[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 149 (Thursday, September 18, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Page S9016]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO DON BOXMEYER

 Mr. COLEMAN. Mr. President, while my city of Saint Paul was 
enjoying its moment in the spotlight earlier this month, we were also 
mourning the passing of one of our great storytellers, Don Boxmeyer. 
Throughout his life as a reporter, columnist and author, Don discovered 
and brought out the human strength and variety of Saint Paul as no one 
else has. That made him one of our most important citizens.
  Don worked as a hard news reporter for the St. Paul Dispatch and the 
St. Paul Pioneer Press, and wrote a column for over two decades. Here 
is how he described his career in his own words:

       I realized that the interesting people and places nobody 
     ever wrote about held more fascination to me and my readers 
     than all the governors, mayors and city council members who 
     never seemed to be much persuaded by my opinions anyhow. I 
     began to collect hobos and hermits, bare-knuckled brawlers 
     and bread-baking nuns, short order cooks and hockey coaches, 
     drake mallards named Jake, and bridge tenders, band 
     directors, bear hunters and quiet old men who wept softly 
     when we talked about the friends they'd left on the 
     battlefield.

  And he shared them with the rest of us with humor, respect and a love 
of the nobility of regular people.
  In his book, ``A Knack for Knowing Things,'' Don collected many of 
his best columns about Saint Paul and Minnesota. He wrote about Swede 
Hollow in Saint Paul, the Rondo neighborhood destroyed by the 
construction of I-94 and Saint Joseph's Orphanage. He wrote about 
Stillwater, Lake Superior and Ashby, MN, and hundreds of other places 
and the people who made them. If a new resident of our State or its 
capital city asked me to tell them what kind of place they had moved 
to, I would just give them a copy of that book and let them discover it 
for themselves.
  Don Boxmeyer's life eloquently conveyed an important lesson: each of 
our communities has roots in the values and experiences of generations 
that came before and we need to capture them before they disappear. His 
oral history of places Minnesotans know well and events they only 
vaguely know about is a priceless gift to the future.
  Somewhere I read about a moment of despondency in the life of Robert 
F. Kennedy as he mourned the death of his brother Jack. Attempting to 
comfort him, someone said something like, ``It is tragic that he only 
got to serve for 1,000 days, but that's as long as Julius Caesar served 
and we still remember him.'' Robert Kennedy replied, ``Yes, but Caesar 
had Shakespeare to tell the story.''
  Saint Paul and Minnesota are much the greater because we had Don 
Boxmeyer to tell our stories.

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