PEORIA MAGAZINE May 2023

COVER STORY

BUSHWHACKER, IN BUSINESS NEARLY A HALF CENTURY The ‘math nerd’ became an outdoorsman, and the rest is history and happiness for Rich Pestien

BY LINDA SMITH BROWN PHOTOS BY RON JOHNSON

A s a kid growing up in Lombard, a suburb of Chicago, Rich Pestien had little experience in the great outdoors. He had been to Starved Rock hiking a couple of times. That was about the extent of it. Little did Pestien know that the great outdoors would become a way of life and a living for him. He has now owned and operated Peoria’s Bushwhacker outdoors store for going on 50 years. A ‘MATH NERD’ HITS THE ROCKS By the time Pestien enrolled at the University of Illinois in Champaign as a self-described “math nerd,” he’d “never been camping, never been skiing or done any of that. “A hot night out for a math major or a computer science guy was to spend all night in the computer lab, key-punching the IBM cards,” Pestien said. “Then at 6 o’clock in the morning, you’d go to Denny’s for breakfast … That was the ultimate night out for a computer science major.” During his sophomore year, a fellow student invited Pestien to go rock climb ing, which brought adventure beyond just scaling the rocks. Sometimes he

“I started working more and more at the store and less and less on my master’s degree,” he said. In 1974, the owners of Bushwhacker asked Pestien if he wanted to invest a few thousand dollars to become a partner. “Like a dumb kid, I said, ‘That sounds good’ and I was in the outdoor business and retailing. “At the time, we partners were hard core, granola-crunching backpackers, climbers and cross-country skiers, with a bunch of warm jackets in the store. We did OK, in spite of ourselves.” One partner opened a Bushwhacker store in Springfield. In 1976, Pestien came west to Peoria, where he opened a Bushwhacker at the corner of Main and University, where One World Café is now located. “But then around 1980, all the hippies grew up, got married, had kids and stopped backpacking, so that market went south,” he said. “Then it stopped snowing regularly, so our cross-country skiing market went north with the snow line. We lost a lot of money in a couple of years.” BRANCHING OUT, HITTING A BUMP

had to backpack to the climbing areas. Sometimes it meant setting up a tent and spending the night, too. Pestien started making frequent trips to Bushwhacker, an outdoor equipment supply company in Champaign. Eventually he was offered a part-time job there.

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