I wanted to introduce y’all to our hard-working volunteer, Nate Demars. Nate’s taking some time off right now before he starts school in the fall and we were lucky enough to nab him when he was casting about for something to do around his interest in historical preservation.
Nate already has a degree in marketing and he also had a career in sales working for the Whirlpool Corporation. He could have stayed in sales, kept moving his way up the corporate ladder and cashing his checks but instead he decided that what he really wants to do is get into preservation. So he quit his job and now he’s waiting to head back to school to get his MBA and figure out how to make a living saving old buildings. I asked him how in the world he went from selling Whirlpool to historic preservation and he said it’s all because of Bob Dylan.
See, Nate went to school in Duluth, MN, which is where Dylan grew up. And Bob Dylan saw Buddy Holly play at the Duluth National Guard Armory in 1959. When Dylan won his Grammy in 1998 he said,
“When I was about 16 or 17 years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at the Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three seats away from him and he looked at me and …I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.”
Nate loved this story and he started getting interested in the Armory. He started digging around in the history and learned it wasn’t just Buddy Holly who played there. Everyone from Johnny Cash to Les Brown Jerry Lee Lewis to The Supremes stood on that stage. Nate started feeling really concerned that this great building with an amazing history was being just left to rot.
And that, my friends, is when he became a preservationist.
Nate worked with Minnesota locals on the Armory Arts & Music Center project and in doing so got to know some of the people at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Eventually he graduated, started working for Whirlpool, got transferred to Columbus and the rest is happy history for us because now he’s here writing up tax credit case studies for Heritage Ohio.
Nate is planning to be a developer with a special focus on preserving terrific buildings when he graduates. He says it makes sense culturally, sure, but he really wants people to understand that it also makes sense economically. Nate is pretty passionate about the fact that preservation and revitalization are good businesses practices and he’s doing his part to spread the word. Besides volunteering with us, he’s also working with the Columbus Landmarks Foundation on their next City Hop.
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by cursedthing
