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 Member
Profile: Pete Musgrave
How many businessmen could claim to have facilitated a love
affair between a buffalo and a yellow pickup truck? The buffalo's name was
Belle. Her keeper, as well as the pickup's owner, was Pete Musgrave. The
business, in Sheridan, Oregon, was called Western Deer Park and Arboretum.
Entrepreneur
is too pedestrian a word to describe Pete Musgrave. Entrepreneur is for
beginners. We need a new word- like suprapreneur or ultrapreneur to describe
the relationship this man has with business.
During his years at Oregon State University, Pete
worked as a floor waxer, a recipe taste-tester, a construction laborer and a
"cat skinner" on a logging crew. Here, Pete may have gotten the notion that
anything was possible.
He graduated from OSU with a pharmacy degree (1961)
and worked in somebody else's store before deciding to buy one. In 1968, after
leaving Mootry's Pharmacy in Salem, Pete acquired Sheridan Drug. "There was a
lot of competition in Salem," he recalls. "Nobody wanted to move to a small
town, but in Sheridan there wasn't any competition!"
Apparently, the 4000-square-foot store in Sheridan
wasn't enough challenge. In 1980, he bought five acres of land in town and
built Western Deer Park and Arboretum. "I had 150 species of trees, including
all 87 native to Oregon," Pete says. And besides "Belle" the buffalo, the park
featured deer, camel, emus, monkeys, gazelle, ducks, geese and pheasant. "The
folks in town came to calling me Noah," he laughs. While there was a local
veterinarian, Pete took on some of the details of animal care, including
vaccines and clipping the wings of birds to keep them from flying away. The
business also included a restaurant and a gift shop, and Pete supervised the 15
employees.
By 1986, he decided to sell the park. But that only
whetted his taste for business adventure. He bought a small mill that made
wooden stakes and lath and he ventured into business with a couple of his old
friends from high school, making deep fried snacks from exotic Fijian peas.
In 1988, he decided he wanted to retire. (Yeah,
right!) So he sold the Sheridan Drug store and bought a lovely home on the
outskirts of West Salem. "I quickly got bored," he admits, even though he loves
to play golf. By then, he had also remarried and took a job as a pharmacist in
Monmouth while his wife, Peggy, continued her work as a manager in a state
office. In 1997, he retired again and Peggy joined him in retirement soon
thereafter.
But while working in Monmouth, Pete began working on
an idea to develop a lip salve to get rid of cold sores. "For decades,
pharmacists had recommended lysine (an amino acid) tablets for cold sores,"
Pete says, "but there was nothing out there in a salve form." The ink was
hardly dry on his retirement papers when Morgan's Lysine Lip Balm became
another successful business, though one he could do part time, out of a home
office. The product is now sold throughout the country in thousands of
pharmacies. Peggy, too, caught the entrepreneurial bug and has started a
business growing fresh herbs and edible flowers for Salem's finest restaurants.
"Entrepreneurs have to be serious about the business,"
Pete advises. "It won't work if you treat it like a hobby. You have to keep
track of everything to excess, including what your competition is doing."
Excessive? How could anyone attribute such a word to Pete Musgrave?
Ultrapreneur sounds more attractive.
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