He’s boxed up and resting comfortably in my basement, his impressive life reduced to words stored in several hundred cardboard cartons. It’s peaceful and relatively quiet in what used to be my oldest son Matt’s room. Jack, our fourteen year old, uses the room of Uncle Willard’s repose to play table and floor hockey. But that’s about all the activity the room sees these days, what with the three older Munger boys emancipated and living on their own. You might think that it would be sort of creepy for Jack, playing hockey in a shrine. Not really. I mean, Willard’s remains aren’t really stored in our basement: Only 1,500 copies of his biography are.
I made a slight miscalculation. OK, a major business blunder. For years, folks came up to me at craft fairs and book events and asked me if I was related to State Representative Willard Munger. Of course, since he was my uncle and mentor, I was pleased when strangers made the connection. Time after time, well meaning Liberals and environmentalists and history buffs told me, “You know, someone should really write Willard’s story.” This was while the man was still alive. So when he passed away from cancer in 1999, the longest serving member of the Minnesota House and the last of the old Farmer Laborite politicians remaining in office, well, I thought some non-fiction writer out there with an interest in history would pick up Willard’s remarkable story. Born in a log cabin a month before President Ronald Reagan. Son of a poor Otter Tail County dirt farmer. Only a high school education. Began working for the Nonpartisan League in the late 1920s and became a powerhouse in that party, one of the predecessors of Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer Labor Party. Ship building foreman during WW II. Businessman. Environmental icon. Legend in Minnesota’s political circles. But no one picked up his story. So I did.
Was it hubris? Love? Stupidity? Or was it an overly optimistic nature, a flaw of character, that compelled me to think that I could write a concise, heart warming, thorough story of the man who changed Minnesota’s environmental and conservation ethic beginning with his first term in the legislature in 1954? Think about this: Rachel Carson’s epic tome on the dangers of DDT, Silent Spring wasn’t even a manuscript, let alone a best selling book, when Willard Munger began his quest of environmental activism in the Minnesota House. His first effort to clean up the St.Louis River, the paternal river of the largest fresh water lake in the world, was launched in 1954, the year I was born. I started working on Mr. Environment: The Willard Munger Story in 2004; five years after Willard died. Unlike working on novels, which are my first love, researching and writing a biography of a real person is much more work and much less fun. Maybe that comes through in the book and that’s why it has never sold like I thought it should. All those folks, those Liberals and environmental types and Minnesota history buffs who suggested that someone write Willard’s life story somehow died with Willard. That’s why he’s sitting boxed up in my basement, silent carton stacked upon silent carton waiting: Waiting to be released into the world as a tribute to a man who gave much to and asked so little from his native state.
I’ve reduced the price of the book as the years have rolled by. You can now pick up a copy of this 260,000 word epic for a mere five bucks. Ten if you buy it here because it costs five bucks to ship it. Creative pricing hasn’t made a dent in the wall of cardboard keeping Jack and his shinny hockey playing buddies company in the cellar. I’ve sent out flyers on multiple occasions to every environmental and conservation group in the state, offering to come to their organizations and talk about Willard in hopes of selling a few copies. One group, the Duluth chapter of the Izaak Walton League, took me up on the offer. One.
So here I am sitting at my keyboard in my cedar paneled writing studio overlooking the Cloquet River, inky darkness surrounding me, cloaking the pasture outside the windows like a shroud. It’s 4:30am and, with Willard resting comfortably in the room beneath my feet, I can’t sleep. As I type, I’m thinking of the foolish pride of an author who writes about an old man, a man of another generation, whose only real attributes were electoral longevity and dedication to task. Visions of boxes of Willard books being ripped apart and recycled jolt me out of slumber and force me to begin writing an hour before my normally scheduled shift. I grab a cup of coffee, plop my ever widening rear into my writing chair, fire up the iMac, and begin. Somewhere in the still black morning air, a loon flying between lakes objects to my melancholy. Or maybe he or she is simply agreeing that it’s time to move on.
The Cloquet River: One of the Rivers Willard Saved
If you have a creative idea as to how to get Willard’s life story into the hands of more readers, I’m all ears. I don’t need anymore sleepless nights thinking about recycled biographies.
Peace.
Mark
