UW-Whitewater Alum Jim Scharnell, ‘67
Catering Business Feeds 15,000 Children A Day

By William R. Wineke
for Whitewater magazine

At age 65, Jim Scharnell can claim a vitality that puts him in the upper echelon of men his age.

He continues to run a successful business, regularly runs five miles in the morning and then plays 18 holes of golf in the afternoon, carrying his clubs all the way. He has ridden a bicycle 450 miles across the state of Wisconsin, averaging 65 miles a day. He has climbed mountains. It’s all pretty stressful for a man who, by all rights, should have died 22 years ago.

When Scharnell was 42, a few years after he started his catering business, Quality Catering for Kids, he suffered a catastrophic hemorrhage in the ride side of his brain, which, in turn, caused a stroke in the left side of his brain.

“I remember experiencing a weakness, and then was unable to use my body – and, after that, I don’t recall a thing until I woke up two weeks later and was told I had survived surgery,” Scharnell recalls. “The doctors tell me that 99 percent of men who have had the exact same circumstances I did would never recover. They told my wife that if I did recover, I would probably lose the use of my right side, probably would lose the sight of my right eye and probably would be mentally impaired.”

Obviously, none of that happened – though recovery too some time, Scharnell said. He now drives a grey Porsche, lives beside a golf course in Barrington, Ill., employs 65 in his business and provides 15,000 meals a day to more than 300 day care centers and private schools in Illinois and Wisconsin.

A 1967 University of Wisconsin-Whitewater graduate, Scharnell found that “I could do business; business made sense to me; economics made sense to me.”

He served in the Marine Corps after graduation, ran a restaurant in Winter Park, Colo., and started his catering company in Illinois in 1980. He employs a registered dietetic technician to oversee menus, operates a fleet of trucks that deliver the meals to day care centers and schools, and provides nutrition lesson plans at no cost to the child care centers to help them teach children about proper nutrition.

It wasn’t easy, however.

“The first 12 years were really hard for me in terms of recovering my health, but, for the past 10 years, everything has been on a straight upward path,” Scharnell said.