Ex-governor, congressman dies at age 99

MINNEAPOLIS — Former Minnesota Gov. Al Quie, a moderate Republican known for working across the aisle as both governor and as a congressman, has died. He was 99.

Quie died of natural causes Friday at a senior living community in suburban Wayzata where he had lived for the last 10 years, his son, Joel Quie, said Saturday. While Al Quie had been in declining health in recent months, he still enjoyed meeting and greeting people. At a family gathering two weeks ago, he read aloud to his great-grandchildren from their favorite storybook, his son said. He died just a month shy of his 100th birthday.

“His stature and his energy and his enthusiasm for life was there right to the end,” Joel Quie said.

Albert Harold Quie was born Sept. 18, 1923, on his family’s dairy farm near Dennison in southeastern Minnesota. After serving as a Navy pilot in World War II, he returned home to resume farming. He served a stint in the Minnesota Senate before winning a special election for a vacant congressional seat.

Quie represented southeastern Minnesota’s 1st District in the U.S. House from 1958 to 1979. He ran for governor in 1978 and unseated Rudy Perpich in what was dubbed the “Minnesota Massacre,” a bad year for state Democrats. Voter anger had lingered after Gov. Wendell Anderson arranged for Perpich, then his lieutenant governor, to appoint Anderson to the U.S. Senate seat that Walter Mondale gave up in 1976 to become vice president

But Quie’s single term as governor turned rocky amid a budget shortfall in the early 1980s, when Democrats controlled the Minnesota Legislature.

In a farewell address in December 1982, Quie decried the growing partisanship in politics but said he remained optimistic about the future of the state and the nation.

“I entered public life with a strong, though still-developing belief in the sanctity of the individual, the centrality of the family, and the compassion and good sense of people in neighborhoods and local communities. I believed that all people have infinite worth, and that all people possess gifts that can be known fully by no one,” he said. “My belief in these ideas gained in strength as the years passed and I better saw their worth, and as they withstood the doubts of skeptics and the strain of great change. Nothing … has successfully challenged my early — and lasting — belief in them.”