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Stuart Anderson, with his 2,400-acre cattle ranch abutting the freeway in Central Washington and his signature mustache and cowboy hat, was the icon of cowboy country as he built what was regarded, in the 1980s, as the nation's most successful chain of affordable steakhouses. (It was actually dinner house chains but probably doesn't matter.)

Anderson, 93, passed away peacefully Monday at his Rancho Mirage home., surrounded by his family, including his beloved wife Helen, who was his partner for more than 40 years. He had been a diabetic for years but it was lung cancer that caused his death, though he had quit smoking in 1980.

Stuart Anderson founded his Black Angus/Cattle Company Restaurants chain in Seattle in the 1960s and from its corporate headquarters there he grew it into a chain of 122 restaurants spread across 19 states, with more than 10,000 employees and $230 million in annual revenue.

I felt compelled to come and talk to Stuart about his knowing he was in the final stages of life and that he was reconciled to that fact because he had led such a special life. It was filled with family, success, travel and, as Helen said, "lots of love." He had agreed to have me come down on Saturday to his home and work on his obituary together but that was not to be.

That became clear with the email Monday from Helen: "My wonderful, sweet, best friend Stuart has gone to that Mansion in the sky. He will be missed more than words can tell. He was larger than life and loved by so many. He was so pleased with the 93 wonderful years he had but said he was ready to go. Thanks for all the prayers and good wishes."

I first met Stuart four years ago when Betsy and I were vacationing in the desert. I had contracted with the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership to arrange a wine-and-cheese gathering of Northwest snowbirds to learn some business facts about their second home. The local Palm Springs Desert Sun publicized the event and as people visited, someone pointed out to me "there's Stuart Anderson," to which I responded: "I don't think so. I thought he was long gone."

So I went over to introduce myself to Stuart and Helen and learned that the guy with a weathered face and wearing a cowboy hat was much alive and provided an enjoyable get-to-know visit.

A couple of days later, I learned that he was actually going back into the restaurant business, reopening one of his first Black Angus restaurants, located in Rancho Mirage, (that had been forced to close and go out of business during the downturn) This is not really true. Someone came along to buy our lease which we gladly sold because of the downturn of the economy at that time. We were not forced to close.

So I produced a column about Helen and Stuart re-opening and running the restaurant, both of them visiting with customers and making the rounds each day for a number of months before it became clear that the challenge was too much for a man then nearly 90 who had been out of the business too long so gladly sold the lease.

I visited again four months ago with the Andersons at their Rancho Mirage condo, and found Stuart, who was speaking softly and slowly but retained the firm gaze he usually offered from beneath his cowboy hat. He wanted to talk about the book and the challenge of selling copies, compared to his first book. It is the story of how he built the restaurant empire that became a best-recognized national company. The book actually has a longer official title: "Corporate Cowboy. Stuart Anderson: How a maverick entrepreneur built Black Angus, America's #1 restaurant chain of the 1980s."

He first tried his hand as an author when in 1997 he produced "Here's the Beef! My Story of Beef," a book he described to me as "fun and informative," but most importantly to him, thousands of copies were sold in the Black Angus restaurants. The book was meant to be an answer to the highly popular Wendy's commercial of the time in which an elderly lady asks: "Where's the Beef?"

At that point it had been a decade since he had retired after five consecutive years of his restaurants being named the top steakhouse chain in the nation by USA Today in a poll by industry publication Restaurants & Institutions. He admitted candidly, in an interview we did a few years ago, that he decided to retire because the new owners took the fun out of his job.

At the time of his first book, he was still well-remembered, in Washington State in particular. He was often seen as a spokesperson for a series of television commercials he did in the Seattle area for a senior housing organization.

After retiring, he and Helen enjoyed their (You mentioned this in the 1st paragraph: 2,400 acre) ranch sprawled along Interstate 90 west of Ellensburg. He had bought the ranch in 1966 with the intent of raising the Black Angus cattle that would be served at his restaurants. But it turned out to be too great a challenge, for various reasons, so he continued to raise the cattle while buying his beef elsewhere, until he sold the ranch to Taiwanese interests, though to many travelers going past, it remains the Stuart Anderson ranch.

A private family gathering is being planned in Seattle but the celebration of life will be held in Rancho Mirage in November, which would have been his 94^th birthday.

In the quarter century since national accounting firm Ernst & Young (now rebranded as EY) brought its Entrepreneur of the Year event to Seattle and the Northwest, the annual black tie gala has represented a community celebration of entrepreneurship. And with that has come a growing awareness of the importance of recognition for those struggling to build businesses and create jobs.

That increased awareness of the role visibility plays has brought with it an array of events, created by firms, organizations and media entities who want to own a piece of visibility value of their own for creating visibility for and thus developing relationships with young companies and the entrepreneurs who guide them.

Indeed all of those other recognition events have brought value to the startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem by allowing individual firms to attract the attention of potential investors and potential new talent.

But the EY event has remained the most prestigious gathering for entrepreneurs, as this year's select group of honorees preparing for the June 17 event at the Sheraton Hotel are coming to learn. Among other things, Northwest winner get to move forward to compete for recognition at the EoY national and world events later in the year with winning entrepreneurs from the 145 cities and 60 countries in which the EoY event is held.

As Dan Smith, managing partner of the Seattle EY office, put it:"We've recognized many remarkable leaders who have disrupted industries, created new product categories, and successfully brought new innovation and technology to traditional industries."

In fact three winners in the local event have gone on to win at the national level. They are David Giuliani, who as founder and CEO of Optiva, won in the manufacturing category in 1997; Zillow Group CEO Spencer Rascoff, who won in the "services" category in 2013, and Zulily CEO Darrell Cavens, who won in the "emerging" category in 2014.

Smith notes that this year's finalists include 21 entrepreneurs from the life sciences, retail and technology industries, adding "we've definitely seen a lot of growth in these sectors compared to 30 years ago when the program started."

This annual Entrepreneur of the Year event has held a special attraction for me because of personal involvement, both before and since the event came to Seattle five years after Ernst & Young launched it in 1986 in Milwaukee.

Part of my regard for the event is having close connection to entrepreneurial honorees for this special recognition. The first was Kathryn Kelly, the president of a young Seattle firm ­­­called Environmental Toxicology, who was among those honored as finalists at the second event in Seattle in 1992.

Then came Pete Chase, CEO of Spokane-based Purcell Systems, who won in the communications category in 2006 and became a judge in the following three years, before guiding the sale or his company and launching a new company, Columbia International Finance, for whom I am doing some consulting.

And Leen Kawas, Ph.D., president and CEO of the promising young life science company M3 Biotechnology Inc., is a 30-year-old Jordanian woman who is among this year's honorees and whom I tout as changing the face of life sciences in this state. I have had the satisfaction of being an investor and providing introductions and visibility since she arrived at the helm of the fast-growing company in January of 2014.

The impact of the honor on the entrepreneurs nominated was evidenced by Kelly's reaction back then when I expressed my regret, having nominated her, for the fact she had been one of three finalists but had not won in her category.

"You have to be kidding! Just being here (including the video vignettes of each finalist shown before the envelope is opened and the winner disclosed) was the satisfaction of a lifetime," she said.

There is also a bit of amusement for me when I think of the Entrepreneur of the Year event in that as publisher of the Business Journal I was involved in two entrepreneur of the year events before Ernst & Young brought its event to Seattle.

That came about because Woody Howse, then a partner in the venture capital firm Cable & Howse Ventures, approached me about partnering in an event we named Entrepreneur of the Year, which we promoted and held in the mid-'80s to honor a single entrepreneur each year. It would be hard to top either of our honorees.

The first was W. Hunter Simpson, who had taken over defibrillator-manufacturer Physio-Control 20 years earlier and guided it into a global-leadership role in its industry. The next year we honored Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates, whose company was just then gathering momentum, having gone public a year earlier.

Cable & Howse, then the area's premier vemture capital, had a vested interest in creating visibility for entrepreneurs, as did the Business Journal. We were among many organizations then casting about to determine how best to serve those individuals who held the keys to our future.

In fact, some edginess on the part of the Ernst & Young Seattle leadership would have been appropriate at our having pre-empted Simpson and Gates as the two most impressive names in the local entrepreneur community at the time.

PSBJ and Cable & Howse partnered for several years thereafter with another accounting firm to stage a High Tech Entrepreneur of the Year event, before Ernst & Young Managing Partner Karl Guelich called me to let me know our party was over because the real thing was coming to Seattle.

Guelich had allowed us to go ahead without comment with a Seattle event using the E&Y copyrighted name, partly out of friendship and partly because he likely figured, as it turned out accurately, that our event might even lay visibility groundwork for the arrival of the official awards event of that name.

For perhaps a decade, the Business Journal was part of a process that represented a win for the firm, for the newspaper, and for the entrepreneurs as well. Ermst & Young always scheduled its event for a Thursday evening and provided all the advance detail needed for PSBJ to produce a special supplement with stories on the event and all the honorees, passed out to all attendees as a keepsake as they left the event and then it was inserted in the PSBJ copies that arrived in subscribers' mail the following day.

Since then some of the biggest names among regional entrepreneurs have been in the winners' limelight at the Northwest EoY. They included Mark Britton of Avvo, Jim Weber of Brooks Sports, Inc., Dara Khosrowshahi of Expedia, Inc., Gertrude and Timothy P. Boyle of Columbia Sportswear Company, Jeffrey P. Bezos of Amazon.com, Inc. and Howard Schultz of Starbucks Coffee Company.

So perhaps I'm prejudiced, but it seems clear that EY Managing partner Smith is accurate in suggesting that "the award has acquired a great deal of prestige, and is recognized around the world as an emblem of entrepreneurial success."

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The community thank you last week to former Sen. Slade Gorton for his instrumental role in saving major league baseball in Seattle was an appropriate reminder of his signal accomplishment for the community. But without detracting from Gorton's role, it may also be appropriate at some point to recognize the Seattle attorney whose legal victory set the stage for the search for a local owner.

That would seem particularly appropriate since the Seattle attorney, Arthur Harrigan Jr., had key legal roles in saving two of the Seattle professional sports franchises

Art Harrigan not only succeeded in forcing Mariners owner Jeff Smulyan to give business and community leaders four months to find a local buyer, but five years later he paved the way for a local sale of the Seattle Seahawks by preventing owner Ken Behring from moving the team to Los Angeles.

The legal confrontations with the owners of two of Seattle's professional sports teams came about because Harrigan's law firm, Calfo Harrigan Leyh & Eakes, long represented King County on an array of issues. And both owners came into conflict with the county because they sought to abandon the county-owned Kingdome and their leases there.

The venue for resolving the future of the Seattle Mariners franchise was what amounted to an arbitration hearing before Arthur Andersen, the national accounting firm agreed to by both sides to decide some key issues relating to the lease.

Since it wasn't a court process, which would have gotten large visibility for the battle between attorneys, Harrigan's maneuvering over the meaning of wording in Smulyan's contract regarding an attendance clause that was key to the final outcome was little noted, thus little remembered.

Harrigan's argued interpretation of the lease-requirement wording was accepted by the Andersen firm, so Smulyan was required to give an opportunity for a local buyer to be sought.

Of perhaps equal importance, Harrigan successfully argued that there should be a local value lower than the open-market value. The accounting firm agreed and set a "stay-in-Seattle" valuation at $100 million, rather than the national open-market value of $135 million that it had determined.

That created the opportunity for Gorton and others leading the effort to keep the team in Seattle to find a local buyer for $100 million, rather than $135 million, within four months.

No one knows if, at $135 million, Ninetendo's owner would have opted to pick up the cost of saving the Mariners for Seattle.

With respect to the effort to block the Seahawks' move, King County hired Harrigan's firm to keep Behring from fulfilling his widely publicized intent in the winter of 1996 to leave Seattle and move the team to Los Angeles.

Behring made the argument, after some tiles had fallen from the Kingdome roof, that he had concerns about seismic security of the facility as he announced that he was moving the team to Los Angeles.

Harrigan recalled the February meeting at the Woodmark Hotel at Carillon point at which he, King County Executive Gary Locke, Gary Locke, his assistant, and chief civil deputy Dick Holmquist with Behring's attorney, Ron Olson (who he noted was also Warren Buffet's attorney).

"Olson read from a yellow pad, explaining that the team, fearing earthquakes might impact the Kingdome, had to be moved to the comparative safety of Southern California and the Rose Bowl," Harrigan said. "Holmqust and I were trying not to laugh."

"We were poised to file a temporary restraining order the moment the trucks began rolling up to the team's offices in Kirkland," Harrigan said.

"So when Behring and Olson left the room, I made the call and the restraining order was filed," he added. "Had that not happened, we would have had to go to California and ask a California judge to send them back."

Behring had quickly, after the restraining order, filed suit in Kittitas County, so as part of the legal process, Harrigan also had to get the state Supreme Court to toss out that suit.

A few weeks later he and Behring attorneys met with NFL owners who were considering whether to allow the team to move, in the event Behring could escape the Kingdome lease, and made their presentations.

"I had brought Jon Magnusson and two other renowned structural engineers with West Coast seismic design expertise who explained that the idea that Southern California was safer than the Kingdome in case of earthquake was ludicrous," Harrigan said.

The legal maneuvering all came to an end when it was announced that Paul Allen had purchased the Seahawks.

While Harrigan, 72, is ranked as Seattle's top commercial trial lawyer by Chambers & Partners, which ranks the world's best lawyers and law firms, his legal activities have ranged well beyond the courtroom.

He worked with Craig McCaw in his early Eagle River Investments days, helped create the wireless company Nextel, which became a $7 billion public company, is a member of the boards of several public companies. His is chair, and was a principal fund raiser, for an interesting new company that will generate energy by storing electricity on trains.

Harrigan, a Harvard graduate with his law degree from Columbia, served as Senior Counsel to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, worked on an investigation of CIA intelligence activities related to Vietnam.

Most intriguingly, and perhaps as important as his later pro sports involvements in Seattle, he headed the committee's investigation of IRS intelligence operations, discovering that the agency was giving individuals' tax returns, under the claim of national security, to other intelligence agencies who were then misusing the information in sting operations.

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The first "Innovations in Education" award will be presented this month to the little Yakima Valley school district of Granger where "Every Child, Every Seat, Every Day" became a mantra for students, teachers and parents that allowed the largely Hispanic district to achieve the best attendance in the state last year.

The Innovations in Education Award is being created by the Discovery Institute and will be presented to three women for their key roles in the attendance-success story of the Granger district, where almost a third of the students are from poverty-level homes.

The award will be presented May 19 at a dinner at the Rainier Club as part of the Discovery Institute's 25^th anniversary. Presentation of the award will precede a panel discussion with three noted education-change advocates on the topic of "Creating a 21^st Century Public Education System."

The women being honored with the award are:

--Alma Sanchez, mother of four, turned student at Heritage University, turned entrepreneur, who wrote and managed the grant for the attendance-incentive awards program at Granger Middle School.

--Janet Wheaton, recently retired Granger School District administrator, who worked with Sanchez and helped her with the application for the $20,000 grant that funded the incentive program, The "Every Child, Every Seat, Every Day" was the title of Sanchez' grant application to the Yakima Valley Community Foundation.

--Joan Wallace, Bellevue business woman who for more than a decade has helped focus attention on the needs of the families of Granger and created the district's relationship with Heritage.

Discovery Institute is presenting the award in partnership with the Seattle law firm of Patterson Buchanan, a leader in school-personnel legal issues, particularly the annual School law Conference. Bellevue developer and retailer Kemper Freeman, one of whose key focuses has been education since his years in the legislature in the 1970s, is the major sponsor.

To ensure wide visibility for the award this year, and to help guide nominations in future years, Sound Publishing and Q13 television will be media sponsors.

It was in a recent column detailing the dramatic turnaround in "chronic" absenteeism for the schools in Granger to 3.6 percent, more than four times better than the statewide average of 16 percent, that I suggested the achievement merited the attention of those seeking to bring change and educational enhancement to schools. In addition, perfect attendance to 21 percent from 3 percent the previous year.

Steve Buri, president of Discovery Institute, seized the opportunity of the May 19 dinner event and its focus on creating a school system for the current century to agree that the Granger accomplishment merited the first Innovations in Education Award and that the dinner was the appropriate venue.

Discovery Institute's American Center for Transforming Education works with state legislators, policymakers and those involved directly in education to promote systemic change to the nation's education system.

The motivation in Granger to create the attendance-incentive program was the nagging awareness for educators and parents there, as in every economically challenged area, that absenteeism is a key factor in kids failing to succeed in school as well as their becoming prime targets for gang recruitment.

Sanchez worked to create a belief among faculty and staff that full attendance was possible and put encouragement, support and incentives in place for students. She did that by putting together a year-end drawing for five iPads for students with perfect attendance and promoted the program with posters around school.

The year-end awards promotion was accompanied by signage proclaiming "every quarter you are in school every day you will receive fabulous prizes."

The motivation to recognize the achievement with the new Innovations in Education award was the realization on the part of Discovery Institute and the rest of the team of companies involved with the award that significant education change will only come if attention is focused on new ideas that are producing noteworthy change.

Wheaton said she was sure that going forward there will be an effort to measure academic results from the attendance improvement, but added last year already paid a dividend in that it"was the first in many years that the entire district met standard in all areas of the state bilingual test - the Washington English Language Proficiency Exam."

It's worth focusing on the fact that while the public education system is under challenge from forces seeking to bring about necessary changes to curriculum and structure, the Granger story is evidence that essential change can come about through new vision within the current system as well as from external forces.

The panel conversation I will be moderating following the award presentation May 19 event will feature:

--Don Nielsen, who served eight years on the Seattle School Board and has written a book called Every School that has gotten national attention:;

--Bob Hughes, a member of the state Board of Education and former Corporate Director of Education Relations for Boeing.

-- Paul T. Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Research Professor at UW-Bothell, whose focus is on re-missioning states and school districts to promote school performance, school choice and innovation, finance and productivity; and improving rural schools.

For political junkies, old political writers being foremost among those, one of the recurring exercises is finding similarities between years-apart election campaigns. Thus this year's race for the Democratic nomination for president is offering such a comparison, particularly for those fond of fostering, or for some it's fearful of, the thought that history repeats itself.

With Donald Trump suddenly the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, there will be reach backs to campaigns and candidates of the past to which Trump's campaign this year will draw comparisons.

But the similarity I'm referring to in this case is between Sen. Bernie Sanders' intriguing quest of his party's nomination against an established party figure, Hillary Clinton, and Eugene McCarthy's quixotic campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1968.

McCarthy's campaign slogan of "Get clean for Gene" has become Sanders' "feel the Bern."

That '68 campaign in which McCarthy, a virtually unknown senator from Minnesota, forced Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from any re-election effort then sought to be his successor, will always be a vivid memory for me because it was the first presidential campaign I covered, as a young reporter for UPI.

A quick background for those to whom that 1968 campaign is merely a foggy recollection from a history class. The growing anger, particularly among the young, over the failing effort of the Vietnam War allowed a fed-up McCarthy to decide to run, almost match Johnson's total in the nation's first primary in New Hampshire, and thus caused Johnson to announce in a national television address that he would not seek another term.

Those angry against the war, largely young people who thought it was not only time to end what they viewed as an immoral campaign by their nation's leaders but also seeking broad change in the "Great Society" Johnson had created for their parents' generation, flocked to support McCarthy.

Sen. Robert Kennedy, brother of the slain president and viewed by many as heir apparent to John Kennedy's "Camelot," entered the campaign. For a handful of memorable months until Kennedy's assassination as he left the stage at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel following his victory in the California Primary, his campaign brought forth the unrest among minority groups and added those demanding social change to those seeking to end the war.

Kennedy' campaign actually was attracting some Democratic leaders and cementing delegates in each state, including in Washington State where Everest conqueror and Kennedy confidant Jim Whittaker was pinning down Kennedy delegates.

One of my favorite memories of covering parts of that campaign of nearly 50 years ago as a young political writer was a chance encounter at the 1968 Democratic state convention in Tacoma with a to-become-famous high school friend from Spokane.

Kitty Kelley was a spunky young woman for whom that presidential campaign would be the launch pad for a highly successful but controversy-punctuated career as a biographer of the rich and famous.

I glanced across the crowded hall and, seeing her for the first time in 10 years, I made my way through the crowd, said hello and asked her what she was doing there.

"I'm Gene McCarthy's press secretary," she said with a laugh.

"What the heck do you know about being a press secretary?" I asked.

"I decided I wanted to be one and did some research and found that two of the senators didn't have one," she responded. "So I picked McCarthy, made an appointment with him and told him I wanted to be his press secretary. He asked me 'what does a press secretary do?' and I told him we'd figure that out together. So I got the job."

So when McCarthy decided to emerge from relative anonymity and run for president, the campaign brought Kitty contact with political leaders and the prominent in society. Those contacts she made that spring and summer of '68 helped provide the exposure and experience that would allow her to launch her literary career.

I've watched with interest and amusement in the years since then as her ability to uncover long-hidden secrets and get the "ungettable" story on those about whom she produced a string of unauthorized biographies stirred the ire and criticism of the rich and famous and their friends.

Because she was an attractive blond woman with the name "Kitty," those stung by her tell-all biographies of Jackie Onassis Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, the British Royal Family and perhaps most famously, the Bush family, found it easy to dismiss the quality of her work.

Over the years, when controversy swirled around her work, I've smiled to myself to think back on that encounter in Tacoma with a young woman I'd known as a Spokane teenager who had used brains and guts as substitutes for experience and privilege to carve out a high-visibility career for herself.

She thus exemplified an army of young women who did likewise in that decade of the '60s and early '70s, creating important roles for themselves in what had been, prior to that, a "man's world," and opening the way for others of their gender to do the same.

But back to the '68 campaign.

Kennedy's death ensured that Democratic party leaders would gather in force behind Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who didn't run in the primaries but merely gathered the necessary state-by-state support from delegates and local party leaders. Thereafter the outcome of who would get the nomination was really never in doubt, except in the ranks of those young and minorities who had come to believe McCarthy's election was vital to the changes they had come to demand.

The battles in the streets of Chicago between McCarthy supporters and Mayor Richard Daley's police force as the Democratic Convention gave the nomination to Humphrey ensured that McCarthy's supporters would largely abandon the system and stay away from the November election.

In the end Nixon's razor-thin margin of victory made it clear to political analysts that those who decided not to vote ensured that the Democratic nominee would lose.

Fast forward 48 years to the Sanders campaign, which has attracted large numbers of those, particularly the young and new voters, who want out with the current social and political structure and flock to him as the instrument of change.

It's obvious to the Democratic party insiders and most elected leaders in the states that Sanders isn't going to win the party's nomination at this summer's convention. Thus Clinton, as much a part of Democratic establishment and tradition as was Humphrey, will head into the general election season hoping that history does not repeat itself, as in disaffected prospective voters giving the election to the Republican nominee by staying away from the polls on election day.

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The need to be remembered is an urge that beats strongly in the breasts of those who have experienced fame. And the need tends to grow with the forward march of years beyond the time of fame.

That reality helps explain Stuart Anderson's quest to sell copies of his second book, Corporate Cowboy, and his distress at the fact that the Black Angus Steakhouse chain that is descended from his Stuart Anderson's Black Angus/Cattle Company won't carry or promote his book.

Anderson is quick to admit sales have not gone well for the book, his second. And he is convinced the reason is that it's not coming to the attention of those who dine at the restaurants, which now number 46 in six western states, but mostly California. The company has several times rebuffed his and Helen's efforts to put up posters and sell the book.

In fact, for reasons unknown but that sadden Anderson and Helen, his wife of more than 40 years, he wasn't invited to any of the events surrounding the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the chain in April of 2014, the month in which Corporate Cowboy was published.

So Anderson, 93, is going where he is most likely to find those who will remember him and where some will recall that he was the man who built a chain of 122 restaurants that was, for a string of years in the 1980s, ranked Number One in the nation among full-service restaurants.

The strategy is one of outreach to the seniors who represent a major share of the population of most communities in the Coachella Valley. It's a plan conceived by Brenda Lynn Martin, a longtime friend of the Andersons, who has a high profile in the desert for her promotion of various non-profit and community activities and events.

Explaining her decision to come to the aid of the Andersons in the effort to sell copies of his book, Martin, who has been friends with Stuart and Helen for a dozen years, told me: "My main goal is to fulfill his dream to get those books sold as a part of his leaving a legacy."

So Thursday evening a book signing and jazz fest at the Backstreet Bistro in upscale El Paseo will serve as the debut of a campaign, with Martin partnering with the restaurant's owner, Lavane Hause, to bring the book to the attention of gatherings of seniors at the restaurant each week, with jazz and a book signing.

"If this goes well, we can plan on a series of such gatherings, inviting seniors from a variety of locations, even snowbirds wintering here, to join the jazz and book signngs" Martin added.

"I hope this is the first of many," says Hause, who says of Anderson: "he reminds me so much of my dad. He and Helen lunch here frequently and I can't not try to help him."

I visited in recent days with the Andersons at their Rancho Mirage condo, looking west toward the San Jacinto Mountains, as I try to do each winter when Betsy and I get to spend time with friends in the Palm Desert area.

Anderson, who speaks softly and slowly from the effects of age as well as of a stroke he suffered seven years ago but retains a firm gaze, usually from beneath his cowboy hat, wanted to talk about the book and the challenge selling copies is presenting.

It is the story of how he built the restaurant empire that became a best-recognized national company with 10,000 employees and annual revenue of $260 million. The book actually has a longer official title: "Corporate Cowboy. Stuart Anderson: how a maverick entrepreneur built Black Angus, America's #1 restaurant chain of the 1980s."

He first tried his hand as an author when in 1997 he produced "Here's the Beef! My Story of Beef," a book he described to me as "fun and informative," but most importantly to him, thousands of copies were sold in the Black Angus restaurants. The book was meant to be an answer to the highly popular McDonald's commercial of the time in which an elderly lady asks: "Where's the Beef?"

At that point it had been a decade since he had retired after five consecutive years of his Stuart Anderson's Black Angus restaurants being named the top steakhouse chain in the nation by USA Today in a poll by industry publication Restaurants & Institutions. He admitted candidly, in an interview we did a few years ago, that new owners took the fun out of his job.

But the time of his first book, he was still well-remembered, in Washington state in particular, including for a series of television commercials he did in the Seattle area for a senior housing organization.

After retiring, he and Helen retired to their 2,400 ranch sprawled along Interstate 90 west of Ellensburg. He had bought the ranch in 1966 with the intent of raising the black angus cattle that would be served at his restaurants. But it turned out to be too great a challenge, for various reasons, so he continued to raise the cattle until he sold the ranch to Taiwanese interests, though to most travelers going past, it remains the Stuart Anderson ranch.

It's clear that Stuart and Helen nurture the hope that a focus on retirees and the strategy that Martin has put together may eventually create for Corporate Cowboy success like his first book experienced.

The challenge of travel for Anderson now means they seldom get to visit Seattle or the Ellensburg area any more.

But many of those on their way across Washington State on Interstate-90 will still note "that's where Stuart Anderson's cattle ranch was" as they pass the acreage stretched out along the highway.

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Those who have watched or experienced Liz Marchi's commitment to provide funding for Montana entrepreneurs and startups for a decade might suggest that the term "angel investor" was coined specifically to describe her.

It was 2003 that Marchi, who had arrived in Montana with three daughters and her then husband and settled in the Flathead Valley, decided to create the state's first angel fund, Frontier Angel Fund I. The fund closed in 2006 at $1.7 million, $300,000 more than she had hoped.

She eventually guided the Kalispell-based fund, which had attracted investors from around the country who were either fans of or summer residents in the Big Sky Country, to lead three deals and gather a total of 12 active investments and was soon also overseeing angel groups that had sprung up in Missoula and Bozeman.

Because she successfully syndicated her deals with a number of other angel groups outside the state, she jokes that she has become "the grandmother of crowd funding." She's not referring to the formal definition of crowd funding but rather the syndication efforts she initiated that attracted a crowd of angels from numerous groups making small investments.

Now Marchi, who grew up near Jackson Hole, WY, but who had never been to Montana when she arrived here in 2000, says she is looking forward to making the investor-leader handoff to Will Price, whose roots in the state brought him back from Silicon Valley to create Next Frontier Capital, at $20 million the largest venture fund ever raised in the state.

Price, on the board of or a key executive with a number of Bay Area tech companies, did his due diligence on the attitudes of national venture and mergers & acquisitions firms toward Montana before making the move to Bozeman.

Price's fund, which closed last April a year following his decision to bring his family to the state where his father, Kent Price, is well known as Montana's first Rhodes Scholar and University of Montana board member, has already made two investments.

I've kidded Liz and her husband, Jon, who in 1978 founded Glacier Venture fund as the first venture fund in Montana and presided over it for 29 years, about being "Mr. and Mrs. Montana Money." To which she once responded: "We are more like Mr. and Mrs. Montana risk capital since we share a very high risk tolerance...and often share the consequences."

Although Marchi talks about making a handoff to Price, as well as "the next generation of angels, including some members of Fund II in their '30s, who slay me in terms of their abilities," she was completing the formation in August of $2.7 million Frontier Fund II, which has already invested $900,000 with syndication adding $300,000 for a total of $1.2 million already invested.

"We have 48 investors in 10 states and meet physically in Bozeman and the Flathead, alternating with a WebEx option," Marchi said, noting that investors met in Bozeman today, with investors from two continents and four states, including Montana investors from Bozeman and Kalispell to review three Bozeman companies.

That sounds less like "handing off" for the 62-year-old Marchi than welcoming the potential follow-on investment opportunity that venture capital can represent for angel. And she hopes Price's fund will provide.

She says she does have an agreement with Fund II to be the key administrator only for the next two years, but could opt to remain longer. And she is down to business cards representing her current five involvements.

But Marchi is genuinely pleased at the implications of the arrival in Montana of Price, who did his homework before deciding a venture fund could work in Montana.

Price shared with me the research he did with and his thoughts about how "changing values" will benefit Montana's ability to attract capital.

Montana was often dismissed as a "fly-over" state, meaning that the most viable potential investors on the east and west coasts usually just fly over on their way to the other coast.

But Price's SurveyMonkey sampling of both venture and merger & acquisitions firms and found that the appeal of the big sky to many increasingly disenchanted with urban challenges was strong but that direct air access is a challenge Montana must come to grips with.

Fully 70 percent of responding M&A firms said they would consider buying a company in Montana, even though 80 percent said they had never been to the state. And a third of the venture firms said they would consider doing a deal in Montana, although 47 percent said they had never been there.

The import of improved air access to a state that has no direct flights currently to the major markets was dramatically indicated with the response of M&A firms, 90 percent of whom said it was "important" or "Moderately important" to have direct air access to the market of their investment.

"That's something the state is going to have to address," Price said. "But I think it will be addressed."

Among venture firms, almost two thirds sad the quality of the local syndicate partner would determine their involvement.

Although Marchi herself has attracted investors from around the country, she observes that "Being away from the noise of the coasts keeps us grounded in an important way.

"The entire conversation and perception needs to move about rural America, what is going on here and its role in making our economy and our country work better," she said, expressing the principle that has guided her commitment to Montana entrepreneurs.