'Everyone has an Everest': Journalist Jim Klobuchar laid to rest

Jim Klobuchar may have been one of America's best-known newspaper columnists, but his two-year career in the U.S. Army during the Korean War took center stage at his funeral Saturday, where he received a military send-off at Fort Snelling National Cemetery featuring the somber playing of taps and a three-gun salute.

"My dad was so proud to be a veteran," said his daughter, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, recalling how her father created a bunch of "bootleg" bumper stickers bragging about her military support for one of her first political campaigns that alarmed her campaign staff.

"The kids running the campaign at the time had to rein him in," Klobuchar recalled with a laugh. "They said, 'You can't just make up your own bumper stickers, Jim! There are laws. There are disclosures and disclaimers.' "

Klobuchar, who wrote more than 8,400 newspaper columns for the Minneapolis Star Tribune over 30 years before retiring in 1995, died May 12 at 93. His generous spirit and adventurous approach to life were remembered fondly by his daughter and family friends during an intimate ceremony limited to three dozen attendees. A larger memorial open to the public will be held in Minneapolis in September.

The funeral's theme was taken from his simple white military tombstone engraved with the phrase "Everyone has an Everest," the subtitle of one of the 23 books Klobuchar produced. Though he never made it to the top of Mount Everest, Klobuchar ascended the Matterhorn eight times and Kilimanjaro five. Amy Klobuchar said her father decorated the room he died in with mementos from his trip to Everest.

Klobuchar said her father's battle with alcoholism was one of many mountains he successfully scaled. He had been sober for more than 25 years at the time of his death.

"He loved getting to the top of the mountain, wherever it was," Amy Klobuchar said. "He found God in those peaks and in nature. But it wasn't just the mountains themselves. It was the very idea of a goal and a purpose … a mountain that you didn't think you could climb, but he did. An addiction you didn't think you could overcome, but he did."

She said she regularly receives yellowing copies of newspaper columns by her father that someone has kept on their refrigerator for years, usually with a note explaining how much the column meant to them.

"He wrote about people on the outside," she said. "Through his columns, he kept fighting their fight when they couldn't do it for themselves."

When he retired, she said, her dad questioned whether his career had been worth the sacrifices it required, including the constant deadlines of writing four columns a week, the "dead-of-night" plane flights and the haunting experience of "trying to keep the mother of a dead Marine" on the phone while she was alone and crying to hear the full story of the child she lost.

"His answer: 'God, yes,' " she said.

Klobuchar said her father would have been "humbled" to be buried in a "cemetery full of heroes." During his two years in the Army, her father served with a psychological warfare unit in Germany writing anti-Communist propaganda.

The Rev. Mark Hanson, Klobuchar's personal pastor and a friend for 42 years, said Klobuchar taught him the meaning of grace, recalling the many meals they shared at Perkins, where Klobuchar always had the same order: a single pancake and three link sausages.

Hanson said Klobuchar was the first friend he ever had who closed every conversation by telling him he loved him.

"You taught me how to say 'I love you,' " said Hanson, former bishop of the Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. "Jim, I love you. … May God's peace be with you, my friend."

Jeffrey Meitrodt • 612-673-4132