Twice in the 1980s while traveling Iowa, I met 30-something-year-old mayors who so impressed me that I began telling people they “could or should be governor.”

One was Tom Vilsack, who became mayor of Mount Pleasant in southeast Iowa when he was 36 years old in late 1986. You all know he became a two-term governor, then U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Obama and Biden. We’ve been friends ever since, and it’s great having Tom and his wife Christie Vilsack living back in Iowa now.

The other young mayor with such promise was Mike McCarville, who at 32 years old in 1986, became the youngest mayor in a century in Fort Dodge in northwest Iowa. I haven’t been right since I got word that Mike had died of a heart attack at the age of 71. I’ll miss him ever more.

I was among hundreds who lined up to console his wife Terry McCarville, their sons Nicholas and Braydon and their wives, at Gunderson Funeral Home in Fort Dodge. The actual funeral was at Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church in nearby Moorland, close to Mike’s boyhood home area.

By the way, when I mentioned to Terry that I always thought her husband would have been a good governor, she said right back, “And that was your opinion!”

One thing she and I do agree on is that we were blessed in early June that four couples who share some strong ties with each other, took time for a Sunday late afternoon dinner and pontoon boat slow-cruise around Twin Lakes, the resort-like area west of Fort Dodge where the McCarvilles have lived since 2012.

Mike and Terry, John and Terri Hale of Ankeny, Art and Dolores Cullen of Storm Lake, and we RicheBurgers — my wife Mary Riche and I — heard Mike almost rhapsodize about how “life doesn’t get much better than this” and “it’d be hard to beat living on Twin Lakes, wouldn’t it?” All that fit well with the last line of Mike’s printed obituary: “Mike loved his life and often said he wouldn’t trade places with anyone. He truly was ‘The Happiest Man’.”

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Mike McCarville grew up outside Fort Dodge in a family of 11 kids. He graduated from Prairie High School of Gowrie; attended Iowa Central Community College, the University of Northern Iowa and then graduated from Iowa State U. with a master’s in business administration. He taught and coached basketball briefly, officiated a lot of ball games, and eventually went to work for his father-in-law at their RoJohns insulation, roofing and construction company — where Mike wound up as general manager working for his wife, President Terry McCarville.

His public service career — I think we have to call it that instead of a “political career” — began with his somewhat surprising and successful run for mayor in ’86. A friend Becky Anthony, now retired in West Des Moines after serving as senior vice-president of the Iowa Hospital Association, back then was a young reporter for Fort Dodge radio station KWMT and then the Fort Dodge Messenger newspaper.

“I knew Mike from covering the City Council,” Anthony told me. “He was a young guy when he became mayor, certainly different than the old guard that had run Fort Dodge.”

John Hale, mentioned early about the boat ride at Twin Lakes, was a 34-year-old Social Security administrator in Fort Dodge who was elected to the City Council the same year Mayor McCarville was elected.

Hale, now a very active Democrat, concurs with me that the new mayor “was probably a Republican back then. I would have described him then, and for that matter in later life, as a ‘Bob Ray Republican’ — moderate, not very partisan, a lot of common sense. He leaned more Democratic in recent times. But when we were starting out, we didn’t even ask each other what party we came from, nor did we care. We just wanted to do some good for Fort Dodge.”

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Mayor McCarville had unusual power, especially compared to mayors of most cities today, because this city back then had a “strong mayor” form of government. There was no city manager or city administrator. The mayor ran the whole show, but he needed support from four of the seven City Council members.

“Mike had all this energy and all these ideas,” Hale said. “A really good thing about him is that he also had the personality and communications skills so that when he wanted to make some changes, he didn’t alienate people. We certainly had some critics — we’d refer them as the ‘CAVE’ people, ‘Citizens Against Virtually Everything’ — but we’d take time to talk and try to bring them along on projects.”

McCarville “was a guy who had big ideas and could think big,” Hale continued. “An example of that was that in the late 1980s, he led the way in coming up with a master plan to develop a large portion of the Des Moines River’s route through Fort Dodge.” A local business exec loaned McCarville, Hale and a few other local leaders an airplane for a one-day round-trip to Cedar Falls, where they were counseled by another “big thinker” — UNI business professor Robert James Waller. Recognize that name? The Iowa Legislature subsequently contracted Waller to travel Iowa for two years, coming up with a master plan for the whole state! (While he was doing that, Waller spent a couple days in Winterset, was enchanted by the famous Covered Bridges in that area, and he wrote the fabulously successful novel “Bridges of Madison County.”)

Waller’s recommendation for Fort Dodge?

“He just hammered home with us how important that Des Moines River is to Fort Dodge,” Hale recalled. “It was our history, and it could be our future.”

The Fort Dodgers were initially successful in selling that idea to allies in state and federal government, and were angling toward major Congessional “earmarks” for funding, but then in the ’90s, “the kickbacks were canceled and it was the death knell of our project. Our inability to get it done was so frustrating.” Parts of that riverfront development were accomplished later, but in a more “piecemeal” fashion.

Maybe that played a part in Mayor McCarville’s decision to leave the mayoral position late in his second term and start working full-time in Chamber of Commerce and economic development advocacy. He was one of the best “developers” I ever saw work in Iowa.

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Meanwhile, he was a great source of stories for me in my Des Moines Register years. Connecting on those made us friends, too.

Together, we rode parts of a RAGBRAI or two.

I dragged Mike and the RoJohns construction crew into a couple projects on the Raccoon River Valley Trail; I hired him to re-roof my farmhouse and build a new garage when I lived outside Cooper in Greene County, and for the price of lunch on me in Jefferson, he willingly consulted on whether our new Multicultural Family Resource Center in Greene County should try to buy a deteriorating building in downtown Jefferson. (We didn’t, wisely.)

Two other things are notable about Mike McCarville’s later years.

One, he became a very active water skier on Twin Lakes, at a level that many of us thought beyond common sense at his age, but he was good at it.

And he became a prolific reader, and that brings up a touching gift from him.

In my late wife Carla’s last year before her 2021 death from cancer, Mike called one day and said he and his wife Terry wanted to stop by the farmhouse.

“I’ve felt so bad for you two that I wanted to do something that might help,” he said. “Then I started thinking about how Carla has always read so much. Well, I do, too. Because I’m on the road so much, bidding on jobs or checking on their progress, I’m always stopping for coffee or lunch. I decided that could give me time to read more. So I download books I want to read on my smart phone, because it’s easy for me to carry in a pocket. But they also download on my computer tablet here. So everything I’ve read and am reading is right here,” he said — handing us the tablet. “Carla, I thought that when you feel up to reading, there’s a lot of it you can do free, right here.”

I’ve still got it. Now I intend to power it up, accept whatever download is coming, and feel like I can sort of stay in touch with my pal the Renaissance Man, who could, or should, have been governor.

Meanwhile, a question for all of us to ponder: I celebrate here that in the 1980s, people like Mike McCarville, Tom Vilsack and John Hale were being elected to city government leadership when they were in their 30s. Let’s remember that in 1982, 35-year-old Terry Branstad was elected governor for the first time. Why does it seem like that couldn’t happen now in 2025 and beyond, among men or women? Your opinions?

Chuck Offenburger is a writer known for his Iowa Boy columns.