Fiegen: I grew up on a farm, and I helped my folks with their books from 7th grade on. When we would lay the bills out, and look at what our receipts were, from the sale of hogs or cattle, I could tell you to the penny what we spent on fertilizer, feed, and protein, and that got me interested in economics. From 1969 on – I can remember I was in 6th grade – my parents started to take me to farm meetings, where people would come in and talk about economic and social issues. I recall hearing people talk about the federal reserve, the gold standard, and credit, and all of that got me interested in economics.

BFIA: This would have been in the 70's?

Fiegen: Late sixties early 70's. It was at the end of the Johnson administration – I really became interested during the first years of the Nixon Administration when he was trying to battle inflation while dealing with other issues in the economy. Inflation was the big issue for Wall St. and for the monied people. Credit was the big deal for people in the midwest – making sure that we could borrow money to buy farms, and to operate our farms, and I began to understand that easy credit helps people who are on the bottom of the totem pole, trying to improve their situation. Tight credit and low inflation helps people at the top of the pyramid protect their wealth.

I started to subscribe to some economic newspapers while I was in junior high and high school. I found some of those in the flood and they dated back to '71 – '74, as we got into the Ford years and then the Carter years. I Graduated from high school in 1976, and decided to pursue a joint degree in Agricultural Economics and Speech Communication in college. I went to college part time/full time while I was farming. Then I took a break and formed a grain bin building business with my brothers. We built grain bins for two years, and got to see what it was like to work with your hands, and not work in the wintertime, and try and have enough money put aside. I then went from building grain bins to merchandising grain. I merchandised grain for the NFO on Minneapolis Board. Most of my work was in wheat and small grains, some corn and soybeans.

Then I met the woman who would become my fiancee, my wife and then ex-wife. I went to work as an apprentice electrician. I did that for about a year and then along came Reagan's 80's and I started to have back problems. I was visiting a chiropractor three times a week.  She said, you can't do this for 40 years. And so I decided to go back to school. I got my Agricultural Economics degree and my Speech Communications joint degrees from Kansas State in 1984.

This was at the height of the farm crisis, and I had called my folks and asked, is there room on the farm? Dad said, I don't know how long I can hang on. At the time he was paying 17% for his money, and he said the bank has got me month to month through the year . I took the LSAT and did very well on the LSAT exam. and then applied to law school. I enrolled at the University of Iowa in the fall of '84.

At Christmas time in '84, the bank actually sent my folks a drop dead letter. I usually call my parents on Sunday evening.  I called my folks at the start of finals to check in, and they had just got the letter. It gave them 60 days to pay back all of the loans. Some of them were real estate loans and dad was feeding a lot of cattle at the time. He had $1,800,000.00 borrowed, and they gave him sixty days to pay that back.

I got through finals and my wife had our kids packed up. We literally got in the car at 9:00 p.m., drove to South Dakota through the night. It really wasn't Christmas because at the same time the bank sent the drop-dead letter, they froze my parents' checking account, so they couldn't buy diesel fuel, they couldn't buy heating oil for the house, they couldn't buy groceries. The thing that saved my family is that Dad did some custom work for people, grinding hay or moving snow, and they would pay him in cash, and that's how he bought food for the house and paid the electric bill, while the bank had their bank account frozen. All of that struggle and injustice got me interested in bankruptcy law.

We visited about a dozen different lawyers in 1984 who claimed to know something about bankruptcy, and I wasn't impressed. I came back to law school in January of '85, and a woman from down between Hills and Riverside came to the law school to ask for students to volunteer at her storefront clinic in Hills.  She was good friends of Willie Nelson and he had given her a little seed money to start the clinic.  She had opened the first Farm Aid clinic in Hills, and I started volunteering two nights a week in her little store front clinic for farmers who were going through foreclosure.

During my last year of law school a law firm called Dumbaugh and Childers offered me a job and I got to do hands-on bankruptcy legal work for them with farmers as a law clerk. When I graduated in 1988, they were downsizing their firm and I went back to South Dakota. I was in a firm for two years and then Dan Childers called me and said we want to hire you back, and I went to work for them in January of 1990. I've been doing bankruptcy and some ag law, and some corporate law and litigation since January of '90 and then I opened my own firm in September of 1996.

After I got out of Iowa and while I was with the firm Childers and Vestle, and on my own, I taught economics at Kirkwood for 8 years, again alternating between micro- and macroeconomics. I also taught one semester of macroeconomics at Coe College. When I got elected to the state legislature, I couldn't do both and I gave up teaching in 2001. The interesting thing is, as you listen to people throw out misinformation today, with that economics background, there are times when you have that teachable moment and say, “wait a second here.”   I went to the federal reserve hearing in Des Moines on Saturday August 22nd, and there were a number of people arguing for the gold standard as being beneficial to borrowers, and you have to say, wait a second here, it doesn't work that way.