My Minnesota: Longtime DNR boat safety guru retiring after decades

He'll never forget that summer day in 1960, when his father replaced their wooden duck boat "that looked like a floating log" with a 14-foot Alumacraft. His dad was a Minneapolis welder of farm machinery named Horace, who would escape the city for the family cabin up on Little Sand Lake near Park Rapids.

When a nearby resort put up the Alumacraft for sale, his dad pounced on it, equipped it with a 5-horsepower Johnson motor and offered to take his 12-year-son fishing.

"I'd holler: 'Can I run the motor? Can I?' " Kim Elverum recalled the other day from the fifth floor of the Department of Natural Resources building in St. Paul. His office, with a nice view of the downtown St. Paul skyline, was about to be packed up.

After 42 years at the DNR, Elverum retired on the last day of May. He's been the state's boat and water safety coordinator since 1974 and the Minnesota boating law administrator for 35 years — the longest serving person to hold that job in the national organization's history.

Anyone who died on Minnesota's nearly 11,000 lakes or rivers, or in pools or hot tubs — unless it was suicide or homicide — "came across this desk." And that number has dropped significantly during Elverum's watch, dropping from 56 deaths in 1975 to 14 last year. In 1975, Minnesota's water fatality rate stood at 12.3 deaths per 100,000 registered boats. By 2012, it was down to 1.8 deaths per 100,000 boats — about one-third of the national rate.

Key factors? "Non-ninny-looking life jackets for one," according to Elverum. New laws requiring life jackets on Jet Skis has helped, too. Unworn life jackets, alcohol and cold water remain the main causes of death on the water.

Asked which water tragedy stood out after all his years crunching the numbers, Elverum doesn't hesitate: July 3, 1999. The day of the big blowdown storm Up North that ended with five boaters dead in an alcohol-related collision on the St. Croix River near Bayport.

His early DNR fieldwork took him to Wannaska (south of Roseau), Cloquet, Warroad, Pillager and Mankato, where he met his wife, Mary, who was working at the Rochester DNR office. They were married in LeRoy, some 450 miles south of Wannaska, and honeymooned in Duluth, the Iron Range and up the North Shore.

He actually retired in November, but stayed around for six months through a post-retirement option "because they're aren't too many people who do what I do."

Passersby at his office kept telling him he can't leave, "to which my wife says: You certainly can."

They've put their longtime home in Golden Valley on the market and moved into a senior co-op in Plymouth. They plan to travel but have no firm destination yet.

"We like cruises," he said — fitting for a boat safety guru, but a long way from the 14-foot Alumacraft.