When he moved to Las Vegas 20 years ago, a gravel road provided access to his home. Not anymore. His house, less than 10 minutes from the famous Strip, is now located on a main boulevard. The city has grown incrementally and so too have the huge hotels and casinos that fuel the growth engine. 

Walker Manufacturing founder Max Walker has been inventing and designing equipment for more than five decades. He built his first lawn mower, a sickle bar unit, in 1949, and the first Walker was introduced in the late 1970s. Today, the company that literally introduced the compact commercial transmission steer mower to the market and turns out more than 20 riders a day from its new factory in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Shortly after Walker Talk Volume 8 was printed, we found 15 printing defects: typos, misspellings, printing errors. What was really upsetting and embarrassing to me was that I had personally proofread the entire magazine before printing. After contacting the Walker Talk publisher, we quickly put a quality control plan in place for future issues.

Brothers Dave and Peter Lucadano had a dream in 1985. They wanted to become the biggest and the best lawn maintenance company in the Tampa, Florida, area.

When Dan Fogerty asked the owners of a Bend, Oregon, apartment complex to bring lawn maintenance in house, he had no idea they would accept the idea. After all, the owners had always contracted out the maintenance and Dan had little experience mowing lawns and landscaping. In his proposal, he would take over exterior maintenance that included upkeep of 200,000 square feet of turf and a variety of trees, shrubs and flowers.

The routine is the same every Monday morning. Mark Fagnant and Leroy Collins line up their two Walker mowers. Then they peer down a one mile stretch that cuts through the center of Colonial Colony South. To the right and left of this road are more than 570 retirement homes, comprised of single and double-wide manufactured homes.