Ben (Evangelos) Kyriagis was born in Greece in 1954. He first came to America in 1971 as a high school foreign exchange student in Barron, Wisconsin. He later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Business from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. After working for two large American corporations he founded his own international trading company that took him to thirty countries, including China, Japan, and most countries in Europe. He lives with his wife in Minnesota and in Greece.