Out of the Box

Russel Gehrke is something of a benign mad scientist.

Never mind that he hasn’t quite yet found his niche in the business world. It hasn’t stopped him from garnering significant media attention and becoming an odd magnet for celebrity.

Work related to his latest business venture, Storm Room Associates, has caught the eye of the Discovery Channel. Again. The network has featured him at least five times.

Yet, all the hype has not helped to generate sales of his custom-designed tornado shelters. Last year, company sales were zero. But it has turned the head of a national celebrity in England.

Gehrke is preparing for an April visit from Richard Hammond, known for British TV show “Top Gear.” Together, they are planning to shoot planks of wood at speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour at an old school bus using a contraption Gehrke invented for impact testing on his storm room designs. Dubbed The Shredder, the eye-catching unit positions a 5.7-liter supercharged motorcycle on top of a metal base, and when revved, the 500 horsepower bike spins a series of connected tires through which 2x4s are fed and launched. Hammond wants to run Gehrke’s Shredder, a “glorified baseball pitching machine,” for his upcoming BBC program, “Forces of Nature.”

Beyond the international cachet, Gehrke hopes to gather evidence about whether children would be safer in the bus during a tornado or by covering their heads in a ditch.

“Our game isn’t to make profits. Our game is to save lives,” Gehrke says on the recent Discovery Channel segment. “I have other things I can be doing.”

Prompted by the devastating EF5 tornado that tore through south Joplin in May 2011, Gehrke set out to develop storm shelters equally strong but half the price of competitors. The market quickly revealed an error in his thinking.

“Nobody wants to buy an inexpensive shelter,” Gehrke said. “If you have a $3,000 shelter and a $5,000 shelter right beside it, people would buy the $5,000 shelter thinking it must be better because it cost more.”

A grease monkey and jack-of-all-trades, Gehrke decided to adopt a donation business model to give a shelter to a Joplin family in need after each shelter purchase.

Though he had no problem finding potential families to donate to, no one seemed interested in becoming buyers. That hasn’t stopped him from donating, though. With the help of volunteer labor and gifted supplies, he’s built shelters for a few families and one that holds 50 people for the Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce.

“That saying, ‘no good deed goes unpunished,’ I’m living it,” he said.

Greener pastures?
In the mid-2000s, the eco-engineer co-founded Crane-based American Green Holdings Inc., a renewable energy company that produced biodiesel for vehicles including tour busses and once boasted actor Larry Hagman and country crooner Merle Haggard as board members.

Gehrke, who is dyslexic and holds no college degrees, personally designed the fuel system of a motorcycle that ran partially on Patron tequila for John Paul DeJoria, the co-founder of Patron Spirits and Paul Mitchell salon products. The bike was featured in a Barbara Walters’ special on the stylist.

Despite the remarkable attention, American Green Holdings failed in 2008, Gehrke said, as the economy tanked and diesel prices suddenly fell.

A Seymour resident who has no license as a professional engineer, Gehrke said he discovered his love for engineering in the 1990s when he sought a U.S. Department of Defense contract for a new jet fuel. Though he never got the contract, his soy-based fuel propelled a jet car that was tested to go from zero to 100 miles per hour in 0.6 seconds.

Gehrke has been featured for his creative inventions through the years on the History Channel’s “Modern Marvels,” Discovery Channel’s “Cool Fuel Road Trip” series and other programs, including Paul Harvey’s national radio show. The cable network appearances helped Gehrke land back-to-back McGraw-Hill book deals after American Green Holdings had folded. He wrote “Recycling Projects for the Evil Genius” and “Renewable Energies for Your Home.”

Now, the handyman and entrepreneur is trying to revive his shelter formula through a CrowdIt.com crowdfunding campaign that he hopes to raise $1,000 for development of a shelter for the family of Zachary Williams, a 12-year-old who died in the Joplin tornado.

With 24 days left on March 27, Gehrke’s campaign had raised half of the $1,000 goal – the money needed to finish the shelter.

No need for speed
In February, Gehrke presented at a 1 Million Cups meeting in Springfield where he tried to garner attention and advice from a room full of entrepreneurs. Howard Fisk of Springfield-based J. Howard Fisk Limousines Inc. was in attendance, scouting startups for a potential investment.

Fisk said he admired the company’s concept but wasn’t driven to invest. He got the sense Gehrke needed a website more than anything, and Fisk noted the room was full of young, tech-focused types.

“I’m terrible about putting the cart before the horse all the time,” Gehrke acknowledged.

Fisk recommended Gehrke lean on a variety of other business owners and marketers to help grow his business.

“We all did it. We all have seemingly tried more than one business concept, myself included, with some more successful than others,” Fisk said.

Rick Thomas, a self-described serial entrepreneur and co-organizer of the 1MC events, said the weekly meetings provide an environment where people such as Gehrke can network and find the answers they need to develop their business ideas.

“They all need marketing, and they all need money,” Thomas said of the presenters. “My advice to him would be to keep doing what you are doing and stay after it.

“Keep researching, keep testing and do what you can do to keep costs down.”

Through Storm Room Associates, Gehrke has teamed up with longtime friend Paul Betzold to develop a low-frequency tornado siren that already has received a provisional patent and could save the company yet. The sirens, which run on solar power and the same batteries used by cellphone towers, can link with National Weather Service data to track the paths of tornadoes.

Betzold, owner of Springfield Speaker on West Republic Road, said Gehrke is a problem solver, first and foremost.

“He may come across as scattered, but behind that there is an overriding intelligence,” Betzold said, noting the siren concept was featured on “Modern Marvels.” “He’s the type of person who can’t sleep right until he finds an answer to whatever he is focused on.”

The mad scientist ultimately appears focused on making the world a better place. If Storm Room Associates takes off, he thinks he can do that.

“You’ve got to remember, in Joplin, the community as a whole dealt with that tornado. Every child there knows someone who died, so it is a huge peace-of-mind issue for the kids,” he said. “One of my faults is that I probably care too much about what people think.”[[In-content Ad]]