One more brick in the Walz
Dem veep pick capable of blending in
WATERLOO — Everyone’s coming out of the, um, walls with their Tim Walz story since the Minnesota governor was picked by Vice President Kamala Harris for her running mate.
Okay, I’ll bite, so to speak. He did too. He was hungry.
The occasion was opening day of the Minnesota State Fair in 2022. Fairgoers and dignitaries were celebrating the 125th anniversary of the state fair dining hall operated by Hamline United Methodist Church in St. Paul.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, local mayors and other elected officials were on hand. A group of church musicians sang a little jingle to add to the festivities. Representatives of the St. Paul Winter Carnival, dressed in their best Captain Obvious attire, were even present to make one of the longest serving dining hall volunteers, in her 90s, an honorary carnival duchess.
Hanging around in the background of all this hoopla, I saw this big guy in a tee shirt and ball cap chumming around with folks who looked like he just stepped out of a Freightliner cab. For all I knew he might have followed me up from Waterloo delivering one of our massive John Deere tractors on a semitrailer.
Then he stepped up to the microphone.
I said to myself, ‘Holy crap! That’s the governor!”
He didn’t mince words. He said he didn’t know much about running a dining hall. “But I like to eat!” he said.
Dude. Tell us how you really feel. I found out later he’s not only a dining hall regular, he’s worked shifts in past years with his wife Gwen.
And this is the guy running the state of Minnesota? Wow.
I couldn’t help but crack a smile.
I wouldn’t have noticed him at all if he hadn’t gotten up to speak. He just blended in with crowd.
Certainly not like too many governors I’d ever seen before. And I’d seen plenty over 40 years of newspapering. In addition to our own governors down in Iowa, well, it’s Iowa, and about every 3 1/2 years you can’t turn around without tripping over some governor running for president or thinking about it. A couple of them actually made it.
While Walz impressed me with his ability to come off like a regular Joe, there was one other governor who really came off like one of us. And really was a truck driver.
His name was Harold Hughes, Iowa governor and U.S. senator in the 1960s and early ‘70s. He’s the first governor I remember as a kid. Forty years ago this year, and a decade after he left elected office, I got to cover him twice in four months for two different papers.
In January 1984, he moderated a debate on farm issues among Democratic presidential hopefuls at C.Y. Stephens Auditorium on the Iowa State University campus in Ames. I was there for the Ames Tribune.
The former governor was large and in charge. Early in the session, with his booming voice, he cut Gary Hart off in mid sentence when the Colorado senator went over on time answering a question. No one else tried it after that.
If you asked me who won that debate, it was Harold Hughes.
The next time I saw him, he delivered a speech at Clinton Junior College in Clinton. I was working in the Clinton bureau of the Quad-City Times then.
In a filled auditorium, he began his speech with these words:
“Hi. I'm Harold Hughes. And I’m an alcoholic.”
A sizable portion of the audience answered back:
”HI HAROLD!”
Thought I was at an AA meeting.
A few years ago, in my job at the Grout Museum District in Waterloo, we did an oral history interview by Zoom with Lynn Cutler, the former Black Hawk County supervisor, two-time U.S. congressional candidate, Democratic National committee vice chair and deputy assistant to President Bill Clinton. She said two people inspired her to get into politics and government service.
The first was her beloved late husband Henry, whom she lost shortly before Election Day in her first congressional campaign.
The second was Harold Hughes.
”Johnny Cash,” she said.
Indeed, Hughes had the frame, the hair and the baritone like The Man in Black.
In 2008, I interviewed Hughes’ lieutenant governor, Robert Fulton of Waterloo, for a Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier story on an anniversary of the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Fulton said some members of the Iowa delegation were leaning toward backing Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the nomination.
”But we weren’t going to disappoint Harold,” Fulton said. Hughes supported a different Minnesotan, U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy.
Just as he was gaining some national attention as a U.S. senator, and briefly toying with the idea of running for president, he retired from public life and decided to enter into ministry, an associate of born-again Watergate figure Charles Colson.
Harold Hughes had a compelling story, going from a alcoholic truck driver who once contemplated suicide to the governorship and a U.S. senator - and had a religious conversion along the way.
I’ve been told by fans of Gov. Walz in Minnesota that he’s “the real deal,” though of course he, like any other politician, has his critics.
But for me, along with Iowa Gov. Robert Ray for his humanitarianism with Indochinese refugees, The Man from Ida Grove, Harold Hughes, is a good measuring stick by which any politician can be judged to see if he or she is “the real deal.”
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. Click on their links below to sample their work.
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