(gentle music) - [Host] On this episode of "Postcards" - He always said, "Save some money, "so when the time is right, you can invest."

He was a great believer in planning and making sure that he wasn't late with what he needed to have to make progress.

- I know a lot of people that have collections and my big thing is, if you've got a collection, show it off.

- So this is my office and yes, the patents are part of the projects that I worked on for over 27 years than I've been at 3M.

(upbeat techno music) - [Announcer] "Postcards" is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provide by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota, on the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails, and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar, an arts and cultural heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in west central Minnesota, on the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music, plus your favorite hits, 96.7 kram, online at 967kram.com.

(peaceful music) - [Carol] Archie Bush was the second executive, along with William McKnight, to build the 3M company.

(peaceful piano music) He joined the company very early, when it was a very struggling organization and he was paid 11 dollars and 45 cents a week as an assistant bookkeeper, but he was very good at sales and 3M was beginning to catch on after some very hard first years, so he and McKnight built this massive company to a world corporation.

(peaceful music) Archie also did another very important thing is when he decided to think about his personal wealth, he created the Bush Foundation, which has tremendous assets and has done an enormous amount of philanthropic good all over the upper Midwest.

(peaceful music) Archie Bush was born a mile south of where I am sitting right now.

He was born in Wang Township in Renville County, but he also grew up, you know, with the creek nearby and a very long wetland, which was called the Hover Stet Slew and he played with a little boy, who was a neighbor little boy and they made their first money in that slew by catching muskrats, apparently for 10 cents a muskrat, so the beginning of his career probably started with the initiative to go catch muskrats.

Archie was born on the farm and grew up in a farm family.

He liked farming.

However, he had severe hay fever, which meant by the time August came around at harvest, he was suffering terribly, and Duluth was thought to be a much better environment for anyone who had breathing issues or hay fever issues, so he chose to leave, get a very short business education in Duluth, and went to work for this little mining company.

(quiet music) Well, the reason that we are here talking about Archie Bush is that a local man named Carl Narvestad, also born in Wang Township, about two miles from where Archie Bush was born, a generation later, was a very strong local historian, and he had written, he, Carl, had written about 12 to 14 books, when he decided he needed to interview the people in Archie Bush's life and capture that history before it was gone.

He did this.

I found the manuscript written by Carl in the Granite Falls Historical Society.

I said, I think I can edit this and bring some new information in and this should not be lost.

This is too important a piece of history, not only local history, but obviously, state history and other things, as well.

So I said, "I will take this on to edit, "but it's Carl's work.

"I'm just adding and updating and finding some pictures."

(light suspenseful music) Archie was here a lot to see family members, and he had lots of Hammery cousins living in the Granite Falls area, but he also did a lot of important philanthropy for Granite Falls.

By the 1950s, he was thinking about various legacy pieces in his life, and he helped to purchase a large industrial site in Granite Falls and that is where Pluse Hydraulics and some of the other industrial companies came in.

By 1959, there were two new major companies and employers.

He was also very influential in trying to get a college or a Vo-tech school into Granite Falls and helped with that and helped guarantee some scholarship monies, and that is all separate from what he did with and through the Bush Foundation grants.

(quiet music) I think it's that he had no limits on what he thought, if he worked hard enough, he could do.

He always said, "Save some money, "so that when the time is right, you can invest."

He was a great believer in planning and making sure that he wasn't late with what he needed to have to make progress.

(light upbeat music) (suspenseful film reel music) (dinosaur roars) - [Film Narrator] Millions of years ago, huge reptiles called dinosaurs roamed the earth.

The name dinosaur means "terrible lizard."

(tense music, growling dinosaurs) - Dinosaurs in Minnesota?

Everybody says no, but they are here.

Only thing is that they are very deep.

You know, with the last, what did we have?

Three, four, glacier time periods over Minnesota here?

So every time a glacier came, it covered up more and more stuff.

So we've got dinosaur.

Just as many here as Montana or South Dakota, I think, but they're all buried, 60, 100 feet deep.

I'm sure we've got dinosaurs underneath our feet right here.

(playful upbeat electronic music) So I've been with rocks pretty much all my life.

(percussive electronic music) And I've got a sugar lump collection, some odd collections, and a week and a half ago, I bought the Big Nut, the largest nut in the world.

And it comes from two little islands out in the Indian Ocean and the biggest nut is probably around two feet in diameter and six inches thick and the one that I just purchased came from London, England.

It's probably about a foot, I'd say a foot wide and probably six inches thick and that should be here by the end of the month, so I'll be starting a nut collection, now, too.

And maybe I'm the biggest nut of them all, so... Every time I see, go out and see somebody that's got a collection that's natural history oriented, if it looks interesting, I'll start collecting it myself.

(intense electronic music) - I'll get the long-handled one.

- I got the spear.

I also need a tall shield.

- I probably started collecting funny little things as a kid.

A pretty rock, seashells if I ever found 'em, but my collecting was all just put it in a box, put it in closet, find it 10 years later and go, "Oh, wow, I remember where I found that!"

Or "I don't remember where I found that."

And I'm still kind of the pack rat of the two of us, and Larry is the guy who's the genius at displaying stuff.

I love that about him.

So I lived in the Philippines for, basically for 15 years, among people that were written up in the, I think it was the 1911 National Geographic.

The title of the whole article was, "The Headhunters of Northern Luzon."

And they really were headhunters and they were hunting human heads.

This was a spear that was give to me by a family there and I've got three other spears I've collected since then.

Probably the most interesting piece... (metal clangs) This is a musical instrument.

With the, uh... (laughs nervously) That's the, uh, that's the human jaw bone.

And the instrument, my mother would let, she said when I was gone, she'd go and find this thing and tap on it 'cause it has such a nice tone.

(gong rings) Every once in a while, he'll call me and say, "Come on out to the museum.

I wanna show you something."

I would never think to discourage or say, "No, you can't do that," 'cause I love what he does.

(light upbeat music) - In 2006, we put up the museum.

My most favorite thing to collect now in 2021 would be fossils.

This case here is all dinosaur bones, with the exception of one piece in here.

But these are my bonus for looking for Ammonites, when I'm cracking the rocks, looking for those Ammonites inside.

Dinosaur bone are kind of, when it's wet, they kind of turn blue, purple color, so you can see these quite a ways away.

The front row here, these are all leg bones, or what's left of the leg bones.

The middle row, two rows in there, that's pretty much all vertebraes and then there's a mixture of ribs an vertebraes, leg bones in the back.

(light upbeat music) And in this showcase, this holds some of my prize materials, especially two items I just purchased here in the last year.

This is a big egg.

It came from the elephant bird.

It came from Madagascar, northern Africa.

This bird that laid this egg died out in about 1790.

It was the last known bird.

This bird was about 10 feet tall and was related to the ostrich family.

There's only 40 eggs in the world that are not cracked like this.

And all the rest out there, they're all shells put back together again.

So there's not too many of these around.

The same person, the son of this guy that passed away, showed me this here.

It was underneath a bookshelf in his house.

The first time I saw it, it was full of dust and I thought it was a petrified log.

It's 32 pounds and it looks like a bunch of icicles, kind of all glued together.

This turns out to be a chunk of amber.

I treasure that one quite a bit because in 1995, the largest piece was found in London, England in a museum, and that piece weighed 34 pounds.

And this piece here is 32 pounds, so... (light music) - There's a rock display that just fascinates me because when he showed it to me, I thought, "Oh, those are some of the ugliest rocks I've ever seen."

And then he goes, "Wait, you wait."

And he turns off all the lights and he turns on a black light and these are amazing rocks.

They're bright orange.

They're bright yellow.

They're purple.

They're blue.

But if you look at 'em in natural light, they're just boring.

Under the black light, in the dark, they are stunning.

(light music) I would add that I am so proud of him for his talent in displaying things.

I go into a sweat when he says, "You really should get those things displayed."

And I'm going, "I don't know how to do that."

And I actually bought a big, huge showcase, an antique one, and he helped get that moved into the museum.

He says, "Now, you gotta put your horse stuff in here."

And I came out and then I put some stuff different places and I thought, "Eh, that's the best I can do."

Well he came out and tweaked it all and I go out and I look at that and I go, "How did he do that?"

And it's...

I keep telling him it's, "You have a gift.

"You have a gift and an eye and a talent for that "that is just remarkable and I love that about you."

(gentle piano music) - I'm just fascinated with natural history, anything natural history.

I'm here from Minnesota, and who'd know I'd have a big seashell collection from around the world.

I've been to Florida twice, picked up maybe three shells and that's it, but I'm very fascinated with the ocean life.

There's so much to be discovered out there yet.

Like I said, I even bought a nut.

I mean, I just never know what's gonna be popping up next in my journeys.

(light upbeat music) I know a lot of people that have collections and my big thing is, if you've got a collection, show it off, put it on the end table, or put it where people can see it and you can show it and make somebody's day, make somebody smile or laugh.

To me, that's all I do it for.

I don't do it for the money, don't do it for anything else, but it's just kind of the thrill of showing people.

(gentle piano music) (full spectrum music) (suspenseful orchestral music) - [Jayshree] When I was growing up, I never thought of myself as the science and engineering type because I wasn't up breaking up our toys, curious to understand how they work.

What I wondered about was the humans who put them together.

What were they thinking?

To me, it was always the human context that was powerful.

I knew from a young age, I wanted to do something that would solve problems, help people improve lives.

I just wanted to make the world a better place.

And in looking back, I realize that I would have never been a scientist or an engineer, had it not been for my parents' persistence.

To me, the humanities was much more interesting and exciting, but now I know science is a human endeavor, and it's one in which you can bring your whole self in, your ideas, your inspiration, your passion, your interests.

And that's exactly what I did.

(dog barks in distance) (speaking foreign language) The potato.

(frying pan sizzles) Oh, my God.

Onion smells.

My name is Jayshree Seth.

I'm a scientist at 3M and I'm also 3M's first ever Chief Science Advocate.

I do come from a family that really values education.

My great grandfather had a Master's.

I'm not sure how many people could say that.

My maternal grandfather was a physician.

My father retired as the Director of India's National Institute of Hydrology.

My mother is a college graduate.

I know that we have a long legacy of education and it was very important in the family.

So as a young family, my dad decided that we would move to a place called Roorkee and it's just an engineering town because there is this Premiere Engineering Institute.

Then there's the Irrigation Research Institute, the Army Corps of Engineers, so it was just in the water, we used to joke that everybody just has to become an engineer.

And what that meant is all the parents encouraged their kids to become engineers, even their daughters, so I did well in school.

I always liked working hard.

And it comes down to this entrance exam and I didn't get in.

I didn't get in, so I ended up in a college thousands of miles away from home in a completely different part of the country.

It's like going form Ireland to Portugal.

It's a different language, different culture, different social norms.

It was a really big change for me.

So I was in my final year and everybody was applying to go to the U.S. for graduate school.

And just in competition with the guys, you know, I also applied and this time, I got in!

And so, long story short, I ended up in the U.S. at Clarkson University in Upstate New York for my Master's in Chemical Engineering.

And in many ways, when I look back, I realize that I became trailblazer because I was the only girl in the lab.

There were 14 of us.

And I was working on a theoretical modeling project and I would look around and there were other people in the lab who were actually doing experiments.

All these years, sort of, I had never realized, what is it that I wanted.

See, I was kind of going along with what the expectations were of me.

For the first time, I started realizing the sense of, "Is this what I want to do?"

What is it that I like?

And I realized that I wanted to do experiments.

I wanted to feel that whatever I was doing was helping people.

In looking back, I feel like I was missing the human context of what I was doing.

So I decided to switch from my Master's to my PhD, my fields.

I had to start over, but somewhere deep down, I also knew that I have done this before.

I have reinvented myself many times already and I have done new things.

I'll be fine.

So, I had the opportunity to do an internship at 3M and that's when I first came to Minnesota and I thought it was a great environment and I got offered a full-time position and it was in a completely different area than my Master's or PhD.

So my PhD was in diamond-like films and I came here and I started working on closures and fasteners for disposable diapers, so I always joke that I went from diamonds to diapers.

I'd never seen a diamond.

I'd never seen a diaper.

So what's the difference?

I would envision what it would be like for a child to wear these diapers, you know, and we made them softer and softer from our closures.

And just that context and the empathy that you feel for the end user was such a critical part of the science that I was doing.

And that was so important to me.

So I was very successful in some of my early projects.

I got a lot of accolades.

I started getting noticed.

I got more and more challenging projects.

And with each one, it sort of built my confidence.

So I've had a successful career.

I've been here 27 years.

I have worked on many different product innovations.

I'm at the highest level a scientist can attain.

(gentle piano music) With my role as the Chief Science Advocate, I got the opportunity to observe people's perception of science and the relationship society has with science.

It was very interesting.

Four out of 10 said if science didn't exist, their lives would be no different.

This was shocking.

Science is all around us.

It has made our lives so much better, but we haven't communicated it for the average public to understand, and the so the more stereotypes we break, the better outcomes we're going to have because we invite more people into the world of science.

(peaceful music) So this is my office and yes, the patents are part of the projects that I worked on for over 27 years that I've been at 3M.

And I don't know if I can say there is a special or favorite patent.

It's really not about the patents.

It's about the problems we solve, and each of these patents reminds me of the people that I have collaborated with to solve those problems, so these are all very special to me.

I never thought of myself as the science type, but it turns out I am the science type.

I wanna tell the next generation of STEM students that you don't have to be what people expect from a scientist, some outdated stereotype.

As far as racial and gender equity goes, we need every idea, every diverse perspective, in order to solve problems.

In fact, that's exactly what we need more of.

Science needs you to be you.

(triumphant orchestral and vocal music) (fast acoustic guitar music) - [Man] Guess what, little baby.

- [Woman] What?

(fast acoustic guitar music) - [Man] Come here.

- [Woman] Okay.

♪ I like it when we go to the store ♪ ♪ I like it when you give me some more ♪ ♪ Baby, better close the door ♪ ♪ You know we're gonna do it for sure ♪ ♪ I like it when we go to the zoo ♪ ♪ I love everything that you do ♪ ♪ I like it when the cows go moo ♪ ♪ Moo ♪ ♪ The everything I want from you ♪ ♪ One thing that you got to do ♪ ♪ Is keep me, baby ♪ ♪ You got to keep me, baby ♪ ♪ Not trying to be creepy, baby ♪ ♪ But you got to keep me, baby ♪ ♪ I love the way you make me feel ♪ ♪ I love the way you're keepin' it real ♪ ♪ I like the way your hands, they heal ♪ ♪ Make me wanna steal that deal ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ah ♪ ♪ I love the way you feel like a shoe ♪ ♪ I love the way you eatin' my food ♪ ♪ And you're doin' them dishes too ♪ ♪ You really got me in the mood ♪ ♪ The only thing you got to do ♪ ♪ Is keep me, baby ♪ ♪ You got to keep me, baby ♪ ♪ Not trying to be needy, baby ♪ ♪ 'Cause you have got keep me, baby ♪ - Trumpet.

♪ Bow, be deep deep bew bew ♪ That's not a trumpet.

♪ Be-be be be-be, be be-be, be be-be bow, bow ♪ ♪ Be bow, be de-lip be bow, be bow ♪ ♪ Be de-lip lip bow ♪ ♪ Ah bow bow bow ♪ ♪ You can't wait for nothing ♪ ♪ But you will feel the fire ♪ ♪ You can join the choir ♪ ♪ But all that I require ♪ ♪ Is you keep me, baby ♪ ♪ Got to keep me, baby ♪ ♪ Come on, keep me ♪ (upbeat techno music) - [Announcer] "Postcards" is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota, on the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year-round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails, and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar, an arts and cultural heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in west central Minnesota, on the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music, plus your favorite hits, 96.7 kram, online at 967kram.com.

(upbeat music) (electronic beeps)