By the time I settled into my career at 3M, life had begun moving at a speed I never could have imagined as a kid growing up in Aurora or New Lisbon. College had prepared me to become an engineer. I understood equations, processes, equipment, and problem-solving. But once I entered the working world, I discovered there was another education waiting for me—one that couldn't be found in a textbook.
The world itself was about to become my classroom, one business trip at a time.
My relationship with travel, however, didn't begin with 3M or a corporate itinerary. It began during my sophomore year of college, over winter break, when I stepped onto an airplane for the first time in my life. Sue Ann had relocated to California for a year, and I was flying out to visit her. Today, getting on an airplane can feel about as exciting as getting on a city bus. But for me then, it was something entirely different. I had never experienced takeoff, never watched the ground disappear beneath me, never looked down through an airplane window and seen highways become pencil lines and houses shrink into tiny squares.
As the engines grew louder and the plane accelerated down the runway, I felt myself pressed back into the seat. Then suddenly we were airborne. The Midwest—the world I had always known—fell away beneath the clouds. For a kid whose life had once been measured by the distance between small Wisconsin towns, California might as well have been another country. Yet there I was, traveling thousands of miles through the air in a matter of hours.
The world suddenly seemed larger, but strangely, it also seemed more accessible. Places I had only seen on television or maps were places I could actually go. Travel wasn't something reserved for wealthy people, adventurers, or characters in movies. It was something I could do. I didn't know it at the time, but that first airplane ride planted a seed. Within a few years, airports, rental cars, hotels, factories, and foreign countries would become a regular part of my life.
And I would love almost every minute of it.
When I joined 3M in 1981, travel quickly became part of the rhythm of my job, particularly during those first five years. I was initially paired with an experienced engineer named Tommy Davis. He was originally from the South Carolina area, and like many Southerners I would meet over the years, he went by his middle name. Tommy was what he wanted everyone to call him, so Tommy it was.
I had been working at 3M for all of about a week when he suggested that I travel with him to Decatur, Alabama. The assignment was to oversee the installation of a storage system for product being manufactured at 3M's Film Plant there. Eventually, probably 90 percent of my workload would involve that plant, but at the time I knew almost nothing about what lay ahead. I probably nodded at Tommy as though traveling to Alabama after one week on the job was perfectly normal.
Inside, I was thinking, I've been here five days, and they're already sending me across the country?
Welcome to 3M. That first trip introduced me to another fascinating part of corporate life in the early 1980s: how we paid for everything. Corporate credit cards weren't commonly used the way they are today. Before leaving on a business trip, I had to fill out a travel request, get my supervisor's approval, and then request a cash advance. And I mean actual cash.
There was a person on the fifth floor of Building 42 whose job included handing traveling employees money for their trips. You would go there before leaving and walk away with enough cash to pay for your hotels, rental cars, meals, and other expenses. For a two-week trip, that could easily mean carrying a couple thousand dollars in cash. I sometimes wonder how much money was sitting in that office on any given day.
After returning home, we filed an expense report, attached the receipts we had carefully saved, and reconciled whatever money remained. Looking back, the entire system seems almost unbelievable. At the time, however, I remember another feeling. Walking through an airport in my early twenties with a briefcase, a plane ticket, a company assignment, and more cash in my wallet than I normally saw in months made me feel pretty important. Maybe even a little like the big man on campus. But underneath that youthful swagger was something more significant.
3M trusted me.
The company trusted me with its money. It trusted me with its equipment. It trusted me with contractors and projects. And increasingly, it trusted me with decisions that could have substantial financial consequences. That trust began changing how I saw myself. I was young, inexperienced, and still learning—but I was being handed responsibility, a plane ticket, and a mission. There was something incredibly empowering about that. One of the defining periods of my early career involved Germany.
Over roughly a twelve-month period, I made five trips there as part of a major project involving equipment being designed and built overseas. The equipment was part of an approximately $20 million upgrade to the existing D3 production line in Decatur. I was one of the team leaders on the project. I was twenty-four years old. Even writing those two sentences today gives me pause.
At twenty-four, most people are still figuring out what they want to do with their lives. I was helping lead a project involving an investment of roughly $20 million—an amount of money that was almost impossible for me to comprehend at that age. There were decisions to make, contractors to coordinate, equipment specifications to understand, schedules to maintain, and problems that couldn't simply be pushed to someone else. Sometimes I wonder whether anyone at 3M noticed how young I was. Apparently they weren't too worried about it.
And perhaps that was one of the greatest gifts the company gave me. They expected me to perform at the level of the responsibility I had been given.
So I did my best to grow into it. That project confirmed something I had begun to suspect: I had made the right decision joining 3M. And now 3M was sending me across the Atlantic. We called it flying "across the pond."
Even preparing for international travel felt exciting. 3M had its own department that helped employees obtain passports, including taking the passport photograph. The corporate campus offered all sorts of conveniences in those days—services that seem almost impossible to imagine at a workplace today. There was a barber. There was an on-site doctor. There were people who helped arrange international travel. It was almost like a small city.
Then came the flight itself. Unfortunately, I discovered that although I loved flying, I was terrible at sleeping on airplanes. No matter how long the flight, I couldn't relax enough to fall asleep. That became a painful lesson when traveling east across seven time zones. We would land in Germany sometime in the late morning or early afternoon, and my body would be insisting that it was the middle of the night.
Every experienced international traveler gave the same advice: Stay awake. Whatever you do, stay awake until evening. Your body might be begging you to crawl into bed, but if you surrendered at two in the afternoon, you would pay for it for days. So I learned to push through that first exhausting day and let my internal clock catch up with the country I had just entered. And once it did, Germany was fascinating.
Of all my memories from Germany, driving on the Autobahn remains one of the most vivid. Growing up in Wisconsin, 55 or 65 miles per hour seemed perfectly normal. The Autobahn introduced an entirely different concept of driving. I remember accelerating past 80. Then 90. Then 100. At some point, I pushed the car to around 125 miles per hour.
At that speed, the road comes toward you differently. Your eyes look farther ahead. Your hands grip the steering wheel a little tighter. Every movement feels amplified. For a few glorious moments, I felt like I was absolutely flying. Then I looked in the rearview mirror. A Mercedes was coming. Fast. I moved over, and it sailed past me as though I were an elderly man out for a leisurely Sunday drive. Porsche sedans and sports cars did the same thing.
Here I was traveling at roughly twice the speed I would normally drive back home—and apparently I was still holding up traffic. It was exhilarating, humbling, and more than a little surreal. What impressed me just as much as the speed, however, was the discipline. Drivers followed the rules. You passed on the left. When you finished passing, you moved back over. The left lane wasn't someplace you parked yourself while traffic stacked up behind you. The system worked because people respected it.
If only in America!
The work brought me to Germany, but the weekends introduced me to the country itself. One weekend we took a boat trip along the Rhine River. I remember standing on the boat as the river curled between green hillsides. Villages hugged the shoreline. Vineyards climbed slopes that looked almost too steep to farm. And every so often, another castle appeared above us on the hills. Real castles. Not pictures from a history book. Not something on television. Castles that had stood there for centuries.
Another weekend we took the train to Munich. We stood in the square watching the famous Glockenspiel, sampled German beers, tried different foods, and wandered through a city that seemed simultaneously modern and deeply connected to its past. The food was wonderful and was often served in several courses. Eating wasn't something to rush through before moving on to the next item on the schedule. A meal was an event.
We even tried Kegeln, a traditional German form of nine-pin bowling. The pins—or kegels—were arranged in a diamond pattern, sometimes attached to strings, and the ball was smaller and didn't have finger holes. The lane, called a Kegelbahn, was shorter than an American bowling lane.
At the time, it was simply another fun experience. Looking back, though, Germany left me with an impression that went beyond the castles, beer, food, and Kegeln. There was a sense of order to everyday life that I admired—trains arrived when they were supposed to, streets and villages seemed carefully maintained, and even traditions that had existed for generations still had a place in modern life. I was struck by the German pride in craftsmanship and attention to detail, whether it was the engineering behind a train, the care given to a centuries-old building, or the way a meal was prepared and presented. There was something reassuring about the combination of old and new: ancient castles overlooking a river while modern trains moved efficiently through the countryside below. Germany felt organized, capable, and deliberate, as though things had a proper way of being done and there was satisfaction in doing them well. It was different from home, and I found myself appreciating a culture that seemed to value both its history and the discipline required to keep moving forward.
One of those German trips also gave me the opportunity to visit Italy. Dennis Freidel had accompanied me to Germany on one of my five trips, and we decided to travel to Caserta in southern Italy, where 3M operated another film manufacturing plant. The plant manager was Bob Jacobs, whom we knew from the Engineering group in St. Paul before he relocated to Italy. Dennis and I toured the plant during the day. Because it produced film similar to the Decatur operation, I enjoyed comparing the equipment and processes—seeing what was familiar and what the Italian plant did differently.
But the part of the trip I remember most happened after the workday ended. Bob invited Dennis and me to his home for dinner with him and his wife, Jerilyn. Their home had a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. Even today, I can picture sitting there with the sea stretching into the distance. The air was warm, the setting beautiful, and the food seemed to keep coming. And coming. Jerilyn kept bringing food. And I apparently kept eating it. I remember that the meal was delicious. What I don't remember particularly well is exactly how much food I consumed. I was a twenty-something-year-old guy. Probably a normal amount.
We'll come back to that.
Italy felt different from Germany to me. Warmer. Slower. More intimate. Germany had impressed me with its precision and order. Italy impressed me with its emphasis on people, conversation, food, and community. Sitting on that terrace, nobody seemed particularly interested in rushing. There was always time for another course. Another conversation. Another few minutes enjoying the view.
Years passed. Then more years. Probably ten to fifteen years after that dinner, I was invited to a banquet in St. Paul to receive an award. It was an elaborate affair, with enough glitter and production to make the evening feel almost like a Hollywood event. Before the program began, I was mingling with the other attendees when someone spotted me from across the room. Bob Jacobs. By then Bob had moved back to St. Paul. He hurried over to greet me, and before we could exchange more than a few pleasantries, he insisted that I come over and say hello to Jerilyn.
We began walking toward their table. As we approached, Jerilyn looked up. I could see recognition flash across her face. Remember, she had met me once. Once. Perhaps fifteen years earlier. And the first words out of her mouth were: "Oh my God, you're the engineer who came to our house and ate all that food!" Fifteen years. One dinner. And that was how she remembered Tim Rubash. Apparently I made an impression.
Of course, not all my travel involved Germany, Italy, castles, or Mediterranean dinners. Most of it was far less glamorous. Much of my time was spent traveling to manufacturing plants across the United States, particularly Decatur, Alabama, and Greenville, South Carolina. Those were facilities for which I had direct engineering responsibility, and I genuinely enjoyed being there.
There was an old saying among engineers at the time: "Design in the summer. Install in the winter." As a Minnesota engineer, I considered that excellent project management. If equipment needed to be installed in Alabama or South Carolina, January and February seemed like perfectly reasonable months to do it. It felt like a pseudo-vacation when I worked in Alabama or South Carolina during the cold winter months in Minnesota.
Plant life also suited my personality. It was different from sitting in an office. In some ways, you controlled your own schedule. In other ways, the equipment controlled it completely. During a major installation, a 60- to 80-hour workweek wasn't unusual. These manufacturing lines generated enormous revenue. When a line wasn't running, the company wasn't simply inconvenienced—it was losing serious money.
If something went wrong at midnight, we couldn't schedule a meeting for next Thursday to discuss possible solutions. Someone had to assess the problem, make a decision, and keep the project moving. Increasingly, that someone was me. Contractors needed direction. Schedules had to be maintained. Budgets mattered. Equipment had to work. And once production resumed, it needed to work reliably. There was tremendous pressure to get things right the first time.
But I liked it.
There was something satisfying about standing on a factory floor and seeing a piece of equipment operating that had once existed only as lines on an engineering drawing. You could point to it. You could hear it. You could watch product moving through it. Engineering became tangible. And with every successful project, I became a little more confident that I belonged there.
All that flying eventually came with another benefit: frequent flyer miles. Lots of them. Back then, employees were allowed to keep the miles accumulated during business travel. With the amount I was flying, those miles added up quickly. And eventually, those business trips became personal trips. I used miles to take family members and friends to places like Florida and Hawaii. The flights that had begun as part of my job became opportunities to create experiences with people I cared about. That remains one of my favorite parts of those years. Work paid the miles—but life collected the memories.
Looking back, I realize those trips were giving me much more than passport stamps, hotel receipts, and frequent flyer points. They were expanding the boundaries of the world I believed I could inhabit.
The young man who had boarded his first airplane during college was gradually becoming comfortable walking through foreign airports, navigating unfamiliar cities, working with people from different cultures, making decisions on multimillion-dollar projects, and being responsible when things didn't go according to plan.
Travel taught me that unfamiliar doesn't necessarily mean frightening. Sometimes unfamiliar simply means you haven't learned it yet. That lesson extended far beyond airports and engineering. There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from repeatedly leaving familiar ground. You discover that most situations can be figured out. You learn to ask questions. You learn to observe before judging. You become more curious about people whose lives look different from your own. Most importantly, you discover that the world is simultaneously enormous and remarkably small.
As a kid growing up in Aurora and New Lisbon, I could never have pictured myself speeding down the Autobahn, floating past castles on the Rhine, standing in Munich watching the Glockenspiel, overseeing multimillion-dollar engineering projects, or eating enough food on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean that a woman would still remember it fifteen years later.
But that's the wonderful thing about life. We rarely see where the road is taking us while we're traveling it. We simply make the next decision, accept the next challenge, board the next plane, and keep going. My career at 3M was taking me farther from home than I had ever imagined, and each mile was changing me in ways I wouldn't fully appreciate until years later.
Yet while my career was carrying me around the world, another dream—one much closer to home—was waiting for me. In fact, it was waiting right in the driveway.
