Larry Wolfe
No, this is not a profile of that Randy Newman, the singer-songwriter most famous for the song Short People. This story features Randy Neumann, native of Minnesota and current Sun Lakes snowbird and softball player.
A graduate of Burnsville High School, Randy played JV hockey for the Braves and also played youth baseball and flag football. (Burnsville is a suburb of Minneapolis, about 15 miles south of the city). He then earned a B.S. in Business Administration at Mankato (Minnesota) State College where he was a center on the Indians’ JV hockey team.
After college, he worked briefly as a rack jobber before being hired by Graybar Electric in Minneapolis. Little did he know it at the time, but he would go on to spend his entire professional career of 34 years, seven months and 10 days with that company. But who’s counting?! Graybar is a Fortune 500 employee-owned corporation in the wholesale distribution business for electrical, communications and data networking products. Randy’s career focused on the electrical side of the business where he started in the warehouse then moved into inside sales and outside sales before spending the last five years of his career as Business Development Manager. He’s a member of Graybar’s prestigious Gamma Beta Epsilon Honor Society, reserved for the company’s top all-time sales people.
According to Randy, he’s been involved in softball forever. While at Graybar he was a player and manager with the company’s industrial league team, leading them to six consecutive national tournaments. He’s been spending the winters in Arizona since his retirement and had played senior softball in Scottsdale and Mesa before moving to our Sun Lakes program last year. This is his first year of league play and he’s proving to be a standout player. Randy’s also one of our league umpires. He began umpiring five years ago and last year graduated from the National Tournament Umpires Training School and umpired in the Senior Olympics Tournament in suburban Minneapolis this past summer.
Randy and his wife, Jane, have been married for 31 years and have a son, Nicholas, a daughter, Andrea, and one grandchild so far! Nicholas followed his father’s footsteps to Graybar while also playing hockey while Andrea was a long-distance swimmer and is now a stay-at-home mom and part-time waitress.
Besides softball, Randy and Jane enjoy hiking up our Arizona mountains while Jane also enjoys arts and crafts.
When the Neumanns head north for the summer, Randy’s attention turns to fishing, umpiring in several ASA leagues and playing tournament-level horseshoes, pitching 30 percent plus ringers.
Randy and Jane own a cabin in beautiful Burnett County, Wisconsin, just across the state line and northeast of Minneapolis-St. Paul. They enjoy the relatively cool summer weather there, but are ready to head back to Arizona when the frost hits the pumpkins and the leaves start to fall. Right now, they’re enjoying the best of both worlds and as Randy puts it, “Enjoying retirement to no end!”