When he drove up to Denver recently to pour cider samples at a new chain grocery story, Paul Laur (SFGI95) took his 7-year-old son Gavin along. As president of Santa Fe Cider Company, Laur manages his business with Gavin and Nathaniel (4) in mind—involving them in the world of work while enjoying the time he spends with them.

“My sons go with me to pick the apples or to drive the truck to the press,” he says, “and that’s part of what makes the job fun.”

The manager of the grocery store had other ideas and told Laur it was unprofessional to have his son with him on the job. True to the philosophical tendencies that brought him to St. John’s, Laur went home and thought it over. What emerged was a clear view on the role of business in a person’s life, particularly his own.

“The manager was talking about corporate ethics—not professionalism at all,” Laur says. “I have a family-run business. It makes total sense to me to bring my family along for the ride. It’s a shame that corporations have to be so faceless.”

Laur has worked hard to bring the personal into the professional. When he started his business in Santa Fe, he looked for a way to fit himself into his chosen community. He wanted to attach his business to an existing story, and he found that story in the orchards of New Mexico. Planted by Spanish settlers 400 years ago with rootstock from Asturias in northwest Spain, the orchards risked losing their water rights to fast-growing urban communities nearby. Laur wanted to help keep water in rural communities and began working to create a market for apples from local orchards.

The way he approached being an entrepreneur came out of his liberal arts sensibilities. “My background has not been a business degree from Harvard,” he says. “It’s been about creating synergies with the marketplace and with the community in which we live.”

Laur’s background, in fact, is adventurous and far ranging. He began his college career as a physics major at the University of California-Irvine, hoping to become a theoretical physicist. Sidetracked into a sailor’s life, he found himself, in the late 1970s, sailing a boat to Australia with three undergraduates from St. John’s in Annapolis: Steve Scott (A78), Preston Kelly (A82), and John Fleming (A78). Laur had already heard about the college and had considered applying to St. John’s. Another old friend, Nick Kennedy (A81), had gone to St. John’s and introduced Laur to the three men in his Annapolis crew. The experience on the boat, Laur says, “elevated St. John’s to the short list of things I wanted to do in my life.”

“I suppose the main point about sailing with these guys,” Laur adds, “was that during the 10 weeks or so that it took us to reach Australia, we had one or two conversations about life and our condition. We didn’t spend much time in port—three days in Panama and three days in Tahiti—so most of the time we were logging miles at sea and under sail, only running the engine an hour a day to charge the batteries.”

After finishing his undergraduate degree at the California Maritime Academy, Laur found a career in the Merchant Marine that allowed him to attend the graduate program at St. John’s in Santa Fe between trips to sea. He met his wife, Ruth, just as he was finishing up at St. John’s. It was then that Martin Crowley, who had hired Laur years before to deliver a sailboat, invited Laur to manage a rum factory for him in the Caribbean. This experience with Pyrat Rum introduced Laur to the art and science of taste.

“I became really good at picking up subtle differences and could identify which component was causing what, yet I still had a lot of stuff that fed my scientific geekism,” Laur says. “I love the scientific process, but without the tasting that goes along with it, it makes you a plumber at best, rather than a composer.”

When Laur and his wife had their first son, they returned to Santa Fe rather than raise him in the Caribbean, “where it would be a battle to get him to wear shoes.” They founded the Santa Fe Cider Company in 1999.

Being in Santa Fe allowed Laur to participate in community seminars at St. John’s that have fed his intellectual and entrepreneurial interests. At a community seminar on Flannery O’Connor, Laur met Owen Lopez, executive director of the McCune Foundation, which supports small business and community development in Santa Fe. Lopez became a great supporter of Laur’s company. Laur also enjoyed a seminar led by tutor Krishnan Venkatesh, Graduate Institute director, on food, taste, and the culture of connoisseurs.