MANKATO — At the end, all they had to do was put him on the stage.

They had worked tirelessly to create a sense of passion, optimism and credibility about their candidate and boss, a high school geography teacher from their hometown, a guy that virtually no one else had ever heard of when his race for Congress began.

But early in the morning of Nov. 8, that thing they’d struggled to create was happening spontaneously. They didn’t have to say a word.

Hundreds of people — gray-haired grandparents, blue-collar union guys, crazed high school kids, idealistic young adults and liberal professionals — were jammed, shoulder to shoulder and spilling out the doors into the hallway. They were, more or less, out of their minds when Tim Walz took the stage in the ballroom of the Mankato Holiday Inn.

Before Walz was finished making his victory speech, he was surrounded on the stage by the people who’d been crucial in painstakingly creating the momentum that eventually resulted in that surreal scene on election night.

“By the way,” Walz said, looking around at his key campaign staff, “the average age is about 23 up here.”

The Mankatoans

Four of the seven people he called to the stage were women in their 20s who had graduated from Mankato high schools, went off to college and came back to work on Walz’s upstart campaign to knock off six-term incumbent U.S. Rep. Gil Gutknecht. The four — Leah Solo, Meredith Salsbery, Jackie Bateman and Liz Mcloone — were integral to the campaign, particularly Solo and Salsbery, who were there at the start.

For Salsbery, elections had always been about disappointment. A faithful Democrat, she was disappointed in 2000 that she was 18-days too young to vote for Al Gore, disappointed in 2002 that her absentee ballot vote for Paul Wellstone was disqualified following the senator’s death, disappointed in 2004 that her work on behalf of John Kerry went unrewarded.

This one couldn’t have been more different.

“It was one of those life-changing moments,” Salsbery said of looking out at the sea of victorious Walz supporters. “... It was just this big, happy, yellow T-shirt blur.”

Solo said the ecstatic crowd was the culmination of countless days of work by Walz and his team.

“It was what we knew could happen,” she said. “And it really did happen. It was just unbelievable to have that dream come true.”

The transition from the dream phase to the reality phase wasn’t one of happenstance, they said. It came about through hundreds of hours with phones stuck to their ears, through the tens of thousands of miles cruising down the roads of southern Minnesota, through the endless attempts to connect with hundreds of thousands of potential voters.

The beginning

“There were two of them, they were there from the beginning,” Walz told the crowd, first introducing Solo, who had traveled the district with him for most of the final months of the campaign.

Solo, Mankato West High School class of ’98, was around the kitchen table with Walz, his wife, Gwen, and Salsbery in January 2005 — discussing the possibility of a congressional campaign.

They thought he should run and agreed to help. The campaign started in February.

“My name recognition extended to the end of my block at this point,” Walz said, laughing.

And his campaign account was at zero.

Solo, as political director, and Salsbery, the communication director, were assigned to change that. Solo had run the Democratic campaign office in south-central Minnesota in 2004, so she did a variety of duties for the Walz campaign before surrendering them to others as they came on board.

In the frenetic final three months before the election, Solo traveled with Walz. She also worked with organized labor, which provided a major boost to the campaign.

But it was only late in the campaign, when more and more staff and volunteers were available, that Solo could focus on a couple of duties.

“For the year and a half before that, I did everything,” she said.

If the final months of the campaign were about momentum, the early months were about inertia. The election was nearly two years away and nobody who mattered — other than Tim and Gwen Walz and a couple of local supporters — really thought he could knock off a 12-year veteran congressman.

Gutknecht, after all, had never lost an election — a 14-victory winning streak including primary elections and state House races.

“It was one of the toughest things for the first year to get people to think this was a competitive race and that we weren’t just tilting at windmills,” Solo said.

The voice

Walz, standing before the crowd at the Holiday Inn pointed to Salsbery: “The levelheaded one who said ‘Now take a deep breath before you say anything, and think about it.’”

Her most visible role was as spokeswoman for the campaign and as the one who connected reporters to Walz. But Salsbery also gave Walz ideas on refining what he said to people across southern Minnesota, researched issues to help prepare position papers that were posted on his Web site, and helped him practice for the numerous debates that were to follow.

Salsbery said she quickly learned that Walz was a natural communicator. He knew how to tell a story and developed a repertoire of four or five about his life that would become regular parts of campaign speeches, debates and fundraising parties.

Salsbery simply recommended which ones to tell to different groups, and maybe to drop the one about the culinary benefits of one of the cattle-ranch jobs he had as a Nebraska teenager. Her advice after he told that story to a group of farmers ...

“The Rocky Mountain oyster story — don’t tell it,” Salsbery advised.

Connecting Walz with reporters early in 2005 was a challenging task. The response was often the same one that donors provided. Who? He’s running for what? When’s the election? Call back later.

“We just kept calling back: ‘We’re back doing another event. Won’t you come out and cover us?’”

The fundraiser

Walz called Jackie Bateman to the stage.

“The one who, whenever I wanted to go home, said ‘Have you finished the call time? It’s a long way to $1.2 million.’ Jackie Bateman raised the money.”

That was the goal presented to Bateman, West High School ’02, when she became the finance director at the beginning of the summer of 2005.

Bateman had been involved in some campaigns while going to college in Wisconsin. When she took the job, the campaign had raised $13,000. So ... only $1,187,000 to go.

“We thought that was an obtainable number to hit,” she said, refusing to accept the premise that it must have been a daunting assignment for a 22-year-old. “And we did it.”

Getting the pump primed was a chore, and every trickle in the beginning was a cause for celebration.

“It was rough,” Bateman finally conceded. “I remember the first time somebody gave us a $1,000 donation and it was the happiest day of the campaign.”

“Besides his mother,” Salsbery reminded.

At the end of the summer, they’d raised $60,000.

So ... only $1,140,000 to go.

The end of summer

Young people can bring stamina, enthusiasm and idealism to a political campaign, but there’s a downside.

They have to go back to school.

Salsbery, 23, headed for graduate school at the University of Minnesota, although she continued as part-time communications director. Bateman went back to the University of Wisconsin to finish her degree. Even Walz had to go back to school — teaching geography at West until he took his unpaid leave of absence in March.

Solo, 26, carried on as the only full-time worker in the campaign. Still, it was that fall and winter that the first hints of momentum began to appear. Vietnam War hero and former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland came to Minnesota to do a fundraiser with Walz, and the media actually paid some attention to the campaign.

Salsbery was in class at the U that winter when a cell phone call came. She checked the phone, saw a 202 area code and stepped outside to return the call. It was Joshua Green, a reporter for Atlantic Monthly and he wanted to talk to Walz.

“It was ‘Oh God! What do I do now?’” Salsbery said.

She blew off the rest of her class and set up the interview, the first big national press story for Walz. The Wall Street Journal called next. Other national publications followed.

In March, Walz hired his first outsider. Campaign manager Kerry Greeley of Massachusetts who had worked on the John Kerry presidential run.

The fundraising was going better, too. The campaign reached $118,000 by the end of the year. And Walz actually out-raised Gutknecht in the first quarter of 2006 — $127,000 to $105,000, although Gutknecht still had a $550,000 advantage in cash on hand.

When Bateman came back in the summer to resume her finance director duties, she found the spigot running much easier than the summer before. The money allowed for more hires in the crucial final months.

The scheduler

“The one who made the trains run, the scheduler,” Walz said, calling the next woman to the stage. “She was our token non-public school student. Liz Mcloone from Loyola.”

Mcloone’s relatively late appearance to the campaign was evidence of how much the momentum was building. She came Aug. 16, attracted to the increasingly interesting race developing in her hometown.

“I had the campaign itch,” said Mcloone, Loyola High School ’97. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit this one out. This is the one I want the most and this is where I need to be.’”

A worker in the office of state Sen. Don Betzold, Mcloone’s job was to get Walz to the events he needed to be at and to fill in the vacant times of the day with politically valuable events.

“It’s challenging and it’s exciting because it’s a big puzzle you have to piece together,” she said.

The Walz campaign covered a total of about 120,000 miles from Winona to Luverne and everywhere in between. By fall, the requests for Walz didn’t always mesh with the physical laws of time and space.

“I got unreasonable requests, but we made the best of it we could,” she said.

Take the morning of Oct. 1. Mcloone’s job was to get Walz home from a Las Vegas fundraiser, get him and his wife some sleep, get him to Owatonna by noon for a debate, get him to Rochester for a media event with Walter Mondale, get him to a fundraiser that night.

And then there was the time Walz was headed for a big event with U.S. Senate candidate Amy Klobuchar and Illinois Sen. Barrack Obama when a DM&E; train blocked his path for nearly 30 minutes. A somewhat frantic Walz called the office.

Mcloone notes that Walz made it to the event.

“Things like that happened all the time where it felt like the world was falling apart,” she said. “And everybody came together and made it work.”

The reviews

Minnesota State University political science professor Joe Kunkel said Walz and his campaign staff proved their mettle and essentially forced national Democrats to pay attention.

“They got that campaign up to a quality level that the national Democratic campaign committee took notice,” Kunkel said. “The more you can prove that you can raise the money, the more they pay attention to you.”

Former Congressman Tim Penny, who represented the 1st District for 12 years before retiring in 1994, was impressed with the Walz campaign. And the staff didn’t seem to forget who needed to be in charge, who needed to be in the driver’s seat, he said.

“He had good people around him and they delivered the nuts and bolts for him. But he set the tone of the campaign.”

The home stretch

Bateman had worked all of the summer of ’05 raising less than $60,000. Now that much was coming in every two days, sometimes in a single day. Democrats were excited about the Walz campaign.

“It was a lot easier in October to call people and get money,” she said. “You could basically call anyone.”

She remembers having Walz call a reliable DFL donor in the Twin Cities. The man’s wife answered the phone, and Walz — as he had been doing a year earlier — gave his name and then started to explain who he was and what he was running for.

The woman cut him off after hearing “Walz.”

“She just shrieked. ‘I love you! I can’t believe it!’” Bateman said, noting the donation turned out to be a generous one. “It was those sorts of reactions we would get at the end that we wouldn’t get at the beginning.”

While the momentum was growing, there was a Halloween scare. A rally was planned for Nov. 1 at MSU — with Sen. John Kerry as the headliner. The day before, Kerry became embroiled in controversy for a botched joke that, to many, appeared to question the intelligence of American troops.

On Halloween night, Walz pulled the plug on the Kerry visit but decided to go ahead with the rally on his own. The campaign staff had been craving media attention for months and suddenly were getting more than they could handle.

Salsbery was calling media that had RSVPed for the rally to tell them Kerry wasn’t going to be there. Other media, tracking the Kerry gaffe, wanted the Walz campaign to talk about why he wasn’t coming.

“It just got to the point where at 10 o’clock when my cell phone went dead, I said ‘That’s all I can do,’” Salsbery said.

The next morning she was up early, helping to set up a live shot for Walz on CNN and dealing with interview requests from national and statewide media. The rally, even without Kerry, drew hundreds.

The following day, six days before the election, gubernatorial candidate Mike Hatch arrived in St. Peter and Mankato to campaign with Walz — the morning after Hatch’s running-mate had embarrassed his campaign by not knowing what E-85 fuel was when asked in a televised interview. That evening, in a different part of the state, Hatch blew up at a reporter, reminding people of his reputation for a hot temper.

The Walz campaign stayed on course even as the others tripped around them.

The motivators

The exhaustion was extreme by the end. Salsbery talked of stumbling into the campaign office early one morning and being thrilled to find a half-full can of room-temperature flat Diet Coke. Caffeine!

While they were paid staffers, none wanted to take a guess at what their hourly wage turned out to be.

“I do it for the Diet Coke and cookies,” Solo said. “I don’t know how I’m going to get back on a normal diet, like with meals.”

There were times when the campaign was a long, hard slog.

“When you’re asked to give so much of yourself emotionally, physically, financially, I think it wears on you and you encounter moments like that throughout the campaign,” Solo said. “But those moments are put aside by reminders of why you’re doing this. ... He gets up and speaks and you see him reach out and touch so many people. That sort of refreshes you.”

The memories

Now it’s over — the campaign, their jobs. Salsbery thinks Mcloone and Bateman will be asked to serve on Walz’s congressional staff.

Salsbery said Walz would like her to be his congressional communications director, but she wants to finish graduate school. ... She’s still deciding.

Solo said she’s moving to Indianapolis. Once there, Solo may try grad school or union work or theater. She wants to get away from partisan politics for awhile. Thinking she might like to run for office someday, Solo said she learned a lesson from Walz about living in the real world.

“One of the reasons that he’s such a good politician and is going to be such a good policy leader is because he’s lived so many lives, and lived in the community and been active in the community,” she said.

Wherever they end up, they say this experience is one they’ll never forget. And the most vibrant memory will be standing on the stage — being credited with the victory — and looking out at a sea of giddy faces that they helped create.

“You did everything that was asked of you,” Walz said to the crowd. “You sacrificed and you took your country back. That’s what happened here tonight.”

Penny was in South Carolina on election night. But he has an idea of what the Holiday Inn was like — and what Walz and his young staffers were feeling — when the final results came in: 53 percent for Walz, 47 percent for Gutknecht. In 1982, he pulled off a shocking upset of an incumbent congressman through a long, difficult grass-roots campaign.

“The ones that are most exciting and most rewarding,” Penny said, “are the ones earned the hard way.”