Conrad C. Kaminski profile

Conrad C. Kaminski – Banker’s efforts make Milwaukee a better place
By Susan Nord, SBT Reporter
“Where some guys have hobbies like golf and bowling to get their kicks, I get my kicks out of working,” Kaminski says. “I like it right here at my desk.”
His resume currently lists 12 volunteer organizations that he works with, including the St. Josaphat Basilica Foundation (president), Cardinal Stritch University (trustee), Alverno College National Council, Veterans Administration Soldiers Home Foundation (chairman of the board) and the International Exchange Foundation for Greater Milwaukee and Poland (president). He estimates that he works about 30 hours per week performing his duties for M&M, and provides another 30 hours of volunteer work for the organizations he serves.
Kaminski has touched numerous lives through his energy and vision, and just about everyone interviewed for this story spoke of him as not only a colleague, but as a friend, too.
“He’s a great guy,” said William E. La Macchia, owner and founder of The Mark Travel Company. “I’m a great fan of Connie Kaminski.”
But for all the involvements that Kaminski has, he’s no horn-blower. Far from it. He is so soft-spoken that his voice barely registered on the tape recorder used in an interview.
“He is a very soft-spoken and humble man, but he also knows his own mind,” said Sister Joel Read, president of Alverno College. “But he’s also a team player. If he’s had his say and it isn’t the one that’s going to prevail, you don’t see him moping about that, ever. He’s fully behind whatever he chooses to do.”
Polish Fest
Nothing illustrates that trait like the beginning of Polish Fest in Milwaukee in the early 1980s. As Kaminski tells it, he opposed the idea from the start based on his work on the advertising and public relations committee of Summerfest. He knew it would be a tremendous amount of work, whereas co-founder Adrian Choinski only saw the success of the other ethnic festivals such as Festa Italiana, and the need for the Polish Community to have a festival of its own.
Kaminski resisted as long as he could, but then in November 1981 a few hundred people from the Polish community met at Alverno and decided they wanted to attempt the festival. At the time, Kaminski owned his own advertising and public relations firm in downtown Milwaukee, and he volunteered to run the festival operations from there.
“Of course, we had no money,” Kaminski recalled, “so Adrian went to John Murry at Lincoln State Bank and said, ‘We need at least $25,000 to get us off the ground to get some operating money.’ And John wrote up the loan, which Adrian and I signed. And I swear, neither of them knew how that thing was ever going to get paid. I had a little bit of an idea, but I was still very much concerned.”
The loan was paid off within 60 days from donations, ticket sales and the like. And, of course, Polish Fest went on to become a huge success. After the initial two years, both Kaminski and Choinski stepped aside to let others run the event. The festival eventually hired staff to run it on a full-time basis. Proceeds raised from the festival were used to build the Polish Center of Wisconsin, 6941 S. 68th St., Franklin.
Mark Travel
A man of vision and blessed with a creative imagination, Kaminski was also an integral part of helping La Macchia when he and two partners decided to buy Manpower’s former travel company, Travelpower — at the time owned by Parker Pen Co. — in 1976. La Macchia bought the wholesale travel operations creating Funway Holidays and Funjet. In 1983, La Macchia established the Mark Travel Company.
“He’s very talented, smart and creative, but I was always taken by Connie’s common-sense application to marketing, advertising and public relations,” La Macchia recalled. “I’m pretty much a basic guy, and I like how he applied his creativity to the business world. It wasn’t all about creativity. It was all about how you apply creativity to business.”
La Macchia met Connie Kaminski through Kaminski’s younger brother, Tom, who had been a sales rep in La Macchia’s travel agency.
La Macchia describes Kaminski as a great communicator, trusting him to write articles and speeches after only giving him the basic ideas. When M&M BanCorp’s Michael Murry lured Kaminski away to the financial world it was a “sad day on the marketing side,” La Macchia notes.
“Connie’s a guy that’s hard to describe,” said La Macchia, who has remained friends with Kaminski. “If you don’t know him it’s hard to understand the meaning of the words, but when you need to lean against something, you look for something that you know is not going to fall. That’s what Connie is. He’s like the pillar of strength.”
Banking, Part I
Kaminski, who grew up near Lincoln State Bank, 2266 S. 13th St., got his taste for banking early when, at 15, he was hired to work there while attending Marquette University High School.
Although paid just 75 cents an hour, Kaminski was grateful for the opportunity to work, as jobs were hard to come by in the early 1950s. His duties ranged from bookkeeping to proofing and “sometimes I did janitorial work — whatever need to be done,” Kaminski said.
Kaminski enjoyed banking so much that he enlisted in the U.S. Army Finance Corps and served there from 1954-1957. One of his posts included the Atomic Energy Testing Grounds at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands.
“I was proud to serve in the military,” Kaminski said. “All my uncles served. It was just kind of the thing we did. Fortunately, I didn’t have to shoot anybody.”
Upon his release from the Army, Kaminski enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Madison in its Journalism/Advertising program. (He had attended UWM prior to enlisting in the Army.) At the time, there were two ways to learn about business: through the School of Commerce or through the School of Journalism. Since Kaminski felt he could write and speak fairly well and he also had an interest in foreign languages, he chose the journalism route.
His advertising and public relations career began as an assistant sales promotion manager at the West Bend Company. While in West Bend, he was hired by a local radio station to play classical music. The radio station, recalls Kaminski, hired him in part because of his affinity with foreign languages, which helped in pronouncing composer’s names.
From West Bend, Kaminski moved on to WITI-TV 6. After five years in TV as the director of advertising, promotion and public relations, Kaminski partnered with Bob Meyer, of the Meyer Advertising Agency (now Meyer & Wallis), for three years before starting the Conrad C. Kaminski & Associates advertising, public relations and marketing agency.
Banking, Part II
All the while Kaminski was working in the advertising and public relations industry, he had kept in touch with his friends at Lincoln State Bank, becoming a stockholder and working with them from an advertising standpoint.
After a marketing study in 1981 suggested that the best way for the bank to expand was through opening a new bank, Kaminski’s career began to turn back to banking. After each stockholder raised an additional $30,000, the group had enough to capitalize Franklin State Bank. By 1983, after the formation of the holding company, Merchants & Manufacturers BanCorp, “I was spending so much time involved with the bank that I decided to sell off part of the ad agency and come in to work full time for the banks, and I’ve been here ever since,” Kaminski says.
“What Connie brings is a lot of professionalism to our organization,” says Murry, chairman of M&M BanCorp. “That’s one of his strong suits. And he has organizational skills as well. He is also very flexible and that’s kind of what we need nowadays — managers and executives that are flexible, can move from one responsibility to another, and that’s a key to successful organizations.”
One of the cornerstones of Lincoln State Bank since its inception in 1920 has been its service to the community. It was formed by local merchants who didn’t feel the larger, downtown banks served their needs, and throughout the years has been a stabilizing factor in Milwaukee’s Lincoln Avenue neighborhood.
“The fabric of the community is really dependent upon the different threads that run through it,” Kaminski says. “A number of our employees and certainly our officers are involved in a number of organizations serving the community. And it’s not just being members of organizations, it’s taking an active role in them, being a board member or on committees. That has always been the case.”
Community involvement is a requirement for M&M’s executives, according to Murry.
“We want our executive officers to be out there reinvesting in the community through those organizations,” Murry said, “and Connie’s particularly good at that.”
Community redevelopment
It is that organization-wide caring that led to the development of the Lincoln Neighborhood Redevelopment Corp. (LNRC), which serves low- to moderate-income individuals in their pursuit of housing or starting businesses. The redevelopment company started in 1989 with the purchase of a duplex on South Ninth Street.
“When we started it, we counted 35 empty businesses along Lincoln Avenue,” Kaminski recalled. “And today there is about half that.”
The LNRC has been so successful that the U.S. Small Business Administration named it as an SBA Microlender, making it one of five in the state.
Even though Kaminski no longer takes an active role in LNRC (he was president when it was formed in 1989), he is never more than a phone call away, according to executive director, Michael Gapinski.
“Connie will help you out anytime,” Gapinski says, noting that Kaminski is always the emcee at press events because he is a great communicator. “If we need something, I just call him up.
“What I like about Connie is that he listens to you,” Gapinski continued. “And I know that he’ll talk to anybody, and he focuses in on whomever he is talking to and makes them feel that they are the most important person in the world. What you say is important to him — that’s what he makes you feel like.
“The other thing is, he does anything to make something work,” Gapinski said. “He doesn’t pass things off to other people. He doesn’t care if he has to dig ditches — if that’s what it takes, he’ll do it. He’ll pitch in to make it happen.”
Service started early
If there is a pattern in Kaminski’s life of service, it started in his childhood when he remembers belonging to the Boy Scouts and other youth organizations. But growing up on the South Side in his Polish neighborhood, he saw the sense of community every day.
“There were fraternal insurance organizations (the Polish National Alliance – Milwaukee Society) where you’d buy a $1,000 life insurance policy and the funds were used to bring Polish immigrants to America,” Kaminski recalled.
That sense of community involvement made a lifelong impact on Kaminski.
One of the more visible projects along Lincoln Avenue that Kaminski has worked on is the restoration of the Basilica of St. Josaphat, 2333 S. Sixth St. The historic structure, originally located in Chicago (it was the Post Office and Customs House), was shipped to Milwaukee on 500 railroad flat cars. It was dedicated in 1901 and named as the US’s third basilica in 1929. [There are only 44 basilicas located in the US today. The pope is the only one who has the authority to name a consecrated church a basilica. The basilicas then become the pope’s chapels.]
Kaminski is the president of the Basilica Foundation, which raised in excess of $7.5 million in 10 years to pay for the restoration.
“He … definitely saw the building-up of and restoration of the basilica as something that could be very significant, not only for the neighborhood itself — the residential part of the neighborhood — but also could be a shot in the arm to the business community as well,” said the Rev. William Callahan, pastor of St. Josaphat. Callahan conservatively estimates that 25,000 people visit the historic basilica every year. Arts groups like the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and the Bach Chamber Orchestra also give performances in the basilica throughout the year.
“These arts groups have brought new people into the area and because they are people who have never been here before — they can be people that have lived in Milwaukee all their lives but have never been to the basilica,” Callahan said. “As a result, they come and eat in our restaurants, they see other organizations and stores that are here. … There are so many that have benefited because of the work that’s been done here.”
On a more personal note, Kaminski is also one of Callahan’s parishioners, and just like everything else he’s involved in, Kaminski and his wife Kathy donate their time to numerous parish events.
“I wish I had 100 parishioners like Connie,” Callahan says. “He’s an incredible, good and holy man. And I think his holiness is something that should be stressed. He would never want anyone to really focus on that because he’s very modest and quiet. But I think that his strength really does come from his faith and his willingness to recognize the power of God in his life.”
Kaminski is also the chairman of the board for the Veterans Administration Hospital Soldiers Home Foundation, which is raising money to restore and preserve some of the historic buildings on the approximately 400-acre site that lies between I-94 and Greenfield Avenue, just west of Miller Park.
“There are five buildings that this organization is charged with to protect and renovate because while they get a federal budget over there, that’s largely for the health care for veterans,” Kaminski explained. “And they don’t have a lot of money for keeping old buildings alive.”
Foundation of success
Kaminski credits his parents, especially his mother, who was widowed when he was 9, for giving him a good foundation on which to build his success as a person and businessman.
“It was my parents’ intention to have me go to Marquette High,” Kaminski said. “… I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a real Godsend for me to go there. It was a tremendous sacrifice for my mother to send me there. I don’t know how she did it, but she did, and to this day I’m so very appreciative for what she did.”
Along with his education, he noted how lucky he was to have so many great mentors throughout his life, too, as contributing factors to his success. “And finally,” he says, “a good work ethic — put my nose to the grindstone.”
The biggest disappointment in his life so far?
“If I would have had the opportunity to do anything in my life, I enjoy singing as much as anything,” Kaminski, who sang with the Florentine Opera Company from 1967-1973, said. “But I never thought I could make a living at singing. Wisely, I decided against that. But truth be known, if I could have done something, I would have enjoyed singing more than anything else. I would have liked to do that.”
Thankfully for Milwaukee, Conrad C. Kaminski did not go on to fame and fortune as an opera star.
The Metropolitan Opera’s loss is Milwaukee’s gain.
November 9, 2001 Small Business Times, Milwaukee