be district president
• Be state president
• Run for national office.
“Why I only put ‘run for national office’ and not ‘get a national office,’ I don’t know.”
So it looked like the young Koziolek had his FFA future planned. The only problem was, he forgot all about the list. “About 10 years ago I was going through some stuff and ran across a notebook and found this list. I had forgotten all about writing these things down.”
Obviously he made a strong mental note of each of the items on the list because he scored a 100 percent on accomplishment.
After graduating from Wells-Easton, Koziolek attended the University of Minnesota-Waseca, also serving as District 14 president that the time. After that year, he decided to transfer to the St. Paul campus of the U of M, and he also contemplated a run at state FFA office.
“I remember a group of guys at Waseca ... they encouraged me to run,” he said. “It was the best decision in my life.”
Koziolek claims to have been a naive farm boy. “What FFA has allowed me to do and gotten me to do is unbelievable.”
He vividly remembers a trip he and Westergren-Skoczen took to the nation’s capital, where he was front-and-center mere feet from then-President Ronald Reagan as he gave a Rose Garden speech.
That memory would never have happened had he not joined FFA, which he saw as a “natural” for him. There were eight children in the Luverne and Mary Koziolek family, and Steve said being in 4-H wasn’t an option due to the number of siblings and the distance from town. “We lived eight miles from town, and back then that was quite a distance that you didn’t just run to town for everything.”
Koziolek remembers the FFA adviser of his older brothers coming out to the farm, and that piqued the younger Koziolek’s interest. “FFA became my way to get involved.”
And get involved he did. Despite adviser turnover at the Wells-Easton chapter (three different advisers during Koziolek’s four years of high school) the chapter remained strong. He credits the groundwork laid by each of those advisers — Don Nickel, Bill Arndorfer and Dale McGee.
“Each one had a good plan so that when the new adviser came in he could just pick up where the previous one left off.” Koziolek actually had a fourth adviser, Ken Reckard, who was the Wells-Easton adviser when Steve made his state officer run.
Wells-Easton FFAers reaped the benefits of that strength, and Koziolek hopped right in to take advantage of all he could. He participated in parliamentary procedure contests as well as livestock judging and mechanical ag contests. “Mech. ag was big at our school so I got involved in that.”
Koziolek has remained active in the organization through the state FFA Foundation, serving on the board for nine years, two as chairman. He would probably still be on the board, but he can’t.
“We really overhauled the structure of the board, and part of that was to put term limits on board members.”
Another bright spot that he points to was the board hiring Val Aarsvold as executive director of the foundation.
“Historically the foundation had been raising about $30,000 per year and we need to be closer to about a half million,” he said. That number is now close to $300,000, Koziolek said.
“The crowning moment was to work with the State Fair and the State Fair Foundation to get the Miracle of Birth Center and FFA Chapter House built,” he said. CHS Inc., Christensen Farms, AgStar Financial Services, Minnesota Pork Board, Minnesota Soybean Growers and Minnesota Corn Growers were major financial contributors to the center.
“This keeps the ag connection at the State Fair ... it also gives FFAers a place where they can go to meet.”
After Koziolek completed his term as state FFA president he continued his education at the U of M, graduating with an ag economics degree in 1985. He has spent most of his career in the crop protection field, with the exception of four years he spent in retail. He has worked with Ciba Geigy and 13 years in the BASF system “mostly in sales and marketing.”
Koziolek has been with Rosen’s Inc. for the past five years, currently as manager of the northern business unit which includes Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin. He manages sales people in those areas.
Not bad for a guy who wasn’t even going to go to college. “I wasn’t planning on going to college, but then I was working at the lumberyard in Wells and Bud Warmka talked me into going to college.”
Koziolek believes he would be working in agriculture in some capacity, but he doesn’t think he’d be where he’s at without FFA.
“I really have an affinity for agriculture, so I would have been in ag some how, or construction.
“Ag is a great place to live and work,” he said. “I think we’re in those days we were always talking about.”
Audrey Westergren-Skoczen, Vice President
Audrey Westergren was growing up in a special time for a young lady.
“That was in an era of getting girls into FFA,” Westergren-Skoczen said of her early years at Bertha-Hewitt High School.
She remembers the summer before she was to be a high school freshman and Dale Howe, B-H FFA adviser paid a visit.
“He made it out to visit every student coming into high school to do recruitment for FFA and the vo-ag program,” she said.
Westergren-Skoczen didn’t need too hard of a push, “home economics wasn’t my first choice.”
She was involved in the family’s dairy farm near Bertha, and her parents were supportive of what she wanted to do “but they didn’t push us.”
Wayne Westergren, Audrey’s father, was one of the founders of the B-H FFA alumni chapter.
As where most first-year FFAers get their feet wet by participating in the Creed contest, Westergren-Skoczen dove in to dairy judging instead. “We (dairy judging team) qualified for state when I was a freshman, so Mr. Howe wouldn’t let me be in the creed contest,” she said, “he wanted to get everyone involved.”
Westergren-Skoczen also took part in the parliamentary procedure contest; “that was a riot.”
She credits Dale Howe’s leadership with planting the seed for her to pursue leadership roles in the B-H chapter and beyond. She spent two years as chapter reporter before becoming chapter president her senior year. She spent the year after high school graduation, 1980-81, as regional vice president.
“My personality meshed with some of the leadership skills that FFA taught,” she said.
FFA also provided Westergren-Skoczen with experiences she never thought possible (refer back to Steve Koziolek’s entry for one such experience).
“When I was a sophomore in high school, there were two of us who wanted to do the Work Experiences Abroad program,” she said. Well, here came Mr. Howe again to the rescue. “He took six of us on a 16-day trek to Europe. That was just a wonderful experience ... we visited the farm of a relative of one gal who went with us.”
Westergren-Skoczen said that was a good experience of having to work together as a team. “We had to have fundraisers to be able to go, so we all had to work together.”
Setting her sights on a state office was helped along by the exposure to visiting state officer teams. “I remember when the team with Jack LaValla and Sue Bronk (1979-80 team) came around; they really made an impression on me,” she said. Neal Cronin of Motley was on that same officer team and he was from the same FFA district as Westergren-Skoczen.
“He tracked me down when I was at St. Cloud State, he was over at St. John’s, he didn’t want me to regret not trying again.” You see, Westergren-Skoczen already had an unsuccessful run for state office under her belt. “I had thought about not running again.”
Obviously she decided to run again, and this time with better results. It’s a move she doesn’t regret.
“It was hard work, and you learned that this is responsibility and you need to take it on and it doesn’t matter if you’re tired.”
Westergren-Skoczen admits the most tiring part of being a state officer may have been the process to become a state officer. “That was the most strenuous thing I’ve ever done. It was tough and it was intentional,” she recalls. “The team-building started during that process.”
That was evident during her successful run as she exited an interview that she felt went poorly. “I came out feeling pretty bad, and I remember Steve Koziolek coming up to me, I didn’t even know him before this, but he came up to me and basically said, ‘you need to stay in the game’.”
Koziolek said he doesn’t remember that exchange, but it obviously made a lasting impression on Westergren-Skoczen. “I was raised with compassion for others and that was strengthened through FFA,” Koziolek said. “If she (Westergren-Skoczen) remembered that (incident), that’s what’s important.”
Westergren-Skoczen has made a career of helping people, after graduating from SCSU with degrees in mass communications and criminal justice “where my interests were.”
Her first year out of college was spent as a volunteer coordinator at the Central Minnesota Sexual Center. “It was a program that offered 24-hour crisis line and support groups,” she said. “It was pretty intense.”
That lead to a job at the St. Cloud Children’s Home in adolescent residential treatment.
Both of these experiences lead her to working with victims’ assistance with the Stearns County attorney where she spent 14 years. “Then it came time for me to do something different.”
That something different came in the form of customer service project coordinator with the St. Cloud Marco office. Marco provides a wide array of office solutions for any business — copiers, printers, document management, data networking, security solutions, among others.
“I’m still using all of my FFA skills — organization, communication skills and problem solving,” she said.
“My role is when a project has been sold, the paperwork comes to me and we start putting the plan together. .. it’s an interesting job; I’ve learned a lot.”
In addition to her work career, Westergren-Skoczen has been director of vacation bible school at Grace Church in St. Cloud for seven years. “Last year we had 80 kids and 60 volunteers,” she said. “That’s a direct connection to what we did as the team of FFA state officers.”
Audrey and her husband, Terry, live on an acreage near Rice with their sons Josh, 13, and Matthew, 10.
“In all honesty I don’t think they know about FFA, but I’ll encourage them to look into it when they get old enough.”
Kevin Krieger, Treasurer
FFA provided Kevin Krieger a way to do something that he really enjoyed and connected with.
“I really thought that I would be a farmer,” Krieger said. Being raised on a farm with five sisters, what else would a south central Minnesota boy think?
Well, that all changed late in the summer before Krieger entered his senior year at Blue Earth High School.
“My dad had had a heart attack and he was recovering from that, and then he was killed in a farm accident,” he said. “That turned my world upside down.”
The dream to farm was extinguished as his mother, Berniece, decided to sell off the farm equipment. Loren Krieger had always rented their farmland.
“I had to decide what to do,” Kevin said.
The first thing to do was to complete his senior year of high school, and toward the end of that school year, he decided to make a run at a state FFA office.
He made it on that first try.
“It was an honor to be elected. At the time I was wondering why I even did that. It was kind of like that song ‘What Was I Thinking?’,” he said. “Could I have done better? Yes, but it was one of the things that kept me going and I needed that.”
Krieger admits that if he would have waited another year, he probably would not have run for a state office.
During the year that Krieger served as a state officer, he was also attending the University of Minnesota-Waseca, before transferring to Mankato State University, where he graduated with a degree in industrial technology with the possibility to teach.
While attending MSU, Krieger and his wife, Margaret, got married.
“I worked my way through school,” he said. Though it may have taken him a little longer, he is proud to say that he had no debt at the end of his college education. He did this by working for a Blue Earth-area farmer as well as working at Green Giant, now Seneca, in Blue Earth.
Then in 1996, Margaret’s uncle who was involved in a Blue Earth John Deere dealership asked if Kevin was interested in selling farm equipment. Krieger has been a salesman at Detke Morbac Co. ever since.
Having always seen the importance of agriculture, Krieger believes he would still be in a rural community even without his FFA involvement.
“FFA exposed me to so many things that I wouldn’t have seen,” he said. He talks of how his high school FFA adviser, Ernie Wingen, taught them how to candle eggs.
“He knew a lot about poultry, and we probably didn’t think too much about it at the time, but maybe now I have a greater appreciation for poultry.”
FFA also got Krieger to Washington, D.C., and an exposure to girls outside of his home school. He speaks of an exposure uncommon to most teenage males.
“I got to meet these young women who were going to be the leaders in agriculture and in business.”
Krieger admits he lived and breathed FFA. “My mom tells of how she would hear me in the shower reciting the Creed and all of the officer parts.”
Blue Earth High School boasted a strong FFA program at the time that Krieger was joining the ranks. That strength was evident on that 1982-83 officer team with Krieger as the state treasurer and fellow chapter member Kevin Kaiser as Region VII vice president.
In Krieger’s early FFA days he served as his chapter’s safety chairman. In that role he and a few other chapter members would visit area farms to perform safety inspections. The FFA members would point out potential safety hazards on area farms.
“After we had been doing these for awhile, (FFA adviser) Ernie Wingen approached me and said ‘well you little bugger’,” Krieger recalled. “I thought we were in trouble. But here he was just telling me that we had won some national award for promotion of farm safety.” That enabled the then-sophomore Krieger to stroll across the stage at the National FFA convention in Kansas City to pick up that award on behalf of the chapter.
Krieger can’t say enough about FFA as an organization and as a leadership tool.
“I really respected the way the organization was operated,” he said. “You didn’t have to be a farm kid, you didn’t need to be tall, good looking, you didn’t need to be a boy. ... the average person could be involved.”
After living the benefits of FFA, Krieger hopes that his two children, Monica, 12, and Brian, 9, have the opportunity to also live the FFA dream. “I could see them doing something leadership-wise.”
Carolyn McNamara Koziolek, Reporter
Back in 1982-83, girls belonging to FFA was still kind of a novelty. No one bothered to tell that to the girls at Goodhue High School.
“There was a group of girls two years older than I was and they really got involved in FFA ... some of these were neighbor girls, we really had some good role models.”
McNamara also credits her supportive parents, as well as Dennis Schmidt and Lee Thompson, her FFA advisers. “I appreciate the time they (the advisers) put in. ... now as an adult I really appreciate what they did for the students.”
Following the role models’ example, McNamara got involved in as much as she could in the Goodhue chapter. She took part in meat judging for many years, dairy judging, creed speaking, as well as chapter activities such as the annual corn drive for Camp Courage and fruit sales.
As a junior she served as her chapter’s reporter, and vice president as a senior. She also served as district vice president her senior year.
Becoming a state officer was a goal, but it would have to wait.
Rather than run for state office during the spring of her senior year in high school, she waited until the spring of her freshman year at the University of Minnesota. “I think I needed to get a year of college out of the way,” she said. “I think I was much more ready than if I would have tried the year earlier.”
She also was serving as the Goodhue County Dairy Princess during her freshman year in college, and that came with its own obligations and time commitments.
McNamara felt that the state officer team meshed together well. “We all had our different personalities, but we all complemented each other.”
Her days as an FFA member and that year as a state officer prepared her for her future. “I really think FFA taught me not to be afraid to step out and try something and not be afraid to succeed or to fail,” she said.
Having graduated from the U of M with a degree in agricultural education, she taught ag business and animal science for one year at Northeast Nebraska Technical College in Norfolk, Neb.
After that one year in Nebraska, she returned to Minnesota and took a job for three years as a bookkeeper at the Elk River True Value. After that stint she spent eight years in the accounting department at Education Alternatives in Bloomington.
During her years at Education Alternatives she went back to take night classes at the U of M. In 1997 she took her certified public accountant exam. At about this same time McNamara and her husband, Steve Koziolek, decided to move to Northfield, and that meant McNamara would be looking for work.
“I saw an ad in the paper” that Minnesota Ag Group had an opening. Minnesota Ag Group is a full-line Case IH dealer with locations in Kasson, Northfield and Plainview. She has been controller for Minnesota Ag Group since 1997.
“I’m glad that I can utilize my ag background and my bookkeeping skills. ... I always had a strong interest in the numbers’ side of things and ag ed prepared me to bring the numbers into agriculture.”
Carolyn and Steve are making a conscience effort to expose their daughter, Nicole, 6, to the world of agriculture, and you had better believe the FFA seed will be planted.
The family makes regular visits to the Goodhue area to see farming up close on Carolyn’s home farm where her parents, Charles and Dorothy, are still farming.
“Nicole likes riding in the combine and I still enjoy driving the combine,” Steve said.
Carolyn’s sister, Shannon, and husband, Lyle Dicke, also farm in the Goodhue area.
“Mom was a good role model for us to be involved in farming ... that’s where the money was coming from, so why not be involved,” she said. She and her sister grew up helping on the farm “doing whatever had to be done, milking cows or whatever.”
She started giving back to FFA, helping to get the metro area FFA alumni chapter established.
Carolyn Koziolek can’t stress the importance of FFA enough. “I think FFA opened your eyes to what careers were out there. You can do different things,” she said. “You don’t need to make decisions right now that this is what you’re going to do for the next 25 years.
“FFA gave me confidence, and the leadership opportunities gave me confidence to be assertive.”
Ray Pliscott, Sentinel
If anyone had an excuse to give up, it would have been Ray Pliscott.
An incident on his family’s dairy farm in early October of 1980 could have set him back, but instead it propelled him to not have a “pity party.”
The fall after he graduated from Chisago Lakes High School, Pliscott was moving dirt with a skidloader when he was tipped out of the unit. His leg got caught between the bucket and the skidloader body, and then the skidloader bucked back.
That accident left him in the hospital for six weeks, during which time his leg was amputated near the knee. It also left him with a different outlook on life.
“Since this happened in the fall I saw all the people coming in from farm accidents and motorcycle accidents, and saw all these families just a bunch of pity people,” he said. “That gave me the incentive to get out of there and get going. I had to get out of there. ... Life is too short to pity yourself.”
Pliscott’s determination led to this abbreviated timeline:
Accident occurred Oct. 4, 1980; leg was amputated in November, got prosthetic leg in December; back milking cows in January 1981.
“That’s the way we were raised,” Pliscott said. “You just get to work.”
Pliscott learned that “no-pity” and “get-back-to-work” attitude from his parents Ray and Betty. Also being the No. 7 child in a total of 13 forced all of the Pliscott children to adopt that same attitude.
Pliscott thanks his parents for instilling the work ethic that was necessary for him to get through his accident and to pursue his FFA career.
He remembers his dad working two jobs to give the family “everything we needed.”
“A lot of it comes from home,” he said. “Parents taught that you are responsible for your actions. ... getting involved in FFA got me out there.”
Pliscott believes that any parent has done all that they can to raise their children by the time the child turns 15; “after that, it’s up to you (the child) to make the right choices.”
Pliscott made the choice to join FFA and get involved.
Even though his parents taught him to get out and get involved, it was his exposure to chapter and district officers that really piqued his interest in higher yearnings. “Their enthusiasm was pretty exciting,” he remembers. “I didn’t think about being a state officer until I was a district officer. Then I met the state officers and they really made an impression on me.”
That impression and the “no-pity” attitude helped Pliscott reach his state office goal. “My accident didn’t faze me; it just drove me to prove that I could do it even with a handicap.”
That handicap didn’t hold him back from achieving the state FFA office, and it hasn’t held him back in life either.
“At times it’s hard ... I can’t run with the kids,” he said, “but then you see someone 10 times worse off than you. I don’t think I have it too bad.”
Pliscott took off his first year out of high school before attending the University of Minnesota-Waseca. After UMW, he went into dairy farming, which he did until 1995. “When I was farming I thought that I would be doing that for the rest of my life.”
Obviously that didn’t work out. After quitting dairy farming Pliscott spent three years driving truck. That wasn’t quite for him and he moved into business as management. In January he became production manager for Custom Rock International in St. Paul, a company that makes concrete form liners to create patterns for laying concrete.
“Leadership activities really shape the type of person you are in the future,” he said. “A lot of my team-building at work came from working with the FFA team.”
Without FFA, Pliscott believes he wouldn’t be where he is currently. “I probably would have stayed in ag. I wouldn’t have been in management.”
It’s funny how a single incident can change one’s life path. Before the skidloader accident, Pliscott planned on going to North Dakota State University to study law.
Pliscott does not have harbor any regrets about where his career has taken him, because as he says, he has it pretty good.
He and his wife, Tammie, live in Osceola, Wis., with Ashley, 13, Amber and Laura, 12, and Johnathon, 5. “I wish I could raise the kids on a farm with some cows and some crop acres” to instill that connection to agriculture and the land.
Closing remarks
“I needed FFA more than it needed me,” Kevin Krieger said, looking back on that time in his life.
He encourages youth today to get involved in FFA, even if they don’t plan on farming.
“Very small percentage of us will be in production agriculture, but we all need to eat, wear clothing and drive ... everything, everyday is tied to agriculture somehow, and there are many opportunities for young people out there.”
Westergren-Skoczen encourages everyone to take advantage of any opportunity that comes their way.
“You don’t know where the road would take you,” she said. “If I hadn’t signed up for that first class, I wouldn’t have gone to Europe and probably wouldn’t have gone to college ... If I hadn’t got elected the second time I ran, I don’t think I would have been where I’m at right now.”
“Life has many intersections; the only wrong choice is not trying if your heart or head are saying you should,” she went on to say. “Life is too short to have regrets.”
Krieger also gets a little philosophical on his advice for life, “If you can’t be a Christian, at least be a humanist” and care about your fellow beings.
Koziolek is equally direct in his advice to today’s youth. “Absolutely join FFA,” he said. “There are good organizations that kids can belong to, but FFA is the premiere one.”
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David Starch, secretary on the 1982-83 state FFA officer team, respectfully declined the invitation to be featured in this article.
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