Dana Pruhs.

• Author: Armstrong, Amy M.
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Junior Achievement Alaska

His father took him along to work on Saturdays during his childhood. It was a routine and simple act that for Dana Pruhs became much more than just bonding time for father and son. It is what he credits for his interest in business, for his desire to create his company, to be an entrepreneur that provides employment for others.

Pruhs' father was in the liquor business in the Fairbanks area. He also owned a hotel and a small construction firm. To be sure, these were engaging and profitable ventures for his father and ones that actively demonstrated for Pruhs the principles of re-investing profits toward the future growth of a business.

Those are lessons Junior Achievement (JA) strives to teach students in the kindergarten through high school programs delivered at local schools. For Pruhs, those lessons were learned as a child tagging along with his father, watching the activity at each workplace as his father explained to him the importance of what was happening.

"As a kid, my biggest excitement was being able to go to work with my Dad that one day a week and go to lunch with him and all of his business buddies," Pruhs says with a smile full of unmistakable happiness. "Having a Coke with cherries in it and listening to all of the stories being told was the greatest thing ever. It truly, truly inspired me. I believe that was the foundation for my entrepreneurial business."

Job Shadowing

His first job--at about age ten--was transferring the bags of guests at his father's hotel to their rooms.

"I was a bellhop," he says again with a grin. "That was in the summer."

Later, in his teenage years when the pipeline construction was at its full peak, his father helped Pruhs purchase a truck so his entrepreneurial leanings could take wings as he provided transport for supplies. His trucking business grew, and his father advised him to keep costs as low as possible by not buying brand new equipment. When Pruhs went to college in California, his trucking business continued to provide him an income and a reason to come home on a regular basis.

As Pruhs thinks back on his own early beginnings, he quickly switches gears from a pleasant reminiscence of days gone by to today's world where children are not necessarily welcome in the workplace due to the myriad of regulations prohibiting certain kinds of child labor and the real dangers posed in some circumstances.

When possible and when safe, Pruhs says, "more of that" needs to take place today. Children ought...