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Gwen Walz has always worked in close proximity to her husband, the Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.
Over the weekend the couple joined Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff on a Pennsylvania bus tour as Democrats head to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, which kicks off today.
They are no strangers to working in close quarters. In the early 1990s in a small city on the edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, Gwen Walz taught English at Alliance High School, where Tim Walz was also teaching geography.
At one point they even shared a classroom, only separated by a divider down the middle, during her first teaching job. It is what brought them together, the first lady of Minnesota revealed.
“We’ve always worked really closely together,” the 58-year-old said. “It seemed proximity was really important. “Tim and I even shared a classroom, with just a divider right down the middle when we were teaching in Nebraska,” she told MPR News in a 2019 interview.
After seeing first hand how engaged Walz’s students were with him, the former teacher – who then went by her maiden name of Whipple – was “smitten,” according to The Minnesota Star Tribune.
It wasn’t long before Walz asked her on a date where they watched Michael Douglas in Falling Down. After the movie, she revealed they went to the only restaurant in town that wasn’t a bar – Hardee’s.
At the end of the night, Walz leaned in for a kiss but he was rejected. Undeterred, the governor reportedly replied: “That’s fine, but you should know I’m going to marry you.”
They married the following year and have been together for 30 years.
In the minds of their students, the couple were “a little like the newly elected President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary,” a former student wrote in The Washington Post.
“She married Mr Walz shortly after my freshman year ended. In the weeks preceding her marriage, she told us that she gave serious consideration to using both her maiden name and married name (presumably like Rodham Clinton) but decided that Whipple Walz sounded too much like a bird call,” the student said.
Two years after they married, Gwen Walz persuaded her husband to relocate back to her home state of Minnesota, where they both taught at Mankato West High School.
The couple, who have two children together, were a refuge for their LGBT+ students, they told The Independent.
Richelle Norton, an art teacher who graduated from Mankato West in 2001, spent hundreds of hours with the couple during her junior year when Tim Walz taught global geography and Gwen Walz taught advanced composition, American literature and an ACT prep course in the evenings.
“They were really like the school mom and dad,” says Norton, who launched the Mankato West Alumni For Walz group.
As the DNC begins today, with his wife at his side, Harris’s running mate will take to the podium on day three: Wednesday, August 21.
Walz will formally accept the party’s nomination just 15 days after he was unveiled as Harris’s pick.
