Cell tower going up near Center Junction

There's going to be an addition to the skyline near Center Junction, Robin Cole of the Rite Group told me last week.

AT&T will operate the 125-foot cellular tower on land owned by Cole southeast of the interchange, he said. Crown Castle International, which specializes in building communication towers and leasing them to service providers, began digging the foundation last week.

There's a little irony in the placement of the tower, because Cole's company is a Nextel dealer. "They came around and said you have the ideal location," Cole said. "Since my ground lies in an unincorporated area, they could go ahead without having to go through the NIMBY [not in my back yard] problem."

The deal was negotiated by Doug Dolan, owner of Realty Advisors in St. Louis.

The tower is designed to provide better service coverage along the Interstate 55 corridor, and is part of a major AT&T investment program designed to meet the needs of modern phones such as the Apple iPhone and Blackberry phones, said Chelsey Ilten, an AT&T spokeswoman in St. Louis.

There are no dead spots for AT&T in the area to be served by the tower, Ilten said, but new technology requires upgraded equipment. "As the new devices come out and new data is sent, it requires more and more capacity," she said.

In recent years, AT&T has spent $283 million upgrading its wireless network, including the placement of 40 new towers in 2006 and seven this year, she said.

• Produce warehouse: The owners of El Torero restaurants will open a wholesale produce warehouse in downtown Cape Girardeau this fall. Called Bodega Dos Naciones, or the Warehouse of Two Nations, the business license application listed a planned opening date of Nov. 10.

The warehouse, which will be at 18 N. Frederick St., will be in a Quonset hut building with a brick facade. Antonio Trejo, a member of the family operating the restaurants led by president Daniel Alvarez, showed me around the building.

The building needs a lot of preparation work to be ready to store produce, Trejo said. He was waiting for an electrician that day to install three-phase wiring to run refrigerators. The company will begin business with a focus on providing produce to the eight El Torero restaurants, Trejo said.

"We're trying to open this wholesale produce warehouse to get better prices and better quality of merchandise," Trejo said.

The warehouse will also be open to serve other area restaurants, he said, and will seek out local produce growers as suppliers.

Trejo promised to call as the work progresses and give me updates on a firm opening date and offerings.

• Store for gamers: Fantasy gamers who have been missing a place to gather since the closing of Plainswalkers Gamers Guild, take heart. Thunder-gnome, a collaborative effort by Roy Foster, Matt "Squeaky" Carlson and Mike Enos, will open soon at 716 Broadway.

I've had a few people ask me about the curious Thundergnome painted on the windows, and the reference to a MySpace page. So I stopped by there this afternoon, and Foster was there working on a display case. Foster worked at Plainswalkers, and he and his friends were missing a gathering place for gamers and decided to open their own.

The storefront -- Foster said it has been a tattoo parlor, a dress shop and a beauty supply store -- was reasonably priced. But he and his friends aren't quitting their day jobs.

The attraction of fantasy gaming as he and his friends do it -- the old-fashioned way, in person -- is the social contact that isn't available with online style games like World of Warcraft, Foster said.

"Like any other geek in the world, I am interested in all things sci-fi and fantasy," Foster said.

Foster, 29, credits fantasy and science fiction for transforming him from a failing student to an avid reader. He said when he entered the seventh grade, he was reading at a third-grade level. After discovering fantasy and science fiction literature, he tested at the 11th-grade level at the end of the year.

And the name? "We were sitting at my and Squeaky's place trying to decide. We had found a good place at a good price, but what would we name it? Well, Squeaky and Mike cracked off 'Thundergnome,' kind of a play on 'Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.'"

The exact opening date is uncertain, he said, and will depend on when all the licensing is in place.

• Auto dealer honored: Coad Toyota, 357 Siemers Drive in Cape Girardeau, won the Toyota President's Award for excellence in all aspects of dealer operations, an honor that was announced in a full-page ad in the Sept. 3 issue of Time magazine.

In the ad, the company praises the Coad family -- operators of auto dealerships since the late Joseph Coad opened his first car lot in 1964 -- for the way they have run the business since taking over the local Toyota franchise 18 months ago.

They have moved the franchise from the bottom 10 percent of Toyota dealerships to the top 10 percent, the ad reports.

To win the award, general manager Shane Morris told me, the company had to maintain a Customer Satisfaction Index of 97.8 percent and keep that satisfaction rating high for a year. A fine achievement, considering the Coads have only owned the dealership for 18 months. "And you have to sell a certain amount of cars," Morris said.

The Coad family has General Motors franchises to sell Chevrolets, Pontiacs, Buicks and Cadillacs as well as Toyotas. The key difference for the dealership was a new attitude, Morris said.

"Immediately we changed the atmosphere of the dealership with our people," he said. "We kept certain people here who were here with the previous owners. And obviously we started selling cars."

Morris began working for the Coads 17 years ago, right out of high school. He washed cars. Now he's the general manager.

Why has he stayed with the Coads so long? "They take care of their customers, and they take care of their employees," he said.

• Online company formed: Jimmy L. Gockel opened an online consulting firm to help people filing for Social Security disability benefits. Called JLG Claims Service LLC, the company was formed after Gockel, who is disabled, was contacted by people seeking assistance with their disability claims. Gockel, an U.S. Air Force retiree and former employee of Southeast Missouri Hospital, said in a news release that he hopes to pass on information gained while he was pursuing a disability claim of his own. The Web site for the new service is www.jlgclaimservice.com
• Company recognized: Workforce Employment Solutions was named one of the fastest-growing small businesses in the United States by Inc. magazine. Workforce was founded in 1994 and has grown from the original office in Farmington, Mo., to a company with 10 offices in four states, including offices in Cape Gir-ardeau and Perryville, Mo.

Rudi Keller is the business editor of the Southeast Missourian. Contact him at 335-6611, extension 126