Tony Dwire offered succinct advice to his coworkers at a lunch celebrating his 30th anniversary with TSP: “Find great people, give them the tools they need, and then run like hell to get out of their way.”
He learned that himself in a pre-TSP job he took on after graduating from the technical institute in Jackson, MN, and being hired as an electrician in his hometown of Worthington, MN. “Francis Judge was the owner, and he was a wonderful guy,” Tony says. “If I’d worked with him things might have been different. But he tied me up with one of his journeymen, and if you got to work at 7 he thought you were already an hour late. It was ‘hurry, hurry.’ You were never fast enough, and after six months I’d had enough.”
At that time, Tony’s high school sweetheart (and future wife), Donna, was a nursing student at what is now Augustana University. On weekend visits, he examined college life and, as Tony says, “got the itch to do something different.” He enrolled at South Dakota State University, leaving four and a half years later with a degree in electrical engineering.
After her graduation Donna had taken on a “temporary” job at what was then Sioux Valley Hospital, and the newlyweds had purchased a house while Tony commuted to Brookings to finish his education. The original plan was to move elsewhere when he was done. “But we fell in love with the community, with Sioux Falls and the state of South Dakota,” he says, and he took a job with Johnson Controls in Sioux Falls. That experience allowed him to meet with engineers already working in the city.
It was not a particularly good time to be starting in engineering with a slow economy in the mid-1980s. Johnson Controls experienced layoffs in 1986, and with the contacts he’d made, Tony took on a temporary job with TSP, working at the VA Medical Center. When that ended, he took on a job as an electrician. Then in January 1988, he and Dick Gustaf, then Managing Principal and Director of Engineering at TSP, happened to be at the same gas station one morning before work. Tony asked Dick if TSP was looking to hire, and he started on Feb. 8, 1988.
While most of Tony’s time today is spent in a supervisory role, for years his focus was on electrical design. The pinnacle of his work, Tony says, probably would be the electrical design for Sanford Children’s Hospital.
“It’s near and dear to my heart,” Tony says. “My wife spent much of her career here in post-partum labor and delivery, and it was a fun and rewarding project. The people were top-notch in their job, and you could tell they wanted everything top-notch for their patients.”
Tony and Donna are the parents of three children, Brenna Wiertzema, an interior designer who was born just weeks before Tony started work here; Andrew, who works full-time as a staff sergeant with the South Dakota Army National Guard, and Katie, who plans to spend another two years in the Air Force before returning to the area. Katie and her husband are stationed in San Antonio. Andrew and his wife are the parents of Tony’s grandson, Connor.
Tony’s mother still lives in Worthington, and his father resides in Ashton, IA. Brother Todd is an electrician in Baxter, MN, while brother Travis “keeps the machinery running” at Millennium Recycling in Sioux Falls.
When Tony attended school in Jackson, he worked part time at Bedford Industries, a Worthington company that made twist ties for items such as bread wrappers. When he quit to be an electrician, he made a dollar an hour less than his work at Bedford. But it’s never been about the money.
“The really memorable part is the people I’ve worked with,” Tony says. “That’s the exciting thing about being part of TSP. I’m so excited about where we’re headed with the young people we’re bringing in today and the promise of where that will all lead us. There hasn’t been a better time to be part of TSP than now.”
