Doug Moe: McFarland man fondly recalls Sir Edmund Hillary

Doug Moe  —  1/22/2008 8:16 am

NOT EVERYONE can say they've looked down on Sir Edmund Hillary from on high.

Rick Ruecking can.

"We were hanging silage pipe on the silo," Ruecking was recalling Monday.

This was on a Grant County dairy farm, and Ruecking was working some 40 feet off the ground.

"Sir Edmund and my father came around the corner of the barn," Ruecking said. "My father took one look at us and joked in a loud voice, 'This looks like a job for SIR EDMUND HILLARY!'"

Hillary, the world's most famous mountaineer and adventurer, laughed and replied that it looked like a job for the younger men who were doing it.

The death Jan. 11 of Hillary, who in 1953 became, with his guide, the first human to climb to the summit of Mount Everest, brought a rush of memories for Ruecking, whose family had Hillary as a guest for a weekend in the early 1970s.

Ruecking today lives in McFarland and works for the State of Wisconsin's Office of Quality Assurance in the Department of Health and Family Services.

In the early '70s he was in his mid-20s and working on the Grant County farm in Millville Township to where his father, Harry Ruecking, eventually retired after a career as an executive with Chicago-based World Book Encyclopedia.

The elder Ruecking and Hillary had become friendly through the mountaineer's association with World Book and its parent company, Field Enterprises Educational Corporation.

Rick Ruecking recalls Hillary as modest, "though he commanded attention through his self-assured presence and was physically imposing -- tall and large-boned with a big shock of unruly hair."

Ruecking said Hillary cheerfully answered questions about the Everest climb.

"I asked him what had been the hardest part," Ruecking said. "He said the hardest thing was getting out of the tent first thing in the morning. He said he woke up exhausted. Started the day exhausted. Then he'd heat his boots and try to get ready to go."

In the wake of Hillary's death, at 88, news outlets around the world carried stories recounting the mountaineer's extraordinary achievement.

Mount Everest, a rock and snow peak on the border of Nepal and Tibet, was named for a 19th Century Brit, Sir George Everest. Everest was the surveyor whose work helped first calculate the height (more than 29,000 feet) of the peak, which is the world's tallest.

In May 1953, Hillary, a New Zealand native, and his Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay, were part of an expedition of a dozen climbers, 35 guides and several hundred porters attempting the treacherous climb.

Hillary's New York Times obituary earlier this month laid out the difficulty: "Numerous expeditions had failed, and dozens of experienced mountaineers, including many Sherpas, the Nepalese people famed as climbers, had been killed -- buried in avalanches or lost and frozen in sudden storms that roared over the dizzying escarpments. One who vanished, in 1924, was George Leigh Mallory, known for snapping when asked why climb Everest, 'Because it is there!' His body was found in the ice 75 years later, in 1999, about 2,000 feet below the summit."

Hillary and Norgay made the summit a little before noon on May 30, 1953. Hillary told the Associated Press that "we shook hands and then, casting those Anglo-Saxon formalities aside, Tenzing threw his arms around my shoulders and we thumped each other on the back until forced to stop from lack of breath."

Ruecking recalled that during Hillary's stay at the Grant County farm they talked about beekeeping -- Rick had around 10 hives at the time, and Hillary was a beekeeper himself -- and that the talk turned serious on the subject of the United States' involvement in Vietnam. Hillary said the American government was not telling its people the truth about how the war was being conducted.

Hillary used his fame and success to start a foundation that helped bring hospitals and schools to Nepal.

When he heard of Hillary's death, Ruecking left the following on an online memorial: "With condolences and respect to all Kiwis for the peaceful society which nurtured the great soul who was Sir Edmund Hillary."

I like what Hillary told the Associated Press reporter who was no doubt expecting some lofty discourse upon asking Hillary why he had undertaken the Everest climb. "You really climb for the hell of it," Hillary said. "We climbed it because nobody climbed it before. It was a mountain to climb."

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Doug Moe  —  1/22/2008 8:16 am