Submitted Photo Troy Bader is a 1982 Rugby High School graduate.

Many Rugby High School grads can relate to the words of Class of 1982 member and Student Body President Troy Bader.

“People end up in different places and do a lot of different things, and we never know where life will take us,” Bader said recently, reflecting on his childhood in Rugby.

Bader ended up as president and CEO of International Dairy Queen after more than 20 years with the company. Before that, he had pursued a career in law, practicing at the Minnesota firm Grey Plant and Mooty as an associate, then as a partner.

Bader said the small town values instilled in him from childhood helped him find success.

Born in Stanley, Bader spent his formative years in Northern Plains communities that numbered as few as 300 people at times.

His father, Dale, was a teacher and public schools superintendent whose career took Bader, his mother Sylvia, and his two brothers to tiny towns throughout the state’s west and central regions.

“When I moved (to Rugby), I came from an even smaller community in North Dakota, Elgin. It was about 900 people,” Bader said.

“I would have been going into junior high,” he recalled. “So, I remember coming into Rugby and I remember being told by my dad that we were going to move. At that age, you just have all your friends and you think life was coming to an end.

“So, I wasn’t excited about moving to Rugby coming out of sixth grade,” Bader said. “But, it was a good experience.”

Life in Rugby

Bader lived in Rugby through his middle and high school years before he graduated in 1982.

Dale Bader served as superintendent for the Rugby Public School District from 1976 until 1988, when he took a post as superintendent for Minot Public Schools.

Dale and Sylvia Bader later retired and moved to Arizona.

Bader said as a middle and high school student, “I did a lot of sports, football, basketball and choir, those were the main activities.

“I was involved in student council and was student body president my senior year. There were just a lot of different things. That’s an advantage I think you have with a small school,” he said. “You don’t have to be specialized in any one thing.

“There are opportunities, and I think, expectations. So, you’ll participate in many things, just because of the student body size,” he added. “If you don’t have people participating in a variety of things, it’s hard to have those things move forward.”

Bader said students in larger cities miss out on the variety of opportunities small town students have because those in larger schools feel pressure to specialize in one single activity or sport.

“So, I look at that as a blessing of growing up in a small town,” he said.

What were his favorite subjects at Rugby High?

“Phy Ed, that’s probably number one,” he said. “I liked some of the history courses and science courses. We didn’t have a lot of business courses at the time. It was pretty standard fare.”

Of his favorite teacher, Bader said, “I’m not about to call out any one teacher. To select one is to offend several others. I say that somewhat jokingly.

“I would say there were many,” he added. “You had the opportunity to work with a lot of different teachers and like any school district, some really connect with you well; others don’t.

“I know when I was there we were really fortunate for a small town to really have a number of exceptional teachers that quite candidly, you could really tell really cared about their students and they cared about making a difference for them,” he said.

Bader said he remembered playing in the Rugby Junior High Band, directed by Tilman Hovland, a beloved teacher for whom Rugby High’s Tilman Hovland Auditorium is named.

“Is Rob Hovland still in Rugby?” he asked, adding he had known Rob Hovland, Tilman Hovland’s son, as a child.

Not surprisingly, Bader also remembered Rugby’s Dairy Queen.

Bader said he had never worked at Rugby’s Dairy Queen as a teen, “but I was a frequent visitor there. I lived just on the other side of the football field. So, you’d find me walking or taking my bike there often.”

College and career

Bader’s post-high school life took him to the Badlands for summer jobs, and the University of North Dakota for a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in finance. From there, he studied law at the University of Minnesota before beginning his career.

Bader has used his small-town roots and the lessons he absorbed from them to his advantage, he said.

“I think so often, in terms of the smaller communities, when you’re there, you don’t appreciate it,” he said.

“But, the work ethic that was instilled, the mindset to be accountable for the things you do, the things you say and your actions and behaviors is really understated, in many ways,” he added.

“In larger cities, most people aren’t going to know you,” he explained. “If you have a service business and do a bad job, people don’t really care, because they know they have a lot of other customers they can satisfy and they have the opportunity to work with in the future.

“In a small town, that’s not your opportunity. If you don’t stand behind it; if you don’t provide good service, if you don’t take care of people, if you don’t treat people decently, everyone knows it and it matters.”

Lessons from small town life

“I think the biggest thing for me is it instilled in my mind the importance of being accountable, of being ethical and really caring about your integrity,” Bader added.

“You’re given integrity and you could lose it quickly, but reputation truly matters,” he said.

“At least for me, it was something that really mattered. The way you treated people mattered. Because they were part of your community,” he said.

Bader and his wife live in the Minneapolis area. Their son, a mechanical engineer, works in the automotive field.

Bader recalled when he joined Dairy Queen in 2001, his son, about five years old at the time, “was a little disappointed to hear that he wasn’t going to be able to go behind the counter at every Dairy Queen to get all the ice cream he wanted.”

At International Dairy Queen, Bader worked in what he said were “various roles,” sometimes relying on his legal education, but not practicing law.

In 2011, Bader took the helm as chief operating officer of the company before becoming CEO and president in 2018.

Bader said he had an opportunity to visit Rugby in 2015 to do a biography at the Rugby Dairy Queen for International Dairy Queen’s International Franchise Expo.

He called the experience “nostalgic.”

“But that was the last time I was back,” he said. “I don’t have family in Rugby anymore. I really haven’t for quite some time.”