Renaissance Post is the creation of Neil Haugerud, with help and suggestions from his friends.
Neil’s interests are many and varied, reflecting his life. In his eight decades on this earth, he has been — among other things — a carpenter, a farmer, a Sunday school teacher, a Marine, an interrogator of accused criminals (who got his subjects to talk with kindness, not waterboarding), a deputy sheriff and sheriff, a real estate and insurance agent, a prominent state legislator, the chair of the Upper Mississippi River Basin Commission, a small-town newspaper columnist, a mediator and consultant in conflict management, and a loving husband, father, and grandfather.
Throughout his long life and varied career, there has been one constant, driving factor: Service to others, bundled with compassion. Now, at an age when most persons have long since retired, the need to be of service to others keeps drawing him to the issue of crime and how best to deal with it.
Service to others recently struck a chord with me. I was attending my 50th class reunion in September in northern California. My wife and I had been planning this with a life-long friend and his wife whom we seldom see. When the reunion weekend arrived, we met at an informal picnic and began to review name tags attached to people with familiar names and voices, but alien faces. Not having seen most of these people for half a century, I especially wanted to seek out three of them to enquire how they had spent their lives. All had stable families with grand-children succeeding them, and all had worked in business, their own, or someone else’s. I remember two of those men in particular when we left high school. Both were brilliant, and headed for first-rate universities. Both went to graduate school, succeeded there and went into business thereafter. Both of them produced products sufficiently useful to others that they could make a living by selling those products. My own livelihood had been earned in research and education. How privileged I felt to know that my work-a-day efforts had contributed directly to the knowledge that others would use to support their lives and interests.