Tim Walz was 14 or so, trouble-seeking with his cousins across a shaggy patch of family land where they liked to shoot air guns at birds.
They had come upon his uncle’s “junk pile” one day in the late 1970s, a little scrap heap with a broken-down car and one unambiguous rule.
“Dad specifically — specifically — said, ‘Now don’t shoot them windows,’” one cousin, Matt Reiman, said of the car recently.
What happened next was probably inevitable: Pop. Shatter. Gleeful profanity from Mr. Walz — and a knee-jerk confession with no adults around.
“My gun went off!” he shouted, as if it might have been an accident, formulating his pre-emptive defense in real time. “My gun went off!”
Relatives said Mr. Walz would later deny culpability of any sort.
“He could make something unbelievable believable,” Casey Reiman, another cousin who was there, said fondly, if still a bit grudgingly, some 45 years later.
“Had a lot of giggle in him,” Matt Reiman said. “Never had a serious day in his life.”
Those days would come.
Within a few years, Mr. Walz’s father, a well-liked school administrator, got sick, then sicker. When he was gone, Mr. Walz’s mother found work where she could, and the family subsisted on Social Security survivor benefits.
By then, Mr. Walz had joined the National Guard, two days after his 17th birthday. He has said he took his oath of enlistment from a lieutenant with a farm nearby, standing in the middle of a cornfield.
As Mr. Walz, the 60-year-old Minnesota governor, prepares this week to introduce himself to the nation from the party convention in Chicago, he and those close to him have positioned his rural Nebraska upbringing as essential to his self-conception, a skeleton key to understanding the man he became and the values he came to embrace.
His experiences in this period formed the core of his future political identity — unpretentious, neighborly, a little mischievous — even as he seemed determined, ultimately, to see what life might look like somewhere else.
Though Mr. Walz still speaks nostalgically of his time back home, he has remained tethered to the place mostly through those who stayed.
His mother still lives in Butte, Neb., a village of fewer than 300 people, where the lettering above the old high school reads simply, “High School,” and Mr. Walz’s cousins recounted his exploits from their regular perch at the corner bar, Corner Bar.
The spot where Mr. Walz’s gun did or did not go off still belongs to the family, part of a sprawling farming operation powered by generational wisdom and very early mornings.
And in a county where the 2020 Biden-Harris ticket received exactly 135 votes — Trump-Pence cleared 1,000 — many figures from Mr. Walz’s past, who agree that growing up in a place like this shapes someone forever, agree with him on little else. Both Butte and Valentine, Neb., where he spent much of his youth and adolescence, have tombstones outside their churches mourning the aborted unborn, rising from the grass in neighborhoods swathed in MAGA red and, much more often, Nebraska Cornhusker scarlet.
Even some family members have tweaked Mr. Walz playfully for how he sometimes talks about where he came from.
“I’m one of the hillbilly cousins,” Casey Reiman said by way of introduction last week, echoing a line Mr. Walz had used recently to describe his relatives. Eager to reinforce the point, Mr. Reiman, who farms with his son, interrupted himself — “Look what I found today!” — to retrieve a dead rattlesnake from his truck.
Of course, presidential campaigns traffic often in reductive sloganeering, flattening biographies into digestible shorthand, especially when the subject seems to come by his homespun-ness honestly. (As with some other elements of Mr. Walz’s history, it can be difficult at times to distinguish between bare fact and rhetorical flourish.)
No one disputes that Mr. Walz passed hours at farm ponds hooking bluegill and bass, that he sometimes played pickup basketball on lumpy dirt, that he brought his rifle to school to hunt turkeys after football practice.
“He grew up in a small town,” Vice President Kamala Harris explained in the Instagram post announcing Mr. Walz’s selection two weeks ago.
“I lived in Butte, a small town,” Mr. Walz told supporters in Pennsylvania later that day.
“Well, I was born in a small town,” blared the John Mellencamp track that served as Mr. Walz’s intro and exit music last week for a raucous event outside Omaha, his first solo rally as Ms. Harris’s running mate.
Onstage in his native state, Mr. Walz celebrated the majesty of “Carhenge” (a Nebraska landmark that he insisted the British had ripped off), runza (a local delicacy that he insisted JD Vance would call a Hot Pocket) and “tubin’ and swimmin’ the Niobrara,” which he insisted Donald Trump could never understand.
But interviews with relatives, schoolmates and neighbors from these formative years make it plain that Mr. Walz’s story, like the places themselves, can defy easy caricature.
He was a child of the Nebraska Sandhills and less hilly parts east, the types of places that the urbanites in Omaha and Lincoln derided as “outstate.” But he was also the son of the bookish school superintendent, evincing a curiosity about life beyond the county line and even musing, as locals remember it, about being president someday.
He could blend into the halls where plumes of cigarette smoke billowed from the teachers’ lounge and the student population was overwhelmingly white, just another boy who liked girls and sports and Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.” But he also stood out, peers recalled — displaying the gumption to win new friends from the open window of his orange 1973 Camaro, beckoning passers-by with an eight-track player and an impromptu invitation: “Hey, hop in.”
“That’s all it took,” Scott Humpal, one of two dozen people in his graduating class and a close friend to this day, said of their early encounter. “Just like now, he’s a good talker.”
If Mr. Walz’s maturity, by his own account, waxed and waned well into adulthood — he was charged with driving while intoxicated in his early 30s — those who have known him longest agreed that much about him had not especially changed: He was self-assured but rarely self-serious; puckish when he could be and stoic when he had to be; compelled to leave home eventually, but never to disclaim it, as much as some there now might like to disclaim him.
“I wouldn’t trade growing up in that town,” Mr. Walz has said, “for anything in the world.”
A boy, dreaming of elsewhere
Some memories of a young Mr. Walz have curdled with time and politics, tilting toward disdain (and occasional conspiracy theorizing on Facebook) over his leftward bent as an adult.
But John Vanderbeek has his own long-held grounds for skepticism.
“Eh,” Mr. Vanderbeek, a former math teacher and school board member in Valentine, said when asked what he remembered about Mr. Walz. “He was a boy.”
He was, more precisely, a preteen boy with an outsize interest in Mr. Vanderbeek’s daughter, who was around the same age.
“Had to run him home every once in a while,” Mr. Vanderbeek said. (The families lived so close, he lamented, that Mr. Walz never stayed away for long.)
Such was life in this town of fewer than 3,000 — a proper metropolis, residents noted, compared to its surroundings, with the Frosty Drive-In, a well-attended Pizza Hut and a schoolhouse that was said to be haunted by the ghost of a girl whose clarinet reed had been poisoned in the 1940s.
Though the place was named for a Union veteran and politician, Edward K. Valentine, and not the saint with the holiday in February, the local authorities affixed hearts to each street sign anyway.
Yearbooks from the period trace the town’s feats and mores — a reel of rodeo results, well wishes from “Valentine’s Professional Men” and, in 1973, a picture (and cheerful notation) of a student’s blackface turn as “a Negro girl for an English play.”
Along Main Street, where a banner over a vacant storefront now reads, “This Is the Decade Rural Nebraska Fights Back,” Mr. Walz and his schoolmates often biked in search of others without plans, hoping for critical mass to toss a football around.
Some nights, young men from the nearby Rosebud Sioux reservation came to town, meandering through the alleys, according to Bob Dean, who runs Valentine’s sign shop (Bob’s Signs, named for his father) and attended school with one of Mr. Walz’s brothers.
Otherwise, life could be quiet, unless students took care to fill the silence.
“People would drive up and down Main Street just honking at each other,” said Pat Donovan, who played baseball with Mr. Walz. “Honk at our friends. See some cute girls, honk at them.”
For a time, the high school had a bullying problem: Upperclassmen would knock freshmen on the back of their heads with bulky class rings.
When Mr. Walz encountered this, he wheeled around to confront a senior, according to Bud Pettigrew, who went to school with him and became a leader in state Democratic politics.
“He didn’t put up with that,” Mr. Pettigrew said. “He’d get in their face and argue.”
At 14, during a summer ranching job that found him working with cattle and building fence, Mr. Walz has said he returned to the bunkhouse each night to leaf through old issues of National Geographic, dreaming of elsewhere, as fellow ranch hands played cards and taught him new curse words.
“Others were probably dreaming of the exotic landscape I was in,” he said in a speech last month.
Born to Darlene and James Walz in West Point, Neb., about 75 miles outside Omaha, and rerouted hours west to Valentine in elementary school, Mr. Walz was the third of four siblings, bestowed with the check-this-out swagger of an older brother and the wait-up-wait-up pleading of a younger one.
He has suggested the family always leaned Democratic, citing lingering affection for the New Deal and his Catholic mother’s affinity for John F. Kennedy.
“She was pregnant with me when he was assassinated, and I guess there was a debate about calling me John,” Mr. Walz has recalled.
At home, the division of tasks between the parents was clear. “She raised the kids,” said Dick Jeffers, a school board member who was close with them, “and he was raising the school.”
Students remembered the elder Mr. Walz as approachable and warm despite his elevated position and his status as a chain-smoking veteran of the Korean War. He was known to shake hands with teens in the hallway (“Back then you didn’t do high-fives,” Mr. Pettigrew noted) and congratulate them on impressive test scores.
Among other priorities, Mr. Pettigrew said, Mr. Walz’s father helped successfully push for a school bond to replace the building nominally haunted by the fallen clarinetist, an uphill campaign in a fiscally conservative area.
Other efforts were less effective. Mr. Vanderbeek said he and the elder Mr. Walz were golfing one day when a gust of wind betrayed one of the school’s worst kept secrets: the superintendent’s comb-over.
“He didn’t even know,” Mr. Vanderbeek said. “I finally walked up behind him and flipped it back over.”
Before long, yearbook pictures show, the elder Mr. Walz conceded to the march of time, bald and smiling.
More recently, some in town have stared into their televisions and realized something: The boy they knew looks quite like his father now.
A move, and a loss
The sign at the village line reads “Butte, 326,” though even that overstates the case: The population fell to 286 in the 2020 census, about half of what it was when Mr. Walz lived there.
Four-wheelers rumble through intersections. A sign at the convenience store promises, “Gas Beer Pop Ice Snacks Hot Food Laundromat.” An early summer celebration known as Pancake Days — a medley of food, games and engine revving — is the centerpiece of the annual calendar.
“It’s really not Pancake Days if you don’t have to call the Fire Department,” Mr. Walz once told a former aide, Kayla Castañeda. (She had stopped in Butte years ago, curious to see where her boss grew up, when she encountered a woman who wanted to send word back to Minnesota: The car that caught fire that year belonged to one of Mr. Walz’s uncles.)
Mr. Walz and his family moved to Butte, about 100 miles east of Valentine, in his sophomore year of high school.
By then, his father’s weakness for cigarettes was well-established. “Just addicted,” Mr. Walz said recently, nodding at the “Korean War era and that generation of men.”
The stated reason for the move was to be closer to his mother’s side of the family. His father would be superintendent at Butte’s high school.
“That’s where the two of them wanted to retire,” Julie Walz, Mr. Walz’s sister-in-law, said.
Even well after he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, according to Jerome Reiman, one of Mr. Walz’s uncles, the elder Mr. Walz would sneak off to the bathroom to smoke.
As his father traveled to Omaha for treatments, according to Julie Walz, Mr. Walz shared little with his friends.
Even his decision to join the National Guard — where service could give Mr. Walz a chance at a college education, as it had for his father — came up almost incidentally.
“One day he just told us, ‘Hey, I’m going to the National Guard this summer,’” Mr. Humpal recalled.
Mr. Walz did accrue some shorter-term benefits from his military training: He has said he gained 25 pounds between his junior and senior years, converting from a wide receiver on the football team to a husky lineman, and began lapping his teammates during the two-mile runs at the start of practice.
The more durable changes in Mr. Walz were more painful to consider.
By the winter of 1984, more than a year after Mr. Walz graduated from high school, his father had slipped into a coma.
Mr. Walz has said that his father’s last week alive “cost my mom a decade of having to go back to work to pay those bills.”
“This, I think, shaped me later in life,” he said during his 2018 campaign for Minnesota governor. “It certainly shaped me as it deals with health care.”
In the coming years, Ms. Walz found a job at a nursing home. She remained “relentlessly optimistic,” Mr. Walz has said, when he struggled to see why.
“I remember thinking, ‘Our dad just died, we don’t have any money, you’ve got to go get a job, and you’ve never had one outside the home,’” he recalled in 2019. “My mom just said, ‘It will give me a chance to learn.’”
In the years after his father’s death, when Mr. Walz was 19, he floated through Nebraska, Texas and Arkansas, where he worked at a tanning bed factory.
He has said the loss coaxed him to take more risks. After graduating in 1989 from Chadron State College in Nebraska, Mr. Walz went to China for a year as a teacher.
Other titles followed in due time: coach, Minnesotan, congressman, governor.
He has thoroughly answered the question, friends said, that all those who imagine leaving a place like Butte ask themselves.
“We were all going through the same stuff,” said Mr. Humpal, who owns a physical therapy business in Texas. “Are we going to college? What are we going to become?”
For some who built lives closer to home, Mr. Walz’s sudden prominence has produced a conspicuous pride, to a point.
“I never figured he’d be in the position he’s in now,” said Jerome Reiman, laughing from his living room as he recounted turkey hunting with Mr. Walz and his father.
He hastened to add something:
“I actually hope he gets beat.”
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