2026 Alaska Business Hall of Fame

Von Imhof landed his current position as president and part-owner of Delta Leasing about twenty years ago. “I was coming off about three or four serial entrepreneur attempts that didn’t go so well, and I kinda got cold feet” when the opportunity arose, he says. He received a lot of encouragement and support from his wife, Natasha, a member of the Rasmuson family that built National Bank of Alaska. Through her, Ed Rasmuson remained part of his life as the second Hall of Famer who mentored von Imhof.

“It was pretty intimidating,” he says of his father-in-law. “He was the CEO of the largest bank in the state. But what amazed me was he was so approachable.” The banking scion taught him to treat everyone with respect, as Rasmuson treated even the newest teller or smallest customer.

Delta Leasing’s customers are chiefly construction or transportation contractors. It rents a fleet of 2,500 pieces of industrial equipment and pickup trucks. North Slope activity has boosted the company.

“On top of that, we’ve even (by virtue of tough times) made the investment in a consumer division, where we are in the Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Deadhorse airports, and we rent vehicles to consumers, toe to toe with the Hertz, Avis, and Enterprises of the world.”

The consumer division was a twist, he admits. “We thought we had it all figured out on the commercial side, so how hard can it be to rent cars to tourists? A lot harder than you’d think,” von Imhof says. “We’ve overcome a lot of obstacles.”

The majority owner of Delta Leasing is Old Harbor Native Corporation. Its recently retired CEO, Carl Marrs, is the third Hall of Famer to inspire von Imhof. “A couple times I went to Carl and said, ‘Maybe we just shut this thing down. I’m not sure if we can continue.’ And he said, ‘Rudi, manage your cash, power through this. You’ll get through this,’” he recalls.

Perseverance applies not only to his business but to his hobby: von Imhof enjoys flying his plane to remote sites, like the Brooks Range cache, and hunting for Dall sheep. “Sheep hunting is a bit like being in business because it entails a lot of work. Climbing up the hills. There’s nothing easy about it,” he says. “It’s not always gonna be peaches and roses. You have to have a tolerance to deal with tough times.”

Ed Gohr

The “delta” in Delta Leasing comes from Delta Junction, where the company was started by another inductee, Ed Gohr.

In 2002, Gohr was anticipating a surge of North Slope investment. “It was a billion dollars, at least, coming to Alaska, and it was going to be spent in Delta Junction,” he recalls. “How can you spend a billion dollars in a town of eighty-five people? That was the genesis of starting a light-equipment leasing company.”

Gohr used $2,000 to finance four vehicles. “We got our first cash payment before we had to pay our truck loan, so it was really zero money down,” he says. The company was still in startup mode when he sold Delta Leasing to Rudi von Imhof and Old Harbor Native Corporation.

A decade later, Gohr started Delta Constructors, originally to service the fracking boom in North Dakota’s oil fields. Within three years, he had more than 600 employees. He notes that he’s now employing the grandchildren of some people he knows.

Gohr grew up in Palmer, where his mother ran a variety of small businesses: drilling water wells, a flower shop, and managing the Palmer Visitor Information Center. “So I grew up always thinking that having your ownership was the way to go,” says Gohr.

An early goal was to earn $1,000 per day, so he started a snow shoveling business. “I bid to do snow removal for the rest of the year at Palmer Pioneer Home. It was a $1,500 bid, just myself,” says Gohr. “The best part was that it didn’t snow the rest of the year.”

Gohr studied finance in college, and after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, he figured he’d cash in on the cleanup. Instead of scrubbing rocks, Gohr was tapped for his computer skills to handle accounting. He worked for cleanup contractor VECO for sixteen years. He can still point to modules fabricated for the North Slope, which remains a specialty at Delta Constructors, where he is CEO and majority owner.

Like his fellow laureate von Imhof, Gohr enjoys hunting, and he is a devotee of golf. “Just shot a 76 yesterday at Palmer, which I’m pretty proud of,” says Gohr. “Golfing brings out the good and bad in people. You can see how they are on the golf course—if they cheat, if they’re honest—and that’s very indicative of who they are in the business world.”

His other keys to success are perseverance and good decisions. “I believe in my spot I’m supposed to make about five big decisions a year,” Gohr shares.

While working at VECO in the ‘90s, Gohr taught the Junior Achievement curriculum to students. His main advice, he says, was to seek the drive within.

Now that he’s going into the Alaska Business Hall of Fame, Gohr calls the experience surreal. “I’ve always been a person who keeps my head down, keeps pushing and working. I don’t think about what I’ve accomplished,” he says. “But I’m getting to the point in my life when I can look back and say I’m proud of what I’ve done.”

Meg Nordale

Another bigwig in Alaska construction calls Fairbanks home. Meg Nordale has been president of GHEMM Company (pronounced “gem”) for a decade. Whereas Delta Constructors has a niche in building industrial and process facilities, GHEMM erects more familiar buildings, such as Bassett Army Community Hospital at Fort Wainwright and the Chief Andrew Isaac Health Center, not to mention the E.L. Patton Bridge spanning the Yukon River.

Nordale started at GHEMM in 1994 as an office manager and accountant, hired by the original owners who founded the company in the ‘50s. “GHEMM” is an acronym, she explains, standing for their names: Clyde Geraghty, Carl Heflinger, Carl Erickson, Bob Mitchell, and Harvey Marlin.

Nordale’s father was born in Fairbanks; her mother was born in Juneau. They met in eastern Washington, though, before returning to Alaska. The family lived in Juneau, Anchorage, the Kenai Peninsula, and Fairbanks, moving around with her father’s public law career. “I feel like that has really been a benefit for me in my business career, that I’ve had the opportunity to live in lots of different parts of Alaska,” Nordale says.

Nordale studied marketing and finance at the University of Denver and took a job with insurance firm Willis Corroon Corporation. “GHEMM Company happened to be one of the clients that I worked on when I was there doing risk management,” she says. That relationship led to the invitation to transition into the construction industry.

“I knew nothing about how to build a building,” Nordale admits, “and still today that’s not my role.” Her interest lies in maximizing rates of return, profitability, and efficiencies.

By 2000, Nordale was offered an ownership stake. GHEMM is now a component of Bristol Bay Industrial, an investment bank owned by Bristol Bay Native Corporation.

Nordale was honored by Associated General Contractors of Alaska with its Hard Hat Award in 2022. The organization, of which Nordale was a past president, reserves its most prestigious prize for those with a distinguished record of improving the construction industry. Former GHEMM executives Conrad Frank and Bert Bell were likewise bestowed Hard Hat awards in 1981 and 2006, respectively.

Now Nordale joins the Alaska Business Hall of Fame, which previously inducted Geraghty, Heflinger, Erickson, Mitchell, and Marlin as a group in 1999.

Nordale says she still enjoys going to work every day. “I absolutely love it. Why do I love it? Because we help people bring their dreams and their plans to fruition,” she says. “And I feel like we’re making contributions to our community and to our state.”

Those dreams and plans are not just blueprints for bridges and hospitals; GHEMM and Nordale also contribute as role models for good business practices. “You have to be personally committed to the role of money in your life, and then you can practice your own good skills using the owner’s money,” she says.

One of those skills is prudent saving. “I want to make sure that on the last day I have enough money to pay the bills,” Nordale advises.

Carol Gore

“I’m probably the only person you’ll ever meet who played classical and jazz on accordion,” says Carol Gore. The squeezebox led her to her first job.

Growing up in a trailer home in Anchorage’s Mountain View neighborhood (plus some time spent at grade school in Cordova), Gore was taking accordion lessons until her parents could no longer afford the $3 fee. Her music tutor made a deal: she could study for free if she worked in the office on Saturdays. “That’s where I learned accounting,” says Gore. “If someone asks you to do something, you should probably say ‘yes.’”

That three-letter word turned Gore’s résumé into a “scramble” of jobs: guitar teacher, print shop apprentice, debt collector for airlines, accountant for a construction company that also disbursed fishing crew shares. Whenever someone offered an opportunity, Gore said, “Wow, they think I can do this. I think I’ll try it.”

As another example, she didn’t know anything about marketing when she was hired to do marketing for Cook Inlet Region, Incorporated (CIRI). Gore is a shareholder of the Alaska Native regional corporation and an enrolled tribal member of Ninilchik, where her mother is from.

After uncovering embezzlement at the corporation’s money management office in San Francisco, CIRI gave Gore a new responsibility. “When I was with a land company, they bought a couple of multi-family [complexes], and everybody went on vacation and left me holding the bag,” she recalls. CIRI eventually sold the portfolio of 3,000 apartments to five buyers for a 30 percent return on investment after ten years.

Gore had to come by her business savvy naturally. She had a job from the time she was 12 and never went to college. “I didn’t grow up in a business environment, but I grew up with parents that worked very hard,” she says. “It was never dark or negative; it was fun, surrounded by family, surrounded by neighbors.”

Creating neighborhoods was Gore’s job for the last twenty-five years at Cook Inlet Housing Authority, a nonprofit affiliate of CIRI. “When I moved to a nonprofit from a for-profit business, I didn’t think any different: the bottom line mattered,” says Gore. “If you’re investing in people and you’re investing in community, you will get a return on investment.”

Cook Inlet Housing Authority became her new family, so it was hard to leave in 2023. However, she says the response to the COVID-19 pandemic convinced her she had taught her team everything they needed. “My best achievement is knowing when the next generation was ready to take leadership at Cook Inlet Housing, having the courage to give up what was family to me… to know it was time to ‘pass the drum’ to that generation,” she says.

No one would’ve intentionally designed a path like hers, Gore admits, but it makes sense because, at every turn, it was all about understanding people. She says, “If I didn’t say ‘yes’ to things I didn’t have a clue how to do, I wouldn’t have had the career that I had. And it’s been amazing.”

Junior Achievement of Alska hall of fame logo

He owns more homes in Alaska than anyone else, yet none are where he hangs his hat. Dean Weidner of Kirkland, Washington, is the closest thing to an Alaskan billionaire. He doesn’t live here anymore, but he’s touched countless lives.

One of those lives was Gore’s. “I’d been at Cook Inlet Housing for, like, eight years, and I get a call from a guy named Dean Weidner. Well, I don’t know who he is,” she recalls. “Turns out he thought I was a competitor.”

Gore and Weidner arrived at a new understanding. “I think we should be partners,” Gore told him. “You build market [-rate] housing, I build affordable; why can’t we be co-located? I didn’t know he was a really big shot, and he never partners!”

Weidner got his start in the industry as a teenager in Colorado. His mother taught him how to manage his family’s duplex and fourplex apartments at 14. He bought his first property in Seattle in 1977. He became an executive for TravAlaska Tours, Cruise West, and Alaska Sightseeing and entered the Anchorage apartment market in 1981.

Weidner Apartment Homes has grown to approximately 320 properties, renting nearly 73,000 units. The National Multi-Family Housing Council ranks him as the twelfth largest apartment owner in the United States.

To give back some of those billions, Weidner endowed the Weidner Property Management and Real Estate Program at the UAA College of Business and Public Policy. For that and other donations, the Alaska Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals honored him with the 2021 Outstanding Philanthropist of the Year award.

Weidner has also donated millions to the University of Wisconsin-Stout in Menomonie (not his alma mater; his bachelor’s degree is from the University of Colorado and his MBA from Fresno State University). Last fall, he received the Chancellor’s Award from the Wisconsin school.

“The multifamily portion of real estate is possibly the best business ever because we provide one of the three critical needs of life. Everyone needs air to breathe, food to eat, and shelter,” Weidner said in his acceptance speech. “Regardless of the economy, our product is needed.”

He cautioned that property management is hard work, involving physical and financial maintenance. “It also requires ‘people skills’ to assist in management as well as thoughtful analysis and research. Consequently, if you are willing to work hard, set goals, and patiently work your asset, you will be greatly rewarded,” he said.

Weidner’s company hasn’t yet achieved the co-located project with Cook Inlet Housing Authority that Gore proposed; the proposal is tied up with the D Street District Plan. His staff, though, sometimes co-locates workspace with the nonprofit.

Gore says, “We became his office in Anchorage for his team; they have an office here, but they came to our office. He made donations to our housing, and away went the competitor. Who cared? We were all in it together.”

Indeed, when Gore retired from Cook Inlet Housing Authority, she went to work directly for Weidner, overseeing his philanthropic giving, special projects, and advocacy. She says she’s working more hours than ever, it seems. “We have just a delightful relationship,” she says of Weidner. “I would work for him for free.”