I met Lew Lubka about 20 years ago and liked and respected him from the onset. I came to treasure him.
What I admired most was Lew's unvarnished style and his limitless curiosity. As our friendship developed, Lew taught me many things about living and about himself. For instance, he taught me to relish diversity, and likewise, rejoice in common bonds-a complex worldview no doubt broadened by Lew's work as a community organizer in Kentucky.
Lew and I shared a love of gardening and a commitment to activism. Both endeavors, Lew showed me, require a vigor that results not only in self-improvement, but also in community enrichment. Not surprisingly then, Lew was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Prairie Roots Food Cooperative, which opens later this year. I will miss Lew at the grand opening.
Throughout our friendship, I delighted in Lew's company on several travels across North Dakota. Our destinations? Always, meetings with allies determined to jimmy the status quo, which often misdirects movements toward progressivism. And always, our guideposts were the early successes of the North Dakota Nonpartisan League.
Only during the past few years did I learn that Lew was good friends with Thomas McGrath, a North Dakota farm boy, a Rhodes Scholar and a writer who was blacklisted-a victim of McCarthyism during the 1950s. Like Lew, McGrath was a World War II veteran. The two became friends when McGrath was teaching at what is today Minnesota State University Moorhead, and Lew was teaching at North Dakota State University.
I learned about the friendship between Lew and McGrath when I attended a reading at Zandbroz Variety highlighting the publication of Thomas McGrath: Start the Poetry Now!, an anthology of essays paying tribute to McGrath's contribution to literature and political activism. Lew's contribution to that anthology is titled, "Tom McGrath: A Personal and Political Memoir."
When Lew was addressing those gathered for the reading, he became emotional, the only time I ever saw him cry. In the moment, he was talking about McGrath's epic poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend, which took McGrath nearly three decades to complete. What made Lew so sensitive was a compliment McGrath had paid him. As Lew related, McGrath told him that if anyone could personify his imaginary friend, it was Lew.
After the Zandbroz reading honoring McGrath, I read Letter to an Imaginary Friend. A portion of one verse stood out because it defined Lew and galvanized my aspirations. Afterward, I began including that partial stanza in my email signature, and many times, Lew told me how much he valued seeing an example of McGrath's hard-earned sagacity appearing at the end of my emails.
Lew was a freethinker, and so, I won't burden his passing with my hope for an afterlife. However, I think Lew would agree that his influence lives on among those who knew him.
And so, this is for Lew, with much appreciation also going to Thomas McGrath:
"Blessed the agitator: whose touch makes the dead walk;
Blessed the organizer: who discovers the strength of wounds;
Blessed all fighters."
Hulse lives in Fargo.