The Journey of Gene Sit

There is plenty of drama in Eugene Sit’s personal history: his kidnapping as a child in China; his mother’s five-year imprisonment as a capitalist when Mao Zedong’s revolution carried the day in 1949; family fortunes earned, lost, and earned again. Sit knows that magazine writers salivate over such stories, but that isn’t what he wants to talk about just now.

As he bursts into a conference room belonging to his firm, Sit Investment Associates, Inc., on the 33rd floor of the IDS Center in Minneapolis, 68-year-old Sit is crackling with 28-year-old energy about something else. What he wants to discuss is neither his family’s saga nor his company, founded on a shoestring 25 years ago and now Minnesota’s 10th-largest asset management firm, with $6.6 billion under management. Before he even settles into a chair, he wants to plug the Minnesotans’ Military Appreciation Fund.  

"For three generations, over a 150-year time span, we have confirmed what is possible in America," Sit says. "My grandparents did it, my dad did it, and I did it. Our philosophy is that you never do anything half-heartedly, and you never take no for an answer."

Sit is a cofounder and driving force behind the fund, a nonprofit entity launched in 2005 to give cash grants to all Minnesotans who have served in a combat zone since September 11, 2001, and to the families of those killed in action. The fund takes no political position on the wisdom or conduct of the war in Iraq. It simply gives money to service people as a way to say thanks. According to another cofounder and board member Skip Krawczyk, CEO of Transport Distribution Services, Inc., in Shoreview, Sit not only organized the effort but contributed the first $1 million.

In terms of lip service, American military personnel now serving abroad may be the most supported soldiers in the history of human warfare, with “We support the troops” a universal refrain chanted from every point on the political spectrum. The Minnesotans’ Military Appreciation Fund was born, essentially, because Gene Sit was unwilling to settle for lip service. His son Roger attended the U.S. Air Force Academy and spent six years serving as an officer, in part because “we felt strongly that every middle-class family should have someone serve in the military,” Sit says.