'See Me, Y': The Yanney Saga from 'Buddy' to Burlington Capital

‘See me, Y’

THE YANNEY SAGA FROM ’BUDDY’ TO BURLINGTON CAPITAL MICHAEL KELLY

‘See me, Y’

THE YANNEY SAGA FROM ’BUDDY’ TO BURLINGTON CAPITAL

BY MICHAEL KELLY

DESIGNED BY CHRISTINE ZUECK-WATKINS EDITED BY DAN SULLIVAN AND PAM THOMAS

On the cover: Dr. Gail Walling Yanney, Lisa Yanney Roskens and Michael B. Yanney. JASMAN PHOTOGRAPHY

Copyright © 2021 Burlington Capital All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior consent of the publisher, Burlington Capital.

Burlington Capital 1004 Farnam St., Suite 400 Omaha, NE 68102 burlingtoncapital.com

First Edition ISBN: 978-0-578-33420-2 Printed by Walsworth Publishing Co.

THE YANNEY SAGA FROM ’BUDDY’ TO BURLINGTON CAPITAL

In a career now in its seventh decade, business and civic leader Michael B. Yanney has signed internal memos simply with his initial: “Y.” Though not a full signature, and hardly an autograph, it became his signature scrawl — a fast way for a busy executive to keep things moving without delay.

When followup or a personal chat is needed, he often has signed memos with “See me, Y.” In receiving such a note, staffers knew not to ask “why” and certainly not to dally before stopping by. That letter “Y” was not to be feared (usually), but it meant business. All who have worked for Mr. Yanney recognized his trademark, his monogrammatic stamp. So it made sense to title his story, “See me, Y.”

The book, though, covers far more than his distinctive manner of written communication, which, by the way, is almost always by hand, not by email or other electronic methods. “See me, Y” covers a lifetime, from the days when he was known by his boyhood nickname up to today, including the lives of his wife, Dr. Gail Walling Yanney, their daughter, Lisa Roskens, and the family-owned business.

A fascinating tale? Oh, yes. You’ll see Y.

PROLOGUE AN OMAHA FAMILY CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 2 A LEBANESE-AMERICAN FAMILY CHAPTER 3 THE GAIL STORY CHAPTER 4 OMAHA NATIONAL AND THE WOODMEN TOWER CHAPTER 5 RIVERFRONT CHAPTER 6 SOVIET UNION/RUSSIA CHAPTER 7 AMERICA FIRST CHAPTER 8 THE LISA STORY CHAPTER 9 BURLINGTON CAPITAL CHAPTER 10 AKSARBEN CHAPTER 11 UNMC CHAPTER 12 CIVIC AFFAIRS CHAPTER 13 POLITICS CHAPTER 14 MENTORING CHAPTER 15 OUTDOORS/GAME AND PARKS CHAPTER 16 MILITARY CHAPTER 17 KEARNEY CHAPTER 18 EQUESTRIAN WORLD CUP CHAPTER 19 FAMILY, TOO CHAPTER 20 YANNEY FUN

EPILOGUE THE YANNEY STORY CONTINUES

STRONG AND VERSATILE, LIKE THE LETTER ‘Y’

YOU MIGHT SAY the printed letter “Y” fits the Yanneys to a T, as in a talented trio. The capital Y consists of three straight lines connecting in the middle, just as this father-mother-daughter team figuratively meets at a strong junction. Y, the 25th letter in the alphabet, stands proud and tall, its arms outstretched and willing to carry a heavy load — it’s the most versatile letter of all, both a vowel and a consonant.

Strong and versatile also describe the Yanneys, whose accomplishments are widespread if not all widely known. Their efforts include a long-standing, successful investment management business and numerous civic contributions of time, talent and treasure. The individual lines that comprise the sturdy letter Y lean in from three directions, each supporting the other, just like this family threesome — Mike Yanney, Gail Walling Yanney and Lisa Yanney Roskens.

Theirs is a saga of achievement, but they say their success has come not only from a bit of luck and whatever innovations, hard work and moxie they could muster, but also from the skills and persistence of those around them — partners in work, play, travel, friendship and community action. And from the family — Lisa’s husband, Bill Roskens, and their children, Charlie Roskens and Mary Roskens. Years will pass and this part of the Yanney line will end in name, but a lasting legacy will remain.

In business, the Yanneys are known for America First Companies, founded in 1984, renamed Burlington Capital in 2006. Lisa joined the company at her father’s request in 2000, soon succeeding him as chairman and CEO. The Yanneys’ corporate philosophy is that a good business makes money “with” people, not “off” them, and that a good company gives back — not just through charity, but from its economic effect on communities.

In civic affairs, Mike Yanney has served in countless ways, from heading riverfront development to creating a youth mentorship program originally known as “Yanney’s Kids” to fundraising for the transformative Omaha expansion of the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

In medicine, at a time when women weren’t encouraged to become physicians, Dr. Gail Walling Yanney became an anesthesiologist at Clarkson Hospital, specializing in ear, nose and throat surgery. She also has served on committees and civic boards, especially related to health and the environment.

Lisa Roskens moved the company in new directions with a collaborative management approach, even as her father continued as chairman emeritus and close adviser.

This book is a story of the Yanney family, its company and its civic life — stories public and private, told through scores of interviews and from research in news accounts and other records. The story of the Yanneys is actually quite a lot of stories.

The three-pronged, combined efforts of Mike, Gail and Lisa have not only accomplished a lot but also have provided leadership. For six decades, often behind the scenes, the name “Yanney” has been associated with numerous improvements to the community they call home.

The capital letter Y, with its three legs joined as one like a fork, stands pointed and strong. The “rule of three,” likewise, is the principle that what comes in threes provides a stronger combination, whether in science, technology, communication, comedy or other fields. A triangle, with its three edges and three vertices, is equally desirable in most ways, and is widely used for its strength in construction, engineering and design.

In a way, Y also describes a football referee’s signal: Touchdown! So cheers to the Yanneys, a trio of Nebraskans who have quietly and humbly achieved lots of goals without the adoration of roaring crowds or marching bands. They make a good combination — as a family, a company and a team.

Mike and Gail Yanney; Lisa and Bill Roskens; and their children Mary and Charlie Roskens on vacation in Vermont in June 2021.

The Woodmen Tower in downtown Omaha, with the Yanney residence and office on the widewindowed 28th floor.

A QUIET SUNDAY, A BIG BANG — AND A CLOSE CALL

LATE ON A PLEASANT SUNDAY AFTERNOON over Labor Day weekend in 2018, as I walked to meet friends in the courtyard outside Mister Toad’s lounge in Omaha’s quaint Old Market district, I noticed lights flashing on a police cruiser — an auto accident had left a black 2017 Audi A8 Quattro, its front end torn off, sitting at an odd angle at 13th and Farnam Streets. An older couple stood next to the vehicle in the middle of the intersection. Walking closer, I was shocked to recognize them — Omaha philanthropists and civic leaders Gail and Mike Yanney.

“Omigosh, are you all right?” I asked. They looked a little rattled at the impact — who wouldn’t? — but said they thought they were OK. I briefly thought about the impact they had made on the community, the state and beyond, and the many thousands of people with whom they had crossed paths. And how this literal crossing of paths in an ordinary downtown intersection had resulted in a very close call.

Just back from a fishing trip with friends in Alaska, the Yanneys had stopped at 13th for a red light. It turned green and Mike started to drive westbound up Farnam toward their home, four blocks away, on the 28th floor of the Woodmen Tower. Out of the corner of his eye, he sensed a vehicle coming fast from his left. Gail saw it, too, and yelled “Stop!” Mike slammed on the brakes and the hard collision spun the Yanney car. BANG! Airbags deployed. If not for Mike Yanney’s quick reaction at age 85, the impact of the red-light runner might have struck squarely on his driver-side door — and airbags and seatbelts may not have prevented serious injury, or worse.

Witnesses verified that the 30-year-old driver of a 2009 silver Chevy Malibu ran a red light. Police, who ticketed her, said she had been talking on her cell phone. The woman was unhurt. The Yanneys’ car was totaled, and a police officer helped with their luggage and drove them home, where they called daughter Lisa Roskens.

Yes, it was just an expensive fender-bender, and fortunately not a news story about serious or deadly injury. But for the following Saturday, because of the Yanneys’ local prominence, I wrote about the accident as the first item in my weekend “notebook” column in the Omaha World-Herald. The story was posted online, and the couple soon heard from friends far and wide, including overseas.

In my 48-year career that would end in retirement a month later, I was aware of the Yanneys mainly by reputation but had met them a few times. When I was a city hall reporter in the ’70s, Mike chaired the Riverfront Development Committee. Over the years the newspaper has written about the civic leadership of the international businessman and his wife, a retired anesthesiologist, as well as of their accomplished daughter — a business executive, attorney and horsewoman. Several years ago, Lisa and I had emceed an event. And I more recently had written that she went to Lausanne, Switzerland, headquarters of the Federation Equestre Internationale, and pitched Omaha as the site for the 2017 Equestrian World Cup Finals. Competing against groups from much larger cities, she amazingly won the site designation for her hometown.

So I knew the Yanneys. But I didn’t foresee on that Sunday afternoon at the downtown intersection that I would get to know them much better. Lisa, chairman and CEO of the family’s investment management business, originally America First Companies and now Burlington Capital, later asked if I’d take on a project. For a number of years she’d thought about engaging a writer to pen a history of her parents, their civic achievements and their family company.

Michael Kelly (this book’s author) and Lisa Roskens emceed an event in 2008.

OMAHA WORLD-HERALD

Little did I know about the yin and the yang of the Yanneys — how Mike and Gail’s distinct backgrounds and personality differences truly complement one another. Or how their “opposites” attracted so strongly on their first meeting that they became engaged to marry in a shockingly short four days. Or how their daughter combines their strengths into one engaging, nonstop force.

And so on June 4, 2019, I began the research. At a reception for Burlington Capital board members, executives and staffers on the second floor of a renovated warehouse at 12th and Howard Streets (three blocks from where the crash occurred), Lisa signaled it was time for the picnic-style dinner. “Shove each other out of the way and find a seat,” she good-naturedly nudged the group of 22. As they settled in their places, she added: “Typically at these dinners, we do a deep dive into one of our business units. But since Mike (this book’s author) has joined us to chronicle our company history, we’ll be talking about who we are and where we came from.”

Up to the microphone stepped the gregarious Dr. Bill Carter, a retired surgeon in his early 90s who had known the Yanneys before almost everyone else in the room. In detail and with good humor, he regaled us with a sweep of history — corporate and personal. He teased that at Mike and Gail’s 1960 Christmas Day wedding at the old Blackstone Hotel, her parents thought, “She was making a horrible mistake. This fella never had a real job, he had no money!”

Dr. Bill Carter, a longtime family friend and board member, gave a charming talk about the Yanneys at the June 2019 Burlington Capital board dinner in the Old Market.

Well, Mike went on to make a little. He spent years in banking and then, at Gail’s urging, forged out on his own, investing in small-town banks and then contracting for soybean-growing in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. One night, Dr. Carter exuberantly explained, a meeting in Colorado Springs included fishing, dinner and lots of vodka toasts with business associates from the USSR. Dr. Carter and a new Russian acquaintance boisterously ended the evening at 10 or 11 outside. “We were talking and singing at the tops of our voices. He sang ’The Volga Boatman’ and I’m singing ’Ol’ Man River.’ A couple of security people came out and suggested rather emphatically that we go to bed!”

Everyone at the 2019 dinner laughed, and others chimed in. Longtime associate George Krauss said Mike Yanney learned early to become a good negotiator because he had to be — he was the youngest of nine children. Mike drew a big laugh by deadpanning, “We had five sisters and one bathroom.”

There was serious talk, too, about the Yanneys’ investment company that consistently has paid dividends to investors for nearly four decades, as well as about the family’s high ethics and civic leadership. Oh, and about travel. Mike Yanney has visited the old Soviet Union or Russia more than 150 times and once was interrogated by a very gruff, accusatory and unfriendly KGB agent.

Gail and Michael Yanney in 2014.

OMAHA WORLD-HERALD

Locally, Mike has taken leadership roles in numerous community improvements — from a still-active mentoring program for youths to fundraising for major expansion of the University of Nebraska Medical Center to an 80-acre park in his hometown of Kearney, Nebraska, in memory of his Lebanese-American parents. Some of his activities I knew from following the news, but I kept learning lots of other things.

In any case, I was hooked. Tell me more.

In the course of writing this book, I interviewed 125 people, who did tell me more — much more. They painted a picture of a leader in business and civic affairs who for decades has brought people together on big projects — even into his 80s, as he evolved into Omaha’s “gray eminence.” Quietly and often behind the scenes, on one issue after another, this elder statesman has provided mentorship, counsel and wisdom in the tradition of an éminence grise, a French term dating to the 17th century.

This illustrated volume is not a mere paean to a family. It’s a kind of cultural history of Omaha and beyond, told through the lives of this remarkable father-mother-daughter trio. A number of those interviewed said they were glad the Yanneys’ activities — and their example of giving back to the community — would be preserved in a book.

“It’s really important to document these things,” said Dr. James Armitage of the University of Nebraska Medical Center. “Humans need heroes. They inspire people and they give young people something to shoot for.”

Said attorney Steve Seline: “Mike is a historic figure in the city of Omaha. It’s amazing how much energy he still has in his late-80s, and for a lot of things he’s still the go-to guy.”

The Yanneys are go-to people, always on the go. Their lives, their company and their civic impact are worth a book and worth a look. Please step inside and enjoy a saga like few others. It’s about the Yanneys, surely, but also about their interactions with ordinary extraordinary folks at the intersections of achievement and compassion, of persistence and innovation, of gravitas and levity — around the world, far from the downtown intersection and a very close call on a quiet Sunday afternoon in Omaha.

2021

— Michael Kelly,

Lisa and Mike at the Business Ethics Alliance in 2016.

EPILOGUE

THE YANNEY STORY CONTINUES

AMONG THOSE WHO KNOW HIM, Michael B. Yanney is famous for his snail-mailed, handwritten personal letters and for his internal memos signed with the letter Y. He wears the term “oldfashioned” with pride, and is natty in his daily attire. He is content to allow his executive assistant to handle new-fangled (ahem) technology like e-mail. And yet when the pandemic hit in 2020, MBY enthusiastically adapted to Zoom calls and conferences.

As he approached his 88th birthday in December 2021, he remained amazingly busy — his schedule full but also staying in touch with people across town, across the country and across the sea.

For years he resisted the idea of a book like this, but daughter Lisa Roskens persisted and he finally agreed to a telling of the story of the Yanney family, its business and its civic life. That includes the blessing of a 61-year marriage to Dr. Gail Walling Yanney and the pride of watching daughter Lisa Roskens thrive as chairman and CEO of their family-owned Burlington Capital while also raising her own family.

Along the way, there has been plenty of laughter. Four days before the book went to the printer, Mike Yanney submitted himself to a comic roasting at the Omaha Press Club as a “Face on the Barroom Floor.”

This book is more than a snapshot of the Yanneys’ lives. It’s a saga, “a long story of achievement and a sequence of events.” What a sequence, and the story isn’t over. Mike stays active in civic affairs, and in 2021, Lisa traveled internationally more than she ever has before – Amsterdam, Vienna, Kiev, Moscow and elsewhere.

She was raising money from investors for new business opportunities, including a promising global agricultural technology fund. Her chairman emeritus father, who has logged millions of travel miles of his own, is pleased with the directions she is taking the company.

Lisa is pleased to capture, as much as it’s possible in these pages, the arc of “a life lived well,” which her father has approached “not from selfishness, but always out of a desire to make the community and the broader world a better place.”

Mike Yanney’s first Zoom call, during the pandemic in 2020. He became an enthusiastic user of Zoom.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every writer, no exceptions, needs an editor; but not every writer has benefited, as I have, from the exceptional editing of Dan Sullivan. Or from the keen proofreading of Pam Thomas. Likewise, Christine Zueck-Watkins worked her magic in designing the book and its chapter layouts, starting with the “Y” design on the cover and then bringing the 75,000 words to life with hundreds of photos from various sources. All three of those professionals contributed much to this book.

Thanks to the many who spoke in interviews about Mike, Gail and Lisa — providing insights about their family, their company and their civic activities. Omaha World-Herald archives were an invaluable source of factual research, and we thank Michelle Gullett, the newspaper’s longtime manager of intellectual property, for her kindness and cooperation.

I’m also indebted to Ruth Utman, executive assistant to Michael B. Yanney, for helping connect me with many of the 125 or so people interviewed for the book; for setting up 25 or more interviews with Mr. Yanney himself; and for organizing Yanney family memorabilia that produced jewels, including Gail’s hilariously ironic 1960 greeting card to Mike that appears on page 20. I thank Lisa Roskens for proposing the book, and for making herself available amid her incredibly busy work and travel schedule. She, too, was a careful editor, sometimes on overseas flights, occasionally pointing out a “clunky” sentence. Clunky, me? Then it dawned on me: This attorney-businesswoman CEO was first a Stanford University English major!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In a 48-year career with the Omaha World-Herald until his retirement on Oct. 1, 2018, Michael Kelly covered police, courts, the county and city hall, spent a decade as sports editor and sports columnist and then wrote a column for 27 years in the generalnews sections.

In 2003, he received the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ national award for commentary and columnwriting for writing about his daughter Bridget Kelly’s survival of abduction, rape and multiple gunshots by a stranger (now serving a life sentence) and her speaking out nationally on behalf of survivors of sexual and domestic violence. In more recent years, he twice won first place for column-writing in the eight-state Great Plains Journalism Awards, and in 2021 was inducted into the five-member inaugural class of the Great Plains Journalism Hall of Fame.

Kelly was the lead writer of the 2010 World-Herald book, “Big Red Rivals,” and was the author of the newspaper’s 2015 book, “Uniquely Omaha.” During his career, he was a frequent speaker in the Omaha area and performed in and emceed many comedic Omaha Press Club Shows grilling public figures. Mike and his wife, Barbara, who celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2021, have four children and 11 grandchildren.

Michael Kelly OMAHA WORLD-HERALD

“We didn’t pick our parents, we didn’t pick this country. Think of how lucky we are today. Every one of us should thank God every day that we are in this really great country.”

— Michael B. Yanney, after his roast at the Omaha Press Club

MICHAEL KELLY

IN A CAREER NOW IN ITS SEVENTH DECADE, business and civic leader Michael B. Yanney has signed internal memos simply with his initial: “Y.” When followup or a personal chat is needed, he often has signed memos with “See me, Y.” All who have worked for Mr. Yanney recognized his trademark, his monogrammatic stamp. This book, though, covers far more than his distinctive manner of written communication. “See me, Y” covers a lifetime, from the days when he was known by his boyhood nickname, Buddy, up to today, including the lives of his wife, Dr. Gail Walling Yanney, their daughter, Lisa Roskens, and the family-owned business and his impact in Omaha and beyond.

A 2015 family portrait, from left: Lisa and Bill Roskens, Gail and Mike Yanney, Mary and Charlie Roskens. JASMAN PHOTOGRAPHY