John and Barb Findley

John Findley was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in April of 1946. He was the third child born to Ralph and Gertrude “Dode” Findley. John and his two older siblings were each born in April, almost exactly three years apart from each other. Then when John was only seven months old, his parents adopted his younger sister, Sandy. Many people thought John and Sandy were twins, because they were in the same grade in school.
 
John’s grandfather, Frank Findley, was an accountant who wanted his own business. When he was about forty years old, he bought the Wisconsin Paste Company, which made billboard paste. When Frank unexpectedly died in his fifties from complications in surgery, John’s father and uncle took over the business. They changed the name to Findley Adhesives and started making packaging and labeling adhesives. As kids growing up, John and his brother worked in the family business during the summers.
 
After graduating from high school in Milwaukee, John went to Gustavus Adolphus College in southern Minnesota and majored in business. Soon after graduating,
he married his college sweetheart. Unable to have children, they adopted
Tom in 1977, when he was four months old. Today Tom lives in the
Milwaukee area with his wife and two children.
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John and his dad decided that after college John should get some other business experience before coming to work at Findley Adhesives. So for five years he
worked at the Horner Waldorf Corporation in order to learn more about the
packaging industry. John then went to work at Findley Adhesives and over
time was able to learn every aspect of the family business.
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Barbara Rackow was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, in January of 1952. Her immigrant parents lived in Stettin on the Oder River in eastern Germany, near what is now the border between Germany and Poland. When the Russians started invading during World War II, Barb’s parents and her father’s brother decided to escape to the western part of Germany that was controlled by friendly U.S. troops. With just one suitcase and one bicycle, the three of them traveled on foot three hundred miles, sleeping in barns and ditches along the way.  Barb remembers her mother telling of one night when they were invited to sleep in a farmhouse in actual beds. But during the night, her mother clearly heard God telling her that they should leave immediately, which the others reluctantly agreed to do. The next day they found out that the whole area had been bombed. They finally made it to Hamburg in western Germany, where they stayed until after the war. Barb’s mother had some friends who were willing to sponsor them, so in 1949, her parents were able to sail by boat from Italy to New York. They settled in Wisconsin and built a little house, where they raised Barb and her younger sister.
 
As she was growing up, Barb’s family in America kept in touch with their relatives in eastern Germany through letters and reel-to-reel audio tapes. They secretly hid the tapes in boxes of oatmeal and shipped them back and forth to each other with recorded voice messages. It wasn’t until 1970 that, as a family, they were able to go over to Germany and meet in person the relatives who lived behind the Iron Curtain.
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Barb’s family spoke German at home, so she grew up bilingual. She took German
as one of her classes in high school and had a wonderful teacher that she adored.
But when a very inadequate substitute teacher took over the class, Barb determined
she would become a German teacher and would work hard to be an excellent one.
She went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and was again
able to visit relatives in Germany during a semester abroad in Munich. After
graduating, she taught German to junior high and high school students in Menasha
and Waukesha, Wisconsin. In 1982, Barb told her eighth-grade class that she would
be traveling in 1984 to see the 350th anniversary performance of the Passion Play in Oberammergau, which has been performed every ten years since 1634 by the
inhabitants of that village in Bavaria. She invited her students to go with her,
not thinking any of them would remember or take her up on it.
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In the early 1980s, Barb and John met and fell in love in the Milwaukee area. One
thing that impressed Barb was that, unlike others, John agreed to go to church with
her. Two years later, they were married in church and have been going to church
ever since. Their faith is a big part of their lives. For twenty-five years they attended Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, which was led by Pastor Stuart Briscoe
and was one of the hundred largest churches in the United States.
 
During the first months of their marriage, John and Barb were planning their first big trip, which was traveling to Germany for the Passion Play. Unexpectedly, two of her previous students contacted Barb and said they would like to go, too. Barb couldn’t say no, so after being married only nine months, John and Barb were accompanied on their newlywed trip by two teenage girls. They had a wonderful time, and after two weeks with the girls, Barb and John were again able to visit Barb’s relatives in eastern Germany.
 
John had been working his way up at Findley Adhesives. In 1988, his uncle was planning to retire, and his father was getting older, so the company’s attorney encouraged John to think about buying the company. This was easier said than done, because the stockholders consisted of twenty-seven members from three generations of the Findley family. But John was able to negotiate a bank loan big enough to buy out all twenty-seven of the other family members, and he became sole owner and president of Findley Adhesives. The large bank loan was conditioned on an aggressive five-year growth plan. John and Barb knew that if the business did not succeed, they would lose the company to the bank. In the first year, the business failed to meet its plan. But then over the next four years, John and his management team exceeded the five-year plan by doubling the size of the company. In the process, Findley Adhesives became a global business with two plants in Europe and joint ventures in Mexico and Japan.
 
Now that John had proven he could successfully grow the company, he decided to
look for a buyer. An important requirement for John was that all his employees still
had jobs after the sale. Because most U.S. companies would likely consolidate and reduce staff, John decided to look in Europe for a buyer. After discussions with
British prospects fell through, John started negotiating with Totale, a large French
oil and gas company, which had a chemical division that could be a good fit.
As part of the deal, the French assumed John would stay on and continue to run
the company, but he convinced them that his chief operating officer would do a
better job. They finally agreed, and John was able to retire at age fifty.
 
In 1996, John and Barb established a charitable foundation in which they put all
the proceeds from the sale of Findley Adhesives. The name, Vine and Branches, is
taken from John 15:5 in the Bible, and the foundation supports organizations that
1) minister to church pastors, 2) work to help marriages thrive, 3) evangelize
and disciple teens, and 4) are champions for the unborn. Both John and
Barb are still actively involved in managing their foundation.
 
While they were dating, Barb had told John that sometime during her life, she wanted
to live in Germany for a year. After retiring, they started planning for that adventure. They decided to settle in Freiburg, Germany, and all the arrangements were completed by September of 2000. Because they had no visas, they could only stay in Germany
for three months at a time. So for two years, they spent the fall months in Germany,
the winter months in St. Barts in the Caribbean, the spring months in Germany,
and the summer months in Wisconsin. It was an incredible experience that fulfilled Barb’s lifelong dream. While in Europe, Barb was able to fulfill another dream
and improve her gourmet cooking skills by working for a week alongside
the chef of a three-star Michelin restaurant in Rouen, France.
 
During the summer of 2002, John and Barb participated in a Bible study on surrendering to God. That November, they went again to St. Barts for the winter, just like they had for the past ten years. But as a result of their summer Bible study, they both independently felt that God was leading them to “surrender” their place in the Caribbean. They decided to go home to Wisconsin early and placed their house in St. Barts on the market. But John did not want to be in Wisconsin all winter, so they started looking
at places in Florida. They found their house in Bonita Springs and, in 2003, started spending part of the year there. That’s when their boating excursions began in earnest.
 
When John was a child, his father had a fishing boat at their family’s summer cottage
on Lake Michigan, and John has loved boating since he was four years old. He is especially avid about barefoot water skiing. After John and Barb were married for a
few years, John bought a boat, and they built a new house on Lower Nashotah Lake, west of Milwaukee. It was perfect for water skiing and close enough for John to commute to work. They loved living on the lake, where John water skied, and
Barb drove the boat almost every summer day for twenty-five years.
 
During the 18 years that John and Barb have lived in Florida, they have owned seven different boats, each one a little bigger than the last one. They have spent countless hours on the water with the culmination being the completion of the Great Loop, a
six-thousand-mile boat route that circumnavigates the eastern United States and
part of Canada. This took many weeks of planning and preparation, and by 2007,
they were ready to embark. But Barb’s dad became ill as they were about to
start the trip, so John completed the first segment from Florida to Milwaukee with friends. In 2011, John and Barb did the second segment from Florida to New Jersey,
took the winter off, then finished the loop in the spring of 2012. In the last segment, they boated from New Jersey through the Eerie Canal and parts of Canada and
back to Milwaukee. On the wall in his office, John proudly displays the flag
he received for completing the six-thousand-mile Great Loop.
 
John and Barb sold their boat and gave up boating when they moved to Shell Point. They had been associated with Shell Point for many years, because John’s father lived here from 2002 to 2008, and his brother, Bruce, has been a resident on the Island for eighteen years. John and Barb moved into The Enclave in 2020, as did John’s younger sister, Sandy Rose, and her husband, Bill. Over the next several years, John and Barb are planning to wind down their Vine and Branches foundation, and John says the highlight of his life has been giving away everything that he has made. Barb likes to cook and do needlework, that she learned from her mom, and she works very hard as the organizer and director of our Enclave activities and communication. She and John are looking forward to traveling to Alaska and Europe in 2022, but they love being in their
home and spending time with their new friends here at Shell Point.