When Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall celebrates its 50th anniversary during homecoming festivities Oct. 5, a Fairmont man will be one of three recipients of the Alumni Achievement Award.

Eldean Maschoff, called “Dean” by his many friends and acquaintances, said SMSU representatives had been in contact with him for a couple of years, asking about his manufacturing history and his life until they informed him about the award last winter.

“I told them they made a mistake,” Maschoff said with a chuckle. “It seems so surreal to me that I’m getting this award because I was not an ‘A’ student even though I demand ‘A’ work.”

He is referring to the creed he followed when starting and growing Aluma, a Bancroft company that manufactures aluminum trailers.

“If I was going to build something, it had to be right. It couldn’t be ‘C’ work or ‘B’ work. It had to be ‘A’ work. That’s what I stressed,” he said.

Maschoff was raised on a farm north of Fairmont, graduating from Fairmont High School in 1959.

“When somebody asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I’d always tell them I wanted to build something. What I was thinking about building was houses,” he said.

He planned to study engineering in South Dakota but enlisted in the Army instead. The Army determined he was mechanically minded so he fixed helicopters during his service. After his discharge, he revived his college plans, but he met a Fairmont girl who was still in high school so he started farming. The romance was curtailed due to religious differences, and Maschoff eventually married someone else. After five years, Maschoff decided farming wasn’t for him so he set his sights on college, enrolling in classes in Marshall in January 1968.

“I was 27 years old when I started college,” he said. “My goal at that time was to have my own manufacturing businesses, but I didn’t even know how to run a drill press or anything.”

College studies were easy for Maschoff, with the exception of math. After failing algebra, one of his first classes, he worked under the tutelage of his instructor, Joseph Van Wie.

“All of a sudden, it clicked. I had no problem after that. I took every college math class I could, and I fell in love with physics,” Maschoff said.

In 1971, he was a member of SMSU’s charter graduating class, earning a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in less than four years.

His first job after college was as product engineer for Sanborn Manufacturing in Springfield where he designed and built air compressors. It was during this time that he realized his learning must continue so he absorbed all he could about factories, equipment, management and sales.

“I never stopped learning, and I haven’t yet,” Maschoff said. “There’s a lot I don’t know yet, and I’m not going to go away until I learn everything I can.”

In 1973, Maschoff was hired as a manufacturing engineer at Winnebago Industries in Forest City, working in the aluminum extrusion division for six months until the Saudi oil embargo basically shut down the motor home business. The company laid off 3,500 of its 5,000 employees and also retained about 100 of its 400 engineers. Maschoff was one who stayed. He was promoted to engineering/production manager of the extrusion process and then of the aluminum fabrication process.

In 1977, he left Winnebago Industries to start his own company, El-San Inc., in Crystal Lake. The company employed 34 people to manufacture greenhouses for homes and small nurseries, and fabricate storm doors and windows, trim pieces for animal confinement and machine shed sliding doors.

In 1983, Maschoff changed the business’ name to Aluma Tech. By then, the company had ceased the greenhouse business but started doing more custom fabricating for some of Winnebago Industries’ customers.

In 1992, three Winnebago Industries managers asked Maschoff to design and build aluminum golf cart trailers for them. He agreed as long as they provided enough aluminum for four trailers — one for each of them and Maschoff too. At that time, golf cart trailers were made with steel. Maschoff had never built a trailer. He had never seen a golf cart trailer. He didn’t even play golf.

But he knew design and extrusion.

“My dad would always say, if you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you’re right. I always thought I could,” Maschoff said. “When somebody asked if I could build something, I’d tell them, yes, I can, and I have complete faith in what I design.”

When friends and acquaintances of the Winnebago managers saw their custom golf cart trailers, they too wanted one, and a new industry was born.

“People would hear about the trailers or see one of them, and they would call me,” Maschoff said. “I didn’t do any advertising at all the first three years. It’s not so much that the trailer was unique in design, but nobody was building them out of aluminum. Nobody.”

In 1995, Maschoff’s Aluma had five employees when the company moved to a 12,000-square foot building constructed for them in Bancroft. Within five years, the building doubled in size, and the business employed 45 people as its gamut of designs grew to include enclosed and flat bed trailers.

Five years later, Maschoff sold the company to friends from Mankato so he could concentrate on designing trailers. By the time he retired in 2015, he had designed every trailer that Aluma built. The company, now housed in a 140,000-square foot building, has more than 150 employees who manufacture more than 350 trailers per week with sales in all 50 states and several foreign countries.

One reason for Aluma’s success is its ability to lower manufacturing costs. While other companies might try to duplicate the general design, Maschoff’s design and manufacturing process reduced the manufacturing time from seven hours to less than three hours.

“Also, they couldn’t match our quality. We guarantee everything for five years unconditionally. Nobody else is doing that,” he said.

Although Maschoff has retired from Aluma, he still travels to Bancroft to see how things are doing.

“That’s still my baby,” he said. “The company is doing very, very well. I feel blessed every time I go down the road and see one of my trailers. I see them all over. Some of the farmers around here have two or three of my trailers, especially the hog farmers.”

Maschoff admits he has a hard time sitting still so he’s developing a new project called the Elm Creek veggie cart. The cart can be used to plant and harvest, as well as cultivate, a variety of vegetables and fruits. Maschoff said he knows it works because he used the original design for five years in his own asparagus patch, which numbers 10,000 plants.

He currently is renting a building in Northrop and employs one part-time person to build the multi-use machine that is an adaptation of a golf cart trailer. He hopes to move to a building in Fairmont when a suitable one becomes available.

Maschoff acknowledges that he enjoys recognition for his achievements, but he absolutely is not comfortable with the publicity surrounding him and his SMSU award.

“A lot of people deserve credit for my success, going back to Mr. Van Wie, my college math instructor, to my buddies that asked me to build them golf cart trailers, to the secretaries I had, all my employees. I owe so much to all of them,” he said.

In the short biography requested by SMSU, he also thanks his ex-wife, Sandy, “for helping me to financially get through college and at the same time help raise my two wonderful children.”

And remember that school girl that caused Maschoff to stay in Fairmont after his military service?

“I never forgot her,” Maschoff said. “A few years ago, I heard she was going through a divorce so I thought I’d call her up, but she had an unlisted phone number. It cost me $7 to find her phone number on the Internet.”

After many phone calls and emails to the former Joyce Meyer, then living in Omaha, the couple was married in 2014.

“It was just like we’d never been apart,” he said.

Sadly, Joyce died May 5 after a lengthy illness.