April 30, 2003 cont'd
The story of the "perfect return" to West Point might be told by West Point native Dan Steffen and his wife Christy (who was born in Osceola, Nebraska). Dan grew up in West Point, he graduated and went off to college in Kearney, Nebraska, where he met Christy; he majored in accounting and took a job as an accountant in Kansas City. It took about eight months for the big city to lose its attractiveness for Dan.
Both of Dan's parents had been born in the West Point area - his dad's father had been a farmer, his mother's father and three or four of his father's brothers had owned service stations in the area. "I have a German background all the way through, I'm stubborn as hell my wife says," Dan reported.
Dan and Christy became engaged while he was living in Kansas City and she was living in Grand Island. "We decided that when we married, we didn't want to live in Kansas City. We lived in Grand Island for a year. We moved to Hastings, Nebraska, and lived there from 1992 to 1997. I worked for a CPA in Hastings for a while, and then as assistant controller for a highway contractor. Christy had a job as a bank examiner for the government and traveled a lot. Our last three or four years in Hastings we talked about the possibility of moving to West Point - she had gotten to know a lot of my friends back here. We'd be back here four or five times a year. If the chance ever came up, we thought about moving. The question was - could we both land good jobs in West Point? We'd talked about it - if I could get the job as controller at Wimmers, that would be ideal. I've known that family forever, they're one of the top employers in town."
"We were back here about six years ago," he continued, "we were chatting with some friends about the possibility of moving back here. We went home, our friends were talking to some other friends about us, the wife worked at Wimmers. She said, 'The controller at Wimmers is retiring.' That was on Sunday night, and they called me right away. The next day I called Wimmers and was asking about it. About a week later, the president - whom I knew - called me up and kind of got the ball rolling."
"Two or three months prior to that," Dan said, "my alumni newsletter sent out a survey asking whether we'd ever be interested in moving back to West Point, and what were our job qualifications and history and so forth. We had filled it out and sent it back. A month later, Christy got a call from Charter West Bank, they were looking for someone with her type of background. So she had a bit of a job lead before I did. She didn't pursue it very hard at that point because we figured I probably couldn't find something here that I'd like. When the Wimmers position opened up, she called the bank back. Everything fell into place from there - all of a sudden we had job offers and had to decide how serious we were about moving to West Point."
Why come back to West Point? "As you get a little older," Dan said, "you might start to appreciate a closer-knit community, having family and friends close, the safety of a small community, being able to help out some on the farm once in a while. West Point is close to Omaha, about an hour away. I doubt that we'd move to a town this small that was six hours away from a large city - we do like to go into Omaha quite a bit."
To be continued....
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