So long to a champion ~ October 31, 2002

David Heiller

There are certain moments that I will never forget. It’s funny how they mostly involve death.

Like when Tom Pringle came into the fifth grade classroom on November 22, 1963, and told us that President Kennedy had been shot. Or when Reverend Graupman sat down at our kitchen table on July 18, 1969, and told us that Lynette had drowned.

October 25 will be one of those days, the time when Cindy called and said that Paul Wellstone had died. The gray day outside suddenly got a foothold on my heart.

I turned on the radio. The announcer said that Paul’s wife had died too, and his daughter and everyone on the plane, and the light faltered even more.

Paul Wellstone: Man of the people.

My friend Dean Dronen from Sandstone called a little later. I could tell he needed to talk to someone. So did I. He told me how much he thought of Wellstone, what a friend he was to veterans. Dean is the veterans’ service officer in Pine County. Wellstone could not have received a higher compliment.

That night we had plans to play cards with some friends. But we didn’t play cards. Instead, we sat around and talked about Paul. We watched the news. We shed some tears and laughed too. It felt so good to do that with people who felt like Cindy and me.

It occurred to me later that everyone in that room in our house had met Paul Wellstone, had talked to him. That says as much about Paul Wellstone as anything. He was a man of the people.

How else could you see a picture of him taken by Christine Carlson that’s printed with this column? My bet is that she doesn’t have pictures of too many other U.S. Senators.

The same is true for this newspaper.

This is a photocopy of Christine 
Carlson's photo that we printed in 
the Askov American. 

She writes: This photo of a young 
Paul Wellstone was taken at Gene
and Becky Lourey's house. 
It was a get-together for Joan Growe. 
The date is September of 1984.
 My deepest  sympathy to the family 
and the state of Minnesota.

He stopped at the Askov American when he was running for the U.S. Senate in 1989. I visited with him for half an hour. I had never met him before, and knew little about him, but boy did he impress me.

I was used to dry, condescending politicians, talking heads who looked over your shoulder at the next press stop.

Paul was different. He listened. He looked you in the eye. He believed in what he said.

“Paul Wellstone visited the Askov American on June 29, and left a strong impression that he can beat Sen. Rudy Boschwitz in the U.S. Senate race in 1990,” I wrote the next week.

And Wellstone did just that.

I asked him what he was most proud of in his political career. He paused for quite a while, then said he was proud of getting people to vote, and of focusing on issues that affect people’s lives.

He said he was proud of voicing issues of rural Minnesota to people in cities, and voicing urban concerns in rural Minnesota. “I really like to think of myself as someone who can bring people to­gether,” he said.

Thirteen years and two terms later, he had lived up to those words.

It was no coincidence that the first person to call me after Cindy was a retired military man praising a senator whose last vote in office was in opposition to a war resolution.

By the time you are reading this, the memorial services for Paul and Sheila and Marcia and Tom and Mary and Will and Richard and Michael will be over. We’ll all be moving on to the political side of the tragedy. It will probably get ugly again.

But I’ll never forget last Friday, October 25, nor the man who we lost, a true leader—a champion—who never lost sight of the common man.