Chad Pregracke grew up on, in, and around the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. He spent summers working as a commercial shell diver
for the cultured-pearl industry and as a commercial fisherman and
barge hand. It was during this time he saw how neglected and polluted the rivers were. At 17, he started asking government agencies
to clean them up. When his requests were ignored, Pregracke took
matters into his own hands. At 23, he founded Living Lands & Waters, a nonprofit organization dedicated to cleaning up and preserving our nation’s rivers.
“We work in a nine-state area in the Midwest to remove all the
visible pollution, including garbage, tires, appliances, barrels, cars,
tractors, and school buses—all stuff we’ve found in rivers,” says
Pregracke. Since its inception, Pregracke, his crew, and more than
60,000 volunteers have collected more than 6 million pounds of
debris from our nation’s greatest rivers.
This year, his organization is raising money to build a barge/
floating headquarters that will include a classroom. “We will focus
on students, especially high school,” says Pregracke. “Schools can
come to us for field trips, and we’ll be able to accommodate the many
teachers who want to get students involved in long-term projects
with us.”
That Pregracke has added an educational element to his work is
not surprising. A former student at Blackhawk Technical College in
Janesville, Wis., and Heartland Community College in Illinois, the
young environmentalist says his community college experience had
a lot to do with his success. “The small class sizes and personal atten-
tion were great,” says Pregracke.
Pregracke is grateful that he’s able to do so much for the community in return. “I was in a hotel recently, giving a presentation to get
a new sponsor, and I was thinking how lucky I am,” he says. “A lot of
people say the government should be doing this type of cleanup, but
we are the government, and we the people should be taking care of a
problem that we’ve created. We’re doing what anybody should.”
Junki Yoshida’s company started with
a bottle of teriyaki
sauce. Today, it is
a one-stop shop for
people who manufacture or sell products, with distribution offices in 24
locations worldwide.
Not what Yoshida
or anyone else
expected when he
left Kyoto, Japan,
at age 19 with $500
and hardly a grasp of
English. “I arrived in Seattle in 1969. I had failed a univer-
sity exam in Japan and did not want to wait an entire year
to try again,” says Yoshida.
Cast out from his family for leaving, the teenager sold
his return ticket and bought a used car that he slept in. He
took low-paying work as a dishwasher and gardener, was
hospitalized twice for starvation, and was chased by immigration officers. Finally, he decided to go to school and
get a proper visa.
“I had no money, but I eventually enrolled at Highline
Community College (HCC) to study English,” he says. A
black belt in karate, he traded lessons for classes.
Yoshida was inspired to become a businessman when his
first child became seriously ill. “When our daughter was
five days old, we rushed her to Seattle Children’s Hospital,” he recalls. “We had no insurance, but the doctors
worked day and night to help her survive. When we left,
they gave us a bill for $250, but said not to worry if we
couldn’t afford it. I said, ‘I will pay these people back.’”
In 1974, Yoshida moved his family to Oregon. Yoshida
had been making his family’s teriyaki cooking sauce in
the basement to give as holiday gifts. Everyone loved the
sauce, so he raised $150,000 and began marketing the
product as Yoshida’s Gourmet Sauce. As the years unfolded, Yoshida created a conglomerate of 17 diverse companies with more than 300 employees under the Yoshida
Group umbrella, generating more than $180 million in
revenue annually.
A big believer in giving back, Yoshida serves as a Port
of Portland Commissioner and a board member of Doern-becher Children’s Hospital Foundation, Troutdale Booster
Club, and Mt. Hood Community College Foundation. He
also recently established a scholarship for single mothers
at HCC, where he will become a board member this year.
“Life is more enjoyable when you give back,” he says. And
so, he does.
