The Misguided Munger Pheasant…
There are no ring-necked pheasants in northeastern Minnesota. Never were. It’s too cold, too filled with predators, too dangerous a place for a bird so colorful. And yet, there he is, strutting around our front yard like an undersized peacock. The bird is an aberration, an anomaly, that can only be explained this way: He’s here to welcome Representative Willard Munger to Fredenberg Township.
Willard, my long-departed uncle, was a great man. I didn’t coin that phrase: His friend and associate Ann Glumac did. Her comment, taken from an article she wrote at the time of Willard’s passing in 1999 (and included in the biography I wrote about my uncle) goes like this:
In the 20 years that I knew Willard, I loved him for his humanity, his humor, his high pitched laugh, his stories, and his dedication to family and friends. I also envied him for his steadfastness in fighting for principles in a world where black and white almost always blend to gray. I’ve been privileged to meet or work with many leaders and public figures, but Willard Munger is the only great man I have ever known.
(Mr. Environment: The Willard Munger Story by Mark Munger (c) 2009)
So how can a man who’s been playing gin rummy with the saints for over ten years be coming home, to the Munger farm in rural northeastern Minnesota, you ask? And why would a pheasant show up out of the blue to greet him? The answer is simple: providence.
You see, back when I decided to write the story of my uncle’s remarkable life as Minnesota’s quintessential conservationist, taking up the keyboard only when no one else seemed interested in doing so, I was encouraged by folks who, time after time after time at art and craft shows, or bookstores, or libraries where I was hawking my fiction, would come up and urge me to write about my uncle. Many of these folks were environmental types or former Liberal politicians. Some were just good people who loved Willard. I resisted the call to write his biography for five years after his passing: I felt ill-equipped, as his nephew and young ward, to write his story. I wanted someone else to do it, to chronicle Willard’s seventy-plus years in Liberal politics because I felt too close to the subject matter to do it justice. But then, as time passed and nothing was written about Willard and his beginnings as a Farmer-Laborite, or the battles he fought as a legislator on behalf of education and the environment, I began to research and write about my uncle. The result, Mr. Environment: The Willard Munger Story was published in 2009 to some fanfare and celebration. But the book has been, in a word, a tough sell despite all the urging and prompting I received to take it on as a project. It hasn’t sold like I expected and, two and a half years later, I have a mountain of unsold copies of the book waiting for buyers.
Yes, I know, it’s partially my own damn fault. I was (as I usually am) overally optimistic. I thought that folks living in Minnesota would be interested in learning about one of their own, about a guy born in a log cabin to poverty who grew up on the northern edge of in pheasant country (Friberg Township in Otter Tail County, northwestern Minnesota); lobbied FDR during the Great Depression; managed the campaigns of Liberal icons and Minnesota governors, Floyd B. Olson and Elmer Benson; built Liberty Ships during WW II after coming to Duluth; and served nearly 50 years in the Minnesota House of Representatives as the voice of the pheasants, deer, ducks, clean water and clean air. I was wrong: I printed way too many copies out of wide-eyed eagerness and love.
For the past two and a half years, cartons of the unsold biography have been stored in an unheated pole building owned by my friend Dave. Now, I have no problem paying the going rate for storage space and, up until yesterday, that’s exactly what I did. But last night, with the help of my sons Jack and Matt, the last carton of books was hoisted and carried into a vacant bedroom of our house on the banks of the Cloquet River. The books are stacked neatly, all 115 boxes of Mr. Environment (1,600 copies), in our basement, as I patiently sell them one by one to folks who care. I’ve got time. I’m not going anywhere. And neither, unless I get to work, are the books.
I’m convinced that the good Lord knew Willard was coming to stay at our house on the river. Why else would a regal bird, with no ties to the spruce, pine, and aspen forests of St. Louis County, be hanging around our place?
Peace.
Mark
