Jefferson loses a “change agent”

Rich Osborne, who died June 3 at 49 years old, kept us wonderfully caffeinated at Greene Bean Coffee, inspired about community, and working on acceptance.

JEFFERSON, Iowa – For most of us here in our small town in west central Iowa, we’ve been stumbling around the past five days like we’re in a fog.

Early Tuesday morning, Richard Osborne III, just 49 years old, died of what is apparently some kind of unknown heart issue.

He and his wife Reagan Osborne have been veritable change agents in this community since they moved here in 2007 from Loveland, Colorado. Most people have come to know the Osbornes as co-owners of our great hangout Greene Bean Coffee Company just off the northwest corner of the courthouse square here. It’s the home of my own coffee group, the “Bean Boyz.”

The Osbornes have not only kept us wonderfully caffeinated and provided us comfortable space for hundreds of our meetings and gatherings. They’ve also inspired us to be more involved in the community, to provide safety and a friendly welcome to all, and to accept and even love those who are a little different in one way or another.

Rich Osborne, outside the storefront. That’s a neighbor building reflecting in the coffeehouse’s window. (Photo from Greene Bean Coffee Company)

Can I brag again that I had a quirky role in them choosing Jefferson?

In 2006, I believe it was, that the Osbornes joined 20,000 other bicyclists riding RAGBRAI. I rode a day or two myself that year, but I didn’t meet Rich and Reagan, or even see them, as far as I know. By the end of the bike ride, the Osbornes had fallen in love with small towns in Iowa. They later talked about how, as fans of the old “Andy Griffith Show,” they were always hoping that someday they’d find their own “Mayberry.”

So on their way back to Colorado from RAGBRAI, they stopped in one of the western suburbs of Omaha to pick up their kid, son Mason who was about 7 years old, who’d stayed with Reagan’s parents Steve and Jan Moon. And they went out to dinner El Bee’s, a favorite Tex-Mex restaurant in the nearby town of Waterloo, Neb. Around the table there, Rich and Reagan continued their raving about RAGBRAI and what life might be like in a small Iowa town.

Suddenly, their waitress butted into their conversation.

“Well,” she said, “if you like RAGBRAI and you like small towns in Iowa, you should be reading my uncle’s columns. He writes about the bike ride and small towns all the time!”

The waitress was and is my niece, Beth Polk Ginger, a teacher who moonlighted for years working at El Bee’s.

A day or two later, I had a phone call from Rich and Reagan Osborne in Colorado, telling me their story about loving RAGBRAI and wanting to move to an Iowa town. They also told me about their lives in Colorado, where Rich was working as a tech support specialist for a huge IT company, Sun Microsystems, and Reagan was a barista in a funky coffeehouse. They asked me what community I’d recommend, and of course I told them about Jefferson and Greene County.

Only weeks later, they’d found an acreage for sale a mile south of the one where I was living outside little Cooper, Iowa, eight miles south of Jefferson. They investigated the vacant house-less farmstead on the internet, and then persuaded Reagan’s parents, the Moons, to drive over and buy it.

In 2007, they moved, spending their first week as Iowans living with my late wife Carla and me at our “Simple Serenity Farm,” as we called it.

The Osbornes quickly found a house to rent in Jefferson while determining what and where their permanent home in the area would be. Their first plan was for the old Ecklund farm they’d bought. Again, there was no house there, but the Osbornes decided they’d convert a giant, 3-story corn crib there into an “off-the-grid” home and perhaps convert the gorgeous arch-roofed barn there into some sort of public venue. They named their place “Two-Barn Farm.”

They were about a third-done on the corn crib conversion when two things happened: 1) They discovered they couldn’t find a cup of gourmet-kinds of coffee in Greene County, and decided they could do something about that, and 2) a tornado blew down their barn, although the corn crib withstood the storm.

Rich Osborne ordered a coffee roasting machine, set it up in the basement of their rental home, and bought coffee beans from around the world. They started experimenting and developing their own brand of espresso-based coffee. They eventually named it “Breakfast Blend,” which would be made for their new “Greene Bean Coffee Company,” with the “Greene” coming from the name of our county.

In 2009, they started selling bags of their roasted beans, in one-pound, distinctive dark green bags that Reagan Osborne designed. Customers would drive to their home to pick-up their orders, or buy the bags in local groceries and other stores. In 2013, the Osbornes opened their coffeehouse in Jefferson, in the 1880s building where it is still located, just off the courthouse square. Much of the interior of the coffeehouse is built from lumber salvaged from the great old barn that was blown down at their “Two-Barn Farm.” (The Osbornes eventually suspended plans to build their home in the corn crib, but they did build a get-away cabin where the barn had been.)

Reagan and Rich Osborne (center) honored as “Entrepreneurs of the Year” for 2014 by the four-county economic development council Midwest Partnership. At the left is then-Jefferson Chamber of Commerce executive Chris Henning and, at the right, is the partnership’s president Warren Varley. (Photo from Jefferson Chamber of Commerce).

The business has been growing ever since.

For the year 2014, the four-county economic development council Midwest Partnership named the Osbornes and Greene Bean Coffee “Entrepreneurs of the Year.” At that point, they reported, gross sales had grown from about $10,000 in 2012, to more than $58,000 in 2013, then to more than $117,000 in 2014.

In June of 2017, they hosted an informal community coffee one morning at the coffeehouse. Rich told the crowd then that they were buying and roasting “about 15 different varieties" of coffee beans they had shipped in from around the world. They were “making and breaking sales records almost monthly, he said. “We thought we'd be able to run the coffeehouse with two, maybe three, employees, and we're now up to seven or eight much of the time.” He said they've trained "20 or more" baristas the past four years, including many younger Greene Countians who carried their skills off to college with them.

Rich Osborne, chatting at a community coffee at Greene Bean Coffee in 2017.

Like most businesses, they struggled through the COVID pandemic in 2020. For much of that year, you couldn’t hang out at the coffeehouse, but you could pick up coffee orders if you were masked and customers could purchase bags of roasted beans for use in their homes or offices.

Reagan Osborne, in those years, was very involved in helping Jefferson become accepted in the Main Street Program for community redevelopment.

Meanwhile, Rich Reagan’s career as a high-level tech support engineer grew, too. He grew up in Massachusetts, but moved to Colorado as a young man. He earned a business administration degree from Colorado Technical University, and for a time was an adjunct faculty member at Front Range Community College in that state.

He continued doing his IT work remotely when his company Sun Microsystem was acquired in 2010 by the even larger “Oracle,” a global tech company. At his death, he had the title of “Senior Technical Support Engineer,” and worked on some major accounts.

Occasionally, you would see him roasting coffee beans in the rear of Greene Bean Coffee, while he was minding two or three laptop computers on the counter. I will never forget one time, stopping to say “hi,” and asking him, “So, whose computer systems are you saving today while you are roasting coffee beans?” Once his answer was, “Harvard University.” Another time it was, “the Social Security Administration.” From right there in the Greene Bean Coffeehouse!

In recent years, the Osbornes’ son Mason has transitioned and become their daughter Meeka. She is one of the baristas. There was some stress, both in the community and for the Osbornes. The way the family handled it won some high praise last Wednesday from Andrew McGinn, their longtime friend and the former editor of the Jefferson Herald local newspaper, now a mental health counselor for Lutheran Services in Iowa.

“Rich was a damn fine human being, and his passing leaves a major void in our community,” McGinn, who still lives here, wrote in a Facebook post. “The fact that Rich was taken from this realm just days into Pride Month isn’t lost on me. As parents, Rich and Reagan rallied behind their trans daughter in a way that was inspiring.

“It couldn’t have been easy: championing trans rights in a small, rural, MAGA-fied community immediately puts you at odds with a good many small-minded souls. But Rich and Reagan stood their ground, despite owning a community business, because it’s the right thing to do. They made Jefferson a more welcoming place, and we will probably never know the true impact that has made on kids growing up LGBTQ in small-town Iowa; simply to feel seen. Rich, your good nature – and your integrity – will be missed.”

The coffeehouse in 2023.

Matt Wetrich, another friend who is executive director of Jefferson Matters, which is a successor organization of the former Chamber of Commerce, said both Rich and Reagan Osborne have been “crafty, creative people. I told Reagan just days ago that they are so creative, it seems like they can make almost anything happen. They’ve done that with their old building where they have the coffeehouse. And Rich showed over and over, in his work for Oracle, that he was a problem solver.

“And one thing we all have loved about them is that these people are big-hearted, kind of kids at heart. They’ve loved Disney movies, will quote lines from them to you, and they’ve made several trips to Disney World,” which they considered to be ideal vacations.

So, what is the plan for the coffeehouse?

“Rich was an integral piece to Greene Bean and ran a lot of the behind-the-scenes operation, while occasionally stepping behind bar to help out when needed,” the company reported Wednesday on Facebook. “There are truly no words to express how much he will be missed. We are all in shock and are trying our best to figure out how to operate without such an important Greene Bean member. At this time, we ask for your continued patience as we begin navigating how to continue on, without Rich.”

Assistant manager Keygan Barber, 27, a loyal employee for eight years, said “as far as I am aware, the plan is to keep this going, particularly because Rich loved it so much. It was his passion.”

Barber said she had “a complex relationship” with Rich. “He’d irritate the hell out of me, and we had some battles. He probably should have fired me years ago. But he was obviously a good guy.”

For right now, Greene Bean Coffee is not selling bags of its roasted beans. Roasting was Rich Osborne’s job and specialty, so Reagan Osborne, Barber and others will be figuring out how to get that done.

Reagan Osborne understandably declined an interview for this column, sending word she was just not up to it yet.

Services for Rich “will take place at a later date,” according to his obituary at Slininger-Schroeder Funeral Home in Jefferson. “Memorials are suggested to the family.”

Besides wife Reagan and daughter Meeka, he is survived by his father, Richard “Rick” Osborne Jr., who moved to Jefferson himself after retiring in Massachusetts; plus Reagan’s parents, the Moons, of Omaha (although they also have a home in Jefferson), and Reagan’s brother Blake Moon of Lincoln, Neb.

A table of memorial cards and flowers at Greene Bean Coffee on Friday, June 6.

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