Mondale was a good friend and a great public servant

Readers, I rise to a point of personal privilege. I ordinarily write about political or legislative issues. I try to write from my brain. Today, I write from my heart about a special friend. Yesterday, almost 3,000 people gathered to celebrate Walter Mondale’s life. Everyone, I think, felt close to him. That’s the sort of guy he was.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, Gov. Tim Walz and a former Senate colleague, President Joe Biden, also spoke. Fritz had been senator, vice president of the United States and served as ambassador to Japan. He was a man of quality too rarely found today in the Senate where he served for 12 years, a partisan liberal, but always congenial, willing to listen, to seek common ground with Republicans.

Fritz and I had been friends for 70 years when he died a year ago. He was still in law school when we met in 1953. He had grown up in a town of a few hundred people in southern Minnesota where his pastor father had a small church. Town and church defined Fritz and inspired him to a life of good works. He didn’t talk his religion, but he lived it.

We bonded at that first lunch. We talked about our Democratic Farmer Labor party. He was serious, but he didn’t take himself too seriously and there were a lot of laughs.

I learned his high school nickname was “Crazy legs” as a mediocre halfback on the football team. I think he was never mediocre again. I also learned that he was an expert at stuffing envelopes in those ancient days when a three-cent stamp, a printed page and a hand addressed envelope was as important as television or computers today.

About a year later, we saved unsold Christmas trees from the dump. He was to be married to Joan Adams two days after Christmas in a student hall at Macalester College where his about-to-be father-in-law was the college chaplain. It was a deary, utilitarian hall until we spruced it up and it filled with joy.

Many years later, on the day that Hubert Humphrey died, Fritz called me from Air Force Two and asked me to meet him at his home to help draft a eulogy. When he finished delivering it two days later in the Capitol rotunda, a reporter, moved as the rest of us, complimented him on it. Fritz said, “Norman Sherman wrote it.” Ghosts don’t expect recognition and public officials don’t often give it. Fritz did.

On Martin Luther King Day two years ago, I spoke to several classes at West High in Iowa City. I asked Fritz to call so the two of us could talk to the students. He did, talking not about himself, but about the importance of young people in the civil rights movement as an example of what they could accomplish.

In 2019, the Minneapolis Star Tribune put him on the cover of their Sunday magazine, captioned “The Vice President still trades in diplomacy, decency, and humor.” Inside they wrote of “his singular beaming smile.”

I could have written all that after our first lunch. I miss him.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and authored a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”