By Bridget Manley, publisher
In fall 1992, 14-year-old Katie Harvey began high school in the city of Alliance, Nebraska, which had 9,765 people at the time, is mostly known for “Carhenge” — a replica of Stonehenge made entirely of automobiles and is the Box Butte County seat in the state’s northwestern panhandle.
As a freshman, she took World Geography at Alliance High School with a teacher she called “charismatic and kind” and said the students all loved. That teacher would eventually become a congressman and then governor of Minnesota, and just last week emerged as Democratic candidate for president Kamala Harris’ running mate: Tim Walz.
“He brought everything to life for me,” she said. Katie, who goes by her married name, LaPira, now lives in Harrisonburg with her husband Tim and their children, and she works for the Rockingham County School system. And she told The Citizen that Walz was influential.
“Being from a small town and not knowing much outside of rural Nebraska, the way he taught just brought everything to life,” she said.
Walz, who officially joined the Democratic ticket Aug. 6, was born in West Point, Nebraska. As the public learned more about his teaching credentials and political rise, his underdog story of leading the Mankato West High School football team from a 27-straight-losing streak to winning the 1999 Minnesota state championship instantly became part of his narrative.
But before moving to Minnesota, Walz taught at Alliance High School. He met his wife, Gwen Whipple, while teaching at Alliance High together, and the Nebraska Junior Chamber named him Outstanding Young Nebraskan.
Every Friday, LaPira said she and her class would play a version of Jeopardy in class, which helped the students better understand the material. He also coached football at the school. LaPira was a cheerleader and remembered him on the field.
“He was a really well-respected coach,” LaPira said. “I’ve seen former athletes post [on social media] that he made a really big impact on them, and of being one of the first people to really care about them.”
Walz taught in China early in his teaching career before moving back to Nebraska. After he and his wife married, they took dozens of students on a tour through China as part of their honeymoon. LaPira said many of her classmates were on that trip and that, for them, it was an experience of a lifetime.
“That was a really important thing for many of them that traveled with him,” LaPira said.
She said Walz’s classroom was always a warm, welcoming and a fun learning environment.
Whipple taught LaPira’s brother at Alliance High, and LaPira remembers her playing piano and volunteering for school choral groups.
“They were just really involved in our community,” LaPira said.
Mr. Walz goes to Washington (and so does LaPira)
LaPira’s mother taught music, and her father was an engineer on the railroad. His work with labor unions eventually brought the family to Washington, D.C., to work with regulatory affairs.
After returning to Nebraska for college, LaPira returned east to start her career. That’s when she met her husband, JMU political professor Tim LaPira. He worked as a legislative assistant to a member of Congress and later as the American Political Science Association Public Service Fellow at the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.
In November 2006, Walz beat incumbent U.S. Rep. Gil Gutknecht, to represent Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, a seat Walz would hold until 2018 when he successfully ran for governor of Minnesota.
Katie LaPira was excited to hear her former teacher was elected to a seat in the House of Representatives.
One Friday afternoon, the start of a holiday weekend, Tim LaPira was on Capitol Hill interviewing congressional staffers. Katie and the couple’s two children had come with Tim to Washington to sightsee while he worked.
Tim had been using Walz’s offices to interview staffers. Walz himself had plans to fly back to Minnesota for the holiday weekend.
“Tim was about ready to leave, but he said [to Walz], ‘You know, I can’t leave without telling you that my wife had you as her teacher,’” Katie said. “He said, ‘No way!… What’s her name… Oh my gosh, I remember her. I remember her parents!’”
Tim told Walz that Katie and their children were at the Air and Space Museum, so Walz pushed back his travel plans to make time for Katie, with her children in tow, to rush over and reconnect.
Walz gave the children congressional souvenirs, asked how LaPira’s parents were, took photos and spent time talking about old hometown friends.
“Here is this very important person who is trying to get home to their family, who rearranges their schedule on a Friday afternoon so that I can make it over to meet him,” LaPira said. “D.C. on a Friday afternoon is bonkers with everybody trying to get out of there. The fact that he pushed back his schedule to meet with me was incredible.”
In the political spotlight
Since Walz’s swift rise in national prominence over the last month, he’s been called “midwestern nice” and the “fun dad” by social media users, while Republicans have criticized him as too liberal and questioned the way Walz once described his military service.
Walz also has received credit for popularizing the adjective “weird” earlier this summer to describe Republican leaders, which other Democrats ran with in the following weeks. Videos have surfaced of Walz at the Minnesota State Fair with his daughter and fixing up old cars. Walz has also won endorsements from officials on both ends of the Democratic spectrum, including centrist West Virginia U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin and progressive U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
LaPira said what you see is exactly who he is. She said she loves the dad memes and thinks they accurately represent Walz’s personality.
“He is 100% authentic,” LaPira said. “My mother has a saying, ‘the salt of the earth.’ That’s him.”
LaPira says her family and neighbors back in Nebraska are excited. Even though the area – primarily cattle farmers – tends to be very conservative, everyone seems “pretty stoked.”
“They probably fall on different parts of the political spectrum, but everybody is equally excited to have our hometown hero recognized,” LaPira said. “He just made an impact on everybody.”
If the Harris-Walz ticket wins, LaPira said she believes Walz is the kind of person who will give Harris “her time to shine.”
“He has a moral guiding post, and he’s going to do the right thing,” LaPira said. “He is a kind of a natural born leader, you know, the very charismatic teacher. He can lead a group of people to get excited…he’s not afraid to be caring and compassionate.”
Thanks for reading The Citizen, which won the Virginia Press Association’s 2022 News Sweepstakes award as the top online news site in Virginia. We’re independent. We’re local. We pay our contributors, and the money you give goes directly to the reporting. No overhead. No printing costs. Just facts, stories and context. We value your support.
