Richmond woman's import business brings peace to infamous farm

The chain-stitch rug hails from the Himalayan mountains of Kashmir. The gazebo is constructed from sheesham wood in Rajastan, India. The life-size Sukhothai standing Buddha is from Chiang Mai, Thailand. The sheepskins are pure Patagonian. The playful bobbleheads are from Taxco, Mexico.

And the 59-year-old blonde woman with the name — Ginger Blossom — worthy of a James Bond character and the wherewithal to put together this international business still lives on her family farm just north of the Chain O' Lakes in Richmond.

That farm could have been forever known as the site of the shocking 1993 murders of her parents and the stunning legal case that saw her brother wrongly sentenced to death on a false confession and later freed.

Ginger reclaimed the farm from that tragedy by building a business that focuses on beauty, fairness and fun. She says the peacefulness of the home anchors her to the place of her happy childhood.

“I always had in mind that I was going to go to college, but I didn't know why, though,” Ginger says as she sits on the porch of her house on the old dairy farm her grandparents started in 1923. “Every time I changed majors, I changed schools.”

She went to colleges in four states, but her heart belonged to skiing. Her father, Morris Gauger, ran a motorcycle shop on the farm, and Ginger would ski at the nearby Wilmot Mountain resort where Gauger's old motorcycle wheels were used to operate the rope tow for skiers.

With an associate degree in ski-resort management, Ginger spent her winters as a ski instructor in the West. She met her husband, Evan Blossom, while they were both teaching skiing and the pair spent most of those early years as instructors in Taos, New Mexico.

“I always figured out a way to ski and travel,” Ginger says. When summer arrived, they went to South America, where it was winter and the slopes were open. Using their ski careers to travel the globe, the pair taught any place there was snow, from Switzerland to Chile.

They were in Argentina in the 1980s when that nation's fragile economy took a turn for the worse and the local currency became useless outside of Argentina. Buying U.S. dollars on the black market was risky and would have resulted in a huge financial loss, so Ginger concocted a better scheme.

“I converted our money into sheepskin bedcovers, and got our money back that way,” Ginger says, recalling how she packed up the exotic products and sold them on her parents' farm.

An outgoing, friendly person with a gift for conversation, Ginger was teaching in Switzerland when some of her students suggested she visit a rug sale in Istanbul, Turkey. Everywhere she visited, she brought back something to sell on her parents' farm.

“It happened little by little,” she says.

Itching to visit Morocco and wanting to make some connections, she heard there would be a large Moroccan contingent at a carpet show in Toronto.

“So I jumped in the car and drove to Toronto,” Ginger remembers. Once there, she made friends with some vendors from Nepal.

“I thought, ‘Why not just go to Nepal?' And India is where you go to get to Nepal. Once you are in Nepal, it's an hour-and-a-half flight to Bangkok and Chiang Mai,” Ginger says. “I've been doing it so long, I forget all the little nuances.”

But she remembers details of her travels, from that overnight train trip through India with no air conditioning to the place where “I can get a fabulous meal in Bali for 75 cents.”

“I have simple wants,” Ginger says. “I like to travel on the cheap. It gives you a more realistic look at a culture.”

Skiing was her job, but the imports “became a profitable sidebar to the skiing,” she says.

Ginger, her husband and their Ginger Blossom import business came back to the farm for good after a bizarre and tragic twist in the Gauger family's fate. On April 8, 1993, Morris, 74, and Ruth Gauger, 70, were brutally murdered on the family farm, their throats slit.

McHenry County prosecutors said Ginger's younger brother, Gary Gauger, who also lived on the farm, had confessed to the grisly slayings. He was convicted by a jury and sentenced to death. Soon after, Northwestern University Law Professor Lawrence Marshall of the Center on Wrongful Convictions got involved in the case, which now is considered a prime example of false confessions.

An appellate court, citing problems with Gary Gauger's confession, ordered a new trial, and the former Death Row inmate was freed. Gov. George Ryan granted him a pardon after federal officials charged and convicted members of the Outlaws motorcycle gang in the slaying.

Now Gary Gauger and his wife live down the road from Ginger and grow organic vegetables that they sell on the honor system in one of the few buildings not taken over by Ginger's imports.

“The farm still has magic. Even without my mom and dad, their imprint is still here,” says Ginger, who lives in the house with her husband, their three cats and a dog. “The good memories far outweigh the bad.”

The barn and the upstairs haymow on the farm at 3016 Route 173 are filled with goods from the nearly 60 countries Ginger has visited.

“This is the last thing you'd expect to find here among the corn,” says Jean Bletsch, a Spring Grove woman who has worked at Ginger Blossom for the last five years. “It's a gem.”

Fellow employee Chris O'Boyle of Harvard ran his own import business before Ginger hired him. Self-confessed “geography nerd” Stephanie Icks of Grayslake handles the technology end of gingerblossom.com and says the toughest part of her job is not spending her entire paycheck on the goods they sell.

One small shed is dedicated to cotton goods, another section pays tribute to Mexican artisans, another to Asian statuary. Everything from the small handmade Mexican pots she sells for a quarter to the impressive Rajastan gazebo that recently sold for five grand is made by small-scale producers, sometimes even an individual family, who are paid a fair wage, work under safe conditions and meet the guidelines of “fair trade,” Ginger says.

“Even if you only help one family, you're helping one family,” says Ginger, who figures she ended up with a world-class business education simply by doing business around the world. “Instead of a grandiose business plan, you are actually doing good right away.”

Much of her life looks like a scene from the adventure movie “Romancing the Stone,” Ginger says, “But for me, it's a normal day at work.”