tenacity. If for some reason one store had to close its doors, the Finns promptly started a new one. This has been characteristic of the entire Range Federation activity, which owes much to the able business managers it has employed. Among them Kendall mentions Aaro Ruuska, William Halme-Kangas and Mike Simonson. According to Jokinen, the Virginia Range Federation had four first generation Finns and three second generation Finns on its board of directors when it was established in 1933, while in the 1950s those figures were four and five respectively, plus two non-Finns who had also been added to the board.

Independent Businessmen: A great number of independent Finnish businessmen have naturally appeared in Virginia. The first of them, according to the Päivälehti, were John Korpi and S. Oberg. Korpi's store was short-lived, since it was burned out in 1893, while Oberg, who had a bread-and-rusk delivery route, had his home and his storerooms also destroyed in the same fire. Oberg, however, tried again by opening a dry goods store. Almost contemporary with them was Peter Peterson (Huhta) who kept a grocery store in Virginia in 1894-95, after which time he moved to Eveleth.

In a chronological listing, the Päivälehti claimed that the next enterprise was a combined furniture, household wares, food and clothing store, Ketola & Company, opened in 1905. John Ketola had come to the United States as a young child, and even as a schoolboy he had worked on the railroad and on city jobs, until at the age of 17 he decided to go to the Dakotas to work on harvesting gangs. There the hours were long and the work hard, and when a rain storm one night tore to shreds the tent of John and his comrade, the two exasperated boys returned to Duluth. And although the mines offered considerable higher wages than could be earned elsewhere, John went to work in business for $40 a month, to begin a career which was to become outstanding among Finnish American businessmen.

Ketola himself has recalled (in an interview with E. A. Pulli) that he considered he needed $1000 worth of goods to get started on his own, but that he was able to start out with only $400 in capital because his employer approved of his bold plans. In 1909 John Ketola took his brothers August and William into partnership, and so Ketola & Company became Ketola Brothers; soon after that one John P. Nelson, who had just arrived on the scene from California, also joined the firm. August remained but briefly in the company, before moving to Utah, but the store

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