Carl Pohlad. I can’t come up with anybody who’d be a close second to him. Carl represents everything to me—a mentor, a partner, a teacher. He’s like my surrogate father, but he’s my buddy, too.
I met Carl in 1975, when I wanted to buy Grain Belt Breweries. It was the first deal I was going to do outside of our family business. I was looking for $4 million, which was all the money in the world. I didn’t know Carl, but Denny Mathisen, a lawyer who knew us both, took me to meet Carl at five o’clock one afternoon. Denny said, ‘Irwin, Carl does not like long stories. So make this short and sweet and get to the point.’
About 15 minutes into the presentation, Carl said, ‘You’d better stop.’ I said, ‘You don’t like this, Mr. Pohlad?’ He said, ‘No, this one you’ve got. Go look for the next one.’ I walked out of his office, turned to Denny and said, ‘Did this really happen, or was it a dream?’ Denny said, ‘That’s the way he does business, Irwin.’ That was the last deal where Carl was my banker; we became business partners after that.
But business aside, I have so much admiration and respect for this human being. Carl has quietly been very philanthropic and has been more meaningful to our society than he’ll ever get credit for. He is clearly the epitome of what I consider to be the number-one person in the Twin Cities business community.
