From This Valley

By Pete Steiner

The Q-man gets the call-up to the BIGS

Normally, this piece would be part of my annual January column, about those we’ve lost. With the Q-man, however, that would be a problem.

Having known and associated closely with the scribe since we were in second grade, he’d take up the entire space. Longtime, loyal readers here (I thank you!) may remember how I once described some road trips I had taken with “the Q-man” and others a number of years back, how we’d share stories of old Mankato (e.g., ice houses).

I am now at liberty to reveal his full identity: Bob Qualset. Bob left us Sept. 11.

As I am wont to do, I reminisce about simpler days that may seem happier because we survived them. Bob grew up about five blocks from me in West Mankato. Our Norman Rockwell childhoods let us cruise our bikes along the smooth, quiet streets of the then relatively new subdivision (in an era when River Hills mall and Walmart were still cornfields “out in the country”).

My dad had put up a basketball court in our back yard after he tired of trying to grow grass there in the summer. Our gang of boys irreparably trampled it with our wiffle ball and football games.

Bob would come over, we’d shoot around, maybe play h-o-rs-e (he usually won). Even if it was February, we’d just shovel the court and play in winter jackets.

Bob was always thrifty. From paper route money, he had a couple checking accounts by the time he was 12.

Always with an eye for a great investment, he locked in Marsha Plocher as his lifelong date already in ninth grade (she would become our class homecoming queen). When home rooms were assigned alphabetically, Bob, a “Q” and Marsha, a “P,” proved that the alphabet can sometimes work in your favor.

The sport Bob loved most was baseball. He was a catcher, astutely aware of game situations and strategy; true to his generous spirit, he was more concerned about what pitch might help the team win than about his personal stats.

He had a great analytical mind, which probably applied well to baseball, as well as to the field of accounting and auditing, which is where he eventually settled. But he never lost that love of baseball; he always believed he was the first person to buy an individual season ticket for the MoonDogs.

And unless Marsha has given them away, there are probably still four dozen of those “T-shirt night” shirts in the dresser drawer.

Bob was always a math whiz, as befits a CPA. But his journey there illustrates the indirect paths many of us of that generation took.

He was ready to go to Vanderbilt University to study nuclear physics when the draft for the Vietnam War got in the way. His scientific aptitude qualified him for an officer’s post with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

He didn’t like watching “The Perfect Storm,” because the ships he skippered off the East coast had gone through raging seas like those.

When he traded his accountant’s ties for permanent T-shirt fashion, retired Bob took what he called the greatest “job” of his life: tutoring physics and engineering students at Minnesota State University.

Anyone who is not Stephen Hawking knows that physics is one of the most challenging subjects. Many students would come to the tutoring room to find this 70-year-old guy who had gotten up at 4 a.m. to do his homework and worked through the calculus and the quadratic equations and the solutions to their problems.

Whenever I would see him, he would proudly brag about how one of his former students was now in a doctoral program at Purdue, or was a newly hired researcher at Mayo, or was working in design at GM.

He was an environmentalist before that term became part of our daily discourse.

I still recall the time he was teaching in Gaylord (before he got his CPA). Bob and Marsha invited me over for a November dinner (I was still single in 1976). I walked in the door, he handed me a wool shirt. “You’ll need this,” he smiled. The temp was set at 58 to conserve energy.

He flew infrequently because, he said, he wanted to minimize his carbon footprint.

We don’t know what happens after death. I’ve imagined Bob catching in that great field of dreams beyond the sky. Or maybe he’s now able to work more closely on unveiling secrets of the universe.

It occurs to me that we tend to think most “great” people live in New York or D.C. or L.A. But Bob lived right here. He never sought the spotlight, preferred to avoid it, but his honesty and helpfulness to others really did change lives.

That, too, is greatness.

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