Yuen: He was a father figure to countless Hmong American kids

As ordinary Minnesotans stand up for their friends and neighbors in the face of a sweeping anti-immigrant crackdown, our state is showing its exceptionalism to the world. It’s in that vein I’d like to tell you about David Lowry Moore, who exemplified Minnesota at its welcoming best.

Moore, who died in December at 89, never married or had kids of his own. But countless Hmong American kids — many now in middle age — thought of him as a dad. In 1981, as refugees from Southeast Asia resettled in the Twin Cities, the Yale-educated teacher founded Minnesota’s first Hmong Boy Scout troop.

Moore had a front-row seat to the influx of new arrivals as a social studies teacher at Edison High School in northeast Minneapolis, said longtime friend Yee Chang, one of Moore’s scouting recruits who eventually considered him a father.

“He embraced us as soon as he saw us in the classrooms and hallways of his high school,” said Chang, 56. “He wanted to be helpful in the best way he knew how, which was through scouting and summer camp.”

Moore met Chang when he was 11, shortly after his family moved to south Minneapolis in the early 1980s. It was a critical time in Chang’s life.

Sometimes we forget the uglier parts of our history. While it’s true that many Minnesota churches and resettlement agencies opened their arms to welcome Hmong arrivals, many residents resented their new neighbors. Hostilities lingering from the Vietnam War were passed from adults to their kids.

Classmates taunted Chang with racial epithets. A familiar succession of greetings followed: “They were like, ‘Are you Viet Cong? Do you know karate?’ Then I got beat up.”

When Moore, the scoutmaster for Troop 100, took these boys from the inner city on their first camping trip, the Scouts immediately knew what to do. They leaned on the muscle memory they developed back in their home villages, starting a fire, putting up tents, catching fish and sleeping under the stars.

Some of the teens had been child soldiers in the Secret War in Laos, in which the Hmong covertly assisted the CIA in the fight against Communist forces.

“Dave was amazed,” Chang said. “He was blown away by our natural love for the outdoors. But it was normal for us.”

Moore was so moved by his Scouts’ stories of survival and resilience that he wrote books about them. He told one of his Eagle Scouts, Long Thao, that at first, he figured he had so much to teach these kids. “But I quickly found out they were teaching me,” Moore said.

Thao is now 41, working as a dentist in Arkansas. He said Moore committed his entire life to serving young people. Moore even drove an old school bus to pick up Hmong kids like him in north Minneapolis so they could attend Scout meetings. Little by little, he mentored Thao. Moore gave him new responsibilities, seeing the potential in him that was at times invisible to Thao.

Nearly 1,000 people paid their respects to Moore at a recent celebration of life at the downtown Minneapolis church. Many wore their scouting uniforms, neckerchiefs or Camp Ajawah T-shirts. They remembered a man who never stopped learning, who courageously stood alongside people pushed to the margins.

Moore, a longtime member of Westminster, was politically active. He campaigned for Chang’s wife, former state Sen. Mee Moua, who went on to become the first Hmong American woman elected to a state legislature. Alumni from Troop 100 include doctors, lawyers, engineers and community leaders, such as former state Rep. Cy Thao.

Bob Fulton of Hugo, the troop’s assistant scoutmaster, said many children who didn’t have positive relationships with their own fathers saw Moore as a “substitute dad.”

“He wanted to teach them to fit into our culture without losing their culture,” Fulton said.

Today, Troop 100, in what is now known as Scouting America, is open to both boys and girls. They still gather every week, though some kids have stopped showing up. Their families, terrified by the aggression of federal immigration agents, are afraid to leave the house.

In a 2010 interview with the Star Tribune, Moore spoke with pride when asked to sum up the potential of his latest batch of Scouts. He borrowed language from the official Boy Scout handbook: “They are trustworthy. They are loyal. They are brave.”

I can’t think of a more fitting description of the Minnesotans today — from soccer moms guarding schools to retirees delivering groceries — who are standing up for immigrants in their communities. They, like Dave Moore, bet on the power and the potential of loving their neighbors.

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