MANHATTAN, KS — The produce industry has a lot of good stories on how people got started in the business, but it’s hard to beat Terry (Edmonds) Olson’s tale from the mid-1960s.

Olson’s father was passionate for produce when he wasn’t teaching plant pathology at Kansas State University, located here. Dr. Leon Edmonds also had to feed a wife, Pat, and nine children. So converting the children to be profit centers was not only a practical matter but also good business training for the kids.

“When you have nine kids, any job is an efficiency lesson,” on where to best-place labor resources, Olson said.

Edmonds grew bushels of backyard tomatoes. On the business side, Edmonds built a cart to be pulled by the family’s St. Bernard, Bozo. His fifth-grade daughter, Terry, and her sister, Pam, were assigned to take the Bozo-drawn cart door to door and peddle tomatoes.

“I found this socially humiliating,” Olson recalled. “But I got to keep half the profits,” which was financially motivating.

“You had to learn people skills; to get your foot in the door before it slammed,” she said.

When Terry was in seventh grade at Manhattan Junior High, and Pam was in ninth, their father bought a rundown greenhouse outside of town. With this was a shack, void of amenities.

“He convinced us there was an opportunity for making money,” she said. The girls’ father “paid for room and board” and left the girls to live beside the facility and turn the greenhouse into a profitable operation. “We wanted money to buy new clothes,” so they took the offer from their dad. Olson loved the challenge and waited for each school day to end so she could return to her greenhouse.

In the process, “We became independent people at a very young age,” she said. “It was a neat thing he did for us. We wanted to dress nicely. We read Seventeen magazine. We learned retailing and wholesaling and how to peddle plants.” This Kaw Valley Greenhouse eventually became Kansas’ third largest bedding plant and greenhouse operation.

Olson earned a horticulture degree at Kansas State and “growing became my passion.”

In the 1980s, Olson developed the East Side Market in Manhattan then more than doubled the business with a second produce store, West Side Market.

Initially she drove 120 miles to Kansas City to shop on the old produce market. Based on her background, going toe to toe with grizzled old produce men was not especially daunting.

Now Olson’s two thriving markets are receiving deliveries from Kansas City wholesalers.

She also buys produce from Manhattan’s Britts Farm Market, other Kansas growers and Missouri’s Amish community.

She promotes with heavy radio and television advertising, using gift certificate programs and other creative promotions. Anything to keep her foot in the door. Just like the days with Bozo.