Page 10
Daily Nebraskan
Friday, February 14, 1986
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"Camelot Camelot," said I to my
self, "I don't seem to remember hearing
of it before. Name of the asylum, likely."
Mark Twain
"A Connecticut Yankee
In King Arthur's Court"
Stubble pokes through white-frosted fields
that buckle like a rumpled blanket, a
blanket that unravels effortlessly as the
car's wheels pull on the thread of U.S. Highway
59.
With each pull, a new wrinkle is exposed.
Then, one more dip, a turn onto State Highway
175, and there it is . . . Ida Grove a modern-day
Camelot caught in the folds of northeast Iowa's
terrain.
Like the Camelot of old, almost. Oh, there are
cars now. And electric lights. And . . . well, a
collection of modern embelishments. But tucked
among this weave of paved roads and modern
frame houses, the midday sun glitters off a mar
velous assortment of towers and castles, mis
placed, it seems, by some mischievous
medieval architect.
The structures are there through the courtesy
of Byron Godbersen, a 64-year-old inventor and
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entrepreneur. He built them. And few who visit
Ida Grove soon forget the legend he's established,
in this town of 2,285 residents.
Maybe a visitor first notices Godbersen's hill
top castle just south of town. Godbersen and his
wife, LaJune, live within its towering walls. Their
children live in medieval-looking homes nearby.
Or maybe one first notices the town's airport
with its castle-like hanger.
Or is one's attention first captured by the
eight-acre Lake LaJune Godbersen has gouged
from a cornfield just beyond the landing strip?
Or perhaps his Swiss chalet? Or the fifth-scale
duplicates of the H.M.S. Bounty and the Gape
Hatteras lighthouse? Or maybe it's that wonderful
medieval structure tucked into Lake LaJune's
west shore? It was, after all, the first dastle
Godbersen ever built. ' .
It looked so empty t here, Godbersen explains,
pointing out of the chalet window toward the
scaled-down castle. He usually eats lunch in his
chalet. It is his private restaurant. and he often
entertains business associates and.friends, there.
Today's lunch is over now and Godbersen sits
sideways to the table, propping his right elbov
on the arm of his chair. He rests theshortiingers
of his bulky, hand against wirid-burned 'cheek bones.
The fingers frame tanned eyelids that.foid
over at the outside corners of ice-blue eyes, the
top button of his blue shirt is unfastened and his
T-shirt peaks through the "V" at his neck. '
He thought the lakeside castle would be
"neat," he explains, in even tones that signal the.
story is often told. He says he came. up with the
idea while flipping through an encyclopedia.
He immediately sketched plans and had the
castle built.Godbersen apparently became caught
up in the thing. He currently is building his 13th
major medieval structure.
Godbersen and his employees have built:
O A medieval tower flanked by two
sloping walls and topped by a United
States flag that serves as the city's marker.
A medieval stone-towered suspension
bridge in the middle of Ida Grove's nine-hole golf
course.
O A medieval castle housing the Ida County
Courier. (Godbersen says he entered the news
paper business because he felt the Ida County
Pioneer Record did not encourage healthy busi
ness expansion in the county. He has since sold
the paper but still owns the printing company.)
0 A medieval-looking Skate Palace God
bersen donated to the American Legion.
An assortment of medieval-looking busi
nesses, including a shopping plaza and the
building where Byron's Originals, fifth-scale
model airplanes, are designed. Across from Byr
on's Originals, employees are shaping castle-like
walls around Godbersen's first Midwest Indus
tries building where some of the entrepreneur's
first inventions were designed and constructed.
But Godbersen does not take refuge in these
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castles. They are not the asylum of an eccentric
but symbols of the wealth he shares with the
community.
In fact, Godbersen seems to follow Thoreau's
advice: "If you have built your castles in the air
' your work need not be lost; that is where they
should be. Now put the foundations under
them."
The foundations for Godbersen's castles have
been built on his knack for turning considerable
skills and his hobbies into profits.
The 1984 assessed value of land and buildings
owned by Godbersen and his companies was set
at more than. $4.07 million. However, the actual
value of the properties is greater. The real value
is adjusted because Iowa grants industry tax
exemptions and because some of Godbersen's
' land is zoned agricultural.
No one is certain of Godbersen's total wealth,
however, and Godbersen won't say.
. ' ."We make enough to pay our bills, pay our
, payroll" and buy improvements that we need," he
. says. "We make enough to stay in business."
ut Godbersen has not always been wealthy.
He grew up on a farm near Mapleton, Iowa,
and milked cows, he savs. instead of nar-
.'. ficlpattng in high school athletics. Godbersen
says he was graduated, "just barely," in 1942.
, wasn't a. very good student. I think I'm
.bright; probably. I understand a lot of things a
-loj; better than a lot of people do."
Two years after graduation, Godbersen entered
the Army where he was trained as a paratrooper
. before being sent to the South Pacific. During
his two years of service, he and LaJune courted
by mail.
They were married two months after he
returned to the United States in 1946. Then, he
took some agriculture courses and rented "240
acres of some of the roughest land you ever saw"
from his father.
"We said the hills were bigger than the farm."
For eight years, Godbersen worked this land.
And he had a fair amount of success. But he is
candid in talking about his distaste for farming.
"I've always said my wife didn't like feeding
chickens and I didn't like milking cows."
Because of this, Godbersen was determined to
do something else. Years of building and fixing
farm gadgets had honed his mechanical skills.
So he put that talent to work.
Godbersen devised a hydraulic hoist that
made it easier to load and unload pickup trucks
and then developed a way to mass-produce and
market it. He and luck found each other.
"I've had a lot of luck," he says. "There are two
kinds. There's a kind where you throw up a coin
and if it comes up heads or tails you win one
way or another. And there's the other kind that
you spell w-o-r-k. I've had a good share of both."
When the first hoist was completed, God
bersen showed it to area equipment dealers. The
first one to see it couldn't understand how some
thing so simple could work so well and made
Godbersen demonstrate the hoist several times.
Then he caught Godbersen in a little white lie.
The dealer asked how many hoists Godbersen
had sold.
"Several," answered the inventor.
"How come the serial number is 1?" the dealer
asked.
Godbersen says he admitted this was the first
hoist manufactured but resolutely backed his
product. The dealer bought, and Godbersen
returned home to fill the order.
Since then, serial numbers for all Godbersen
products start at 1,000, he says.
Godbersen moved from the farm to Ida Grove
in 1954 when orders for his hoist started pouring
in. He worked in a shop with his friend, Russ
Coil. Godbersen said they made their own parts
and welded the hoists together for less than $40.
Dealers bought the hoists for $90 and sold them
to farmers for $118, he says. Sales snowballed.
"I just can't take any credit for genius on that
thing except building it," he says. You can't
miss, he says, when a product sells for almost
three times what it costs to build it and those
sales occur before the product is manufactured.
Other businesses saw the same opportunity.
Within five months, 13 established companies
were manufacturing his hoist. Godbersen was
awarded a patent on the hoist, however, and that
stopped the competition. It was a good thing. He
says the other companies would have undercut
his prices because they could build the hoist
more cheaply.
With money earned from hoist sales, God
bersen bought a 13-foot boat, built a trailer for it
and went on a family vacation to Ten-Mile Lake
in Minnesota.
He had been selling hoists for two years and
was looking for another item to sell during the
spring. While on vacation, he noticed that hoists,
used to pull boats from the water, bumped and
scraped the crafts' hulls. He says he thought he
could build something more efficient.
"I was working on this thing in the at t ic of this
little house for about three days," he recalls. "My
wife came up and simply said, 'If this is what
you're going to do, spend all your time up here,
then we may as well go home.' "
They left the following morning.
"I went right to work on it and showed it
that fall at the Minneapolis Trade Show.
I've been selling it since."
In fact, the boat hoists along with boat
trailers now outsell his original product
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