Milestone Ahead for Junior Achievement

Mike Molander, president of Rockford Protoform LLC, was a wee teenager when his father, a midlevel manager at J.I. Case, told him he was going to take part in Junior Achievement.

“This was the early 1960s, back when your dad told you to do something, you did it,” Molander said. He was dreading the program, “but it was great. It was like a real business. We learned how to start a company from scratch. Pick a board, elect a president, a treasurer, pick someone to run the manufacturing side, and we had to analyze, produce and sell the product.”

Molander said the last thing was the only part of the program he hated.

“Sales. I was lucky, I had a lot of family and that got me going, but it was tough once I ran out of aunts and uncles to sell to,” he said. “Today, sales is something I have to do a lot of.”

Molander is one of perhaps thousands of locals who have gone through Junior Achievement of Rock River Valley. The organization is celebrating its 50th anniversary next April and Larry Messing of South Beloit, who has headed the organization since October 2005, is asking for JA alumni such as Molander to send him their memories. You can find a link at rockford.ja.org.

The Rock River Valley JA chapter covers an area of 5,500 students in Winnebago, Boone, Ogle and Stephenson counties. More than 250 volunteers take part yearly.

Molander hadn’t thought about Junior Achievement in years until seeing a call for JA alumni memories through the Rockford Chamber of Commerce. He went to the Web site and was impressed.

“They are teaching globalization and working with the manufacturers council and Rock Valley College,” he said. “They’ve done a good job of keeping it relevant to the times.”

Messing said after the group finishes its anniversary celebration, he hopes to bring back another Junior Achievement tradition, the Rockford Business Hall of Fame. The program ran from 1989 to 2002 when, Messing said, he was told by the past president that the recession seriously cut into Junior Achievement’s funding.

“We still need to work with the former director (Tim Coffey, who is working in Iowa) to find what he has, and we definitely need a place willing to display it,” Messing said.

JA inducted business leaders yearly from 1989 to 1996 and then switched to every other year for 1998, 2000 and 2002. In all, 52 people were chosen and they include many of the big names from the area’s industrial past, such as Atwood, Woodward, Colman, Aldeen and Behr. If Messing relaunches the Hall of Fame, I have a couple of suggestions. Few business people have been more influential in the 1990s and 2000s than Sunil Puri, president of First Rockford Group, which is the area’s largest developer of commercial and residential real estate.

A second “slam dunk” inductee would be Jon Lundin, longtime president of the Abilities Center and a passionate champion of revitalizing Rockford’s manufacturing-heavy economy. Lundin, who died in May, grew the Abilities Center from an agency relying on government subsidies to one that brought in its own revenue and acted as a small business incubator.