No more frozen fingers in retirement

For Wendell Sohn, 47 plus three was the magic number for retirement.

Forty-seven is the number of years hes been in the business, and three is how many fingers he froze atop an electrical pole where he was repairing a connection last winter.

I wasnt going through that again, he said, choosing to enter retirement before the frigid winter cold arrives again.

At about 10:30 a.m. on a Wednesday two weeks ago, he finished the last of his commitments in a career that started with an appliance repair course in 1964. Sohn had no desire to repair appliances, but there were no electrician courses offered at the vocational school in Jackson at the time.

Sohn worked for a year in Mankato in appliance repair, but when his girlfriend, Carol Sawyer a Jackson native who is now his wife told Sohn an electrician course would be offered in Jackson, he came back and signed up.

Thats what I always wanted to do, he said. I had an older brother that was an electrician too. I always kind of looked up to him.

Fresh out of school, Sohn took a job with Joe Veverka at Jackson Electric in 1967. Hes been an electrician here ever since.

On Jan. 1, 1976, Sohn bought out Veverka and opened Sohn Electric, with Carol keeping the books. The husband-wife business partnership must have worked, because were still together, Sohn said.

Corn dryers, shops, machine sheds and additional electrical capacity were the mainstays of Sohn Electric.

We did mostly farm work, which is more like industrial work nowadays with the size of farmers, Sohn said.

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No more frozen fingers in retirement