Farewell, ‘Box’

This is the story of Box in a box.

At the memorial service Friday for former Pioneer Press columnist Don Boxmeyer, a simple wooden box held Boxmeyer’s cremated remains. It was inscribed with an appropriately tight headline: “Box, February 11, 1941 — August 10, 2008.”

“There’s my dad,” Boxmeyer’s son Erik said before the service started. “We figured, what the heck, a box full of Box.”

Hundreds of family members, friends, neighbors, readers, sources and colleagues crowded into an East Side church to send off the veteran newspaperman and St. Paul native, who died Sunday of respiratory failure at age 67. A funeral home official estimated some 800 people attended the service and visitation.

Mourners included politicians still in office, such as St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, and those no longer serving, like former City Council Member Vic Tedesco. There were fellow journalists from the Pioneer Press, many retired but some still scribbling, and even some reporters from that other paper across the river.

They came to share stories about what friend and radio and television broadcaster Stan Turner called “the city’s chief storyteller.”

“Don told stories. Stories of his own life. Stories of other people’s lives, and a fish story here and there,” said the Rev. Chris Berthelsen, pastor of First Lutheran Church.

Before the service started, Turner and former Pioneer Press editor Don Effenberger exchanged some Boxmeyer tales about newspaper characters that seemed to be taken from “The Front Page”:

• The reporter phoning in an eyewitness account of a hotel fire from a pay phone in the lobby of the hotel that was ablaze.
  

   

• The sportswriter who went on a three-day bender, somehow woke up in Chicago and told his editor as long as he was there, how about a feature on the Cubs?
  

   

• The reporter with the Gucci shoes and the camel’s hair coat who fell into a muddy ditch covering a story.

“Box told it a lot better than that,” Effenberger said.

“You were the best story teller. Period,” Erik Boxmeyer said of his father. “A lot of you got to read them, but to hear the real thing was even better.”

Turner remembered covering City Hall with Boxmeyer during the tumultuous days of “Supermayor” Charlie McCarty.

“One day, the circus came into town, and Don and I were circus reporters,” Turner said.

“It wasn’t just the business of the city he would cover. He picked up the personalities of the city,” said former Pioneer Press reporter Don Ahern.

Boxmeyer was a natural storyteller, colleagues said, but he was a savvy reporter, too. Former Pioneer Press reporter Aron Kahn remembered working with him on a project about how Interstate 94 was going to be aligned east of St. Paul.

“I learned a tremendous amount about behind-the-scenes government and politics and influence from working with Don on that project,” Kahn said, recalling his first investigative story at the paper.

Turner said Boxmeyer “held up a mirror to the city,” but “he never took a cheap shot. He was never malicious.”

Effenberger remembered a reporter who was generous to colleagues, a journalist who loved to highlight and preserve his hometown’s history and its neighborhoods.

“Don was ‘local local’ before his time,” he said.

While writing about places like Swede Hollow and the West Side Flats, Boxmeyer created his own colorful neighborhood, “the community of Boxmeyer,” Effenberger said.

“I’m proud to say I live there. It’s a place we visited regularly whenever Don sat down to write.”

A picture on the front of the service program showed Boxmeyer wearing a Pioneer Press cap, holding up a just-caught fish. Nephew Bob Schwartz told of an avid hunter and angler and prankster who once hung a newly gutted buck from the rafters of his garage “which Don had spray-painted the nose red.”

There were references to Boxmeyer’s anonymous duties writing clues to the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt, and there were also reminders of Boxmeyer’s service in the Navy, including pictures of him in uniform, his dog tags and his “dixie cup” service hat.

The memorial service started with the singing of “The Navy Hymn” and ended with a playing of “Anchors Aweigh.”

Next to Boxmeyer’s box of remains was a picture of Joe Bruender, a 57-year-old Mankato school teacher who died in 2004 of a brain hemorrhage. Bruender became an organ donor. His liver and a kidney wound up in an ailing Boxmeyer, who retired in 2002 but continued writing occasional columns.

Boxmeyer became close to Bruender’s family.

“Thank you, Joe,” was printed on a visitation card.

At the service, readings were done by transplant coordinator Ann Kalis and Kim Friedrich, Bruender’s niece.

“We are very grateful for the four years we were able to give him,” Friedrich said.

Coleman compared Boxmeyer’s death to the red neon “1st” sign atop the First National Bank Building in downtown St. Paul going out.

“Please, please find future journalists to do what Don did so well,” Turner said. “Please don’t let him be the last of his breed.”

“One of a kind, that’s kind of a hackneyed phrase. But it’s true,” said Bill Cento, the retired St. Paul Dispatch managing editor who appointed Boxmeyer a columnist in the late 1970s. “There isn’t anybody who can replace this guy.”

Richard Chin can be reached at 651-228-5560.