‘Just got the tingles’: Mankato, where Tim Walz taught and coached, reacts to his political ascent

MANKATO - Hissing espresso machines and clattering bagel trays joined a low excited murmur at this downtown coffee shop that Tim Walz frequented as a U.S. congressman.

Tandem Bagels was abuzz with the news that Walz, the two-term governor who had been a teacher in Mankato, had been picked as the running mate for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

MaryAnn Nelson, clad in an American flag T-shirt, munched on a sun-dried tomato bagel as she talked about how excited she was at the idea of someone from Mankato possibly ascending to the White House.

“I just got the tingles again,” said Nelson, a Mankato resident and county DFL member. “It’s exciting watching our local guy go from local governance to the second most powerful person in the world.”

Her friend Kate Long picked at a salad as she spoke with Nelson. Long, who described herself as a reluctant Trump voter in 2016 and a proud supporter of his in 2020, said she has never and would never vote for Walz.

Long said she disagreed with Walz’s policies during the 2020 pandemic and his handling of the riots after the murder of George Floyd, which had Nelson conceding the governor had made mistakes then.

Nonetheless, Long said she felt excited when she heard Walz had been picked as the running mate.

“Even I was thinking, it’s cool that he’s from Minnesota,” Long said.

Walz started coming to Tandem Bagels in 2012, when he was a U.S. representative who had an office nearby, said Anne Frentz, who co-owns the shop.

He never gets coffee, but instead always orders the cafe’s “energy bombs,” a dense ball of rolled oats, honey, chocolate chips, peanut butter and chia seeds, she said.

Frentz said her children were friends with Walz’s children and often saw him at high school soccer games. Her father-in-law babysat his daughter Hope and son Gus and other children on Saturdays in Mankato, Frentz said. As a thank you, the Walz family sent White House-branded Christmas ornaments while they were in Washington, D.C., she said.

Others in Mankato who know Walz — he moved there in 1996 to teach high school — say he’s a hard worker and an excellent, if at times rambling, speaker who represents the Midwest well in national politics. In particular they cite his experience as a sergeant major in the National Guard and a longtime congressman who specialized in agricultural issues.

“He certainly brings quite a few things to the table,” former DFL state Rep. Jack Considine of Mankato said. “And he’s genuinely a nice guy.”

Considine remembers meeting Walz in 1998, when his son was an offensive tackle on the Mankato West football team that later won its first state championship in 1999. Considine later kept statistics for Walz in the stands during games and watched Walz coach his daughter’s high school basketball team.

“All the kids on the team really liked him and respected him,” Considine said.

When Walz decided to run for Congress against Gil Gutknecht in 2006, Considine was one of the people Walz reached out to while preparing to run. Considine said that’s part of Walz’s strength — reaching out to people, even those he doesn’t necessarily agree with, to build consensus.

Not everyone sees Walz in such a rosy light.

Walz’s support in his home district slipped over time; he handily beat challenger Jim Hagedorn in 2014 but came within a percentage point of losing in 2016, noted Peter Trocke, the Nicollet County GOP chair who also runs Riverfront Liquor in Mankato.

“People in the district were starting to realize he was saying one thing while campaigning and one thing in Washington,” Trocke said. He said he specifically disliked Walz’s shifting stance on firearm restrictions.

Yet longtime friends and residents note his willingness to stand up for others.

“I would always call him the 800-pound gorilla in the room because people didn’t know just how strong he was,” said Jacob Reitan, a prominent Twin Cities attorney and LGBTQ advocate. “He doesn’t come off that way, you don’t think of him that way, but he’s sort of an 800-pound gorilla in the form of a teddy bear.”

Reitan was a student in Walz’s wife, Gwen’s, class in 1997 and possibly the first openly gay student at Mankato West. He remembers Walz as the head of the gay-straight alliance who was adamant about making the high school a safe place for students — and standing up to bullies.

When Walz ran for Congress in 2006 he spoke to Reitan’s parents, who cautioned him about his stance supporting gay marriage.

“He said, ‘You know, I need to look my gay students in the eye. I’m for gay marriage,’” Reitan said.

Walz publicly declared his support for gay marriage early on in his campaign. Reitan said Walz was instrumental in repealing the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy as well as the Matthew Shepard Act, which expanded federal hate crime laws to cover crimes motivated by a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

“I’m sure there was a lot of people in southern Minnesota who did not agree with him on that issue, but they agreed with his authenticity,” Reitan said.

Sherri Blasing, who lived next to the Walzes from 1997 until his election as governor, said her neighbor did not show any obvious political ambitions when she first met him.

“Tim was mostly excited about the high school football team,” said Blasing, the principal at Mankato West since 2017.

The neighborhood where the Walzes lived is a leafy and idyllic one, on a hill above Mankato West. Children sit at a lemonade stand on one street, and another child sells sweet corn — 13 ears for $5 — on another. “Like Mayberry,” one resident said of the area.

Blasing said she and the Walz family would plant flowers together: peonies, lilies and bleeding hearts. They would talk to Walz as he did chores around the house after coming home from Washington.

“Yesterday Tim was on the floor of Congress and today he’s taking the garbage out,” Blasing said.

Clark Johnson, another former state DFL representative from the Mankato area, door-knocked for Walz’s first congressional campaign. He remembers getting an abnormally positive reception from people in lower North Mankato.

“I realized what the deal was: The people I was talking to, their kids had had him in school,” Johnson said. “We in Mankato knew he was a good guy, because our kids told us.”