'Professor, mentor, carpenter and friend:' Mark Heistad remembered

Funeral services will be held in Minneapolis Saturday morning for former MPR News host and reporter Mark Heistad. He died last week at the age of 59 from esophageal cancer.

Heistad hosted Morning Edition and several other programs at Minnesota Public Radio, and later became a professor at Morningside College.

However, he's probably best remembered for the radio documentaries about Minnesota's history that he produced and hosted for MPR. Those programs ranged from explorations of the labor movement in Minnesota, to the life of former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, to the history of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

He was a craftsman — a hobbyist woodworker — and that influenced how he approached his documentaries, his brother David Heistad said in a recent interview with MPR News host Cathy Wurzer.

"He wanted to make sure he got all the right sound effects," said David Heistad. Mark especially enjoyed covering stories on agriculture, his brother said, and he followed politics closely — making sure his students were prepared to cover these topics as well.

"He had quite the charisma. So, they just had a celebration of his life down in Morningside, and all these students with these testimonials about how Mark had inspired them and kind of encouraged them to do things they didn't know they could do," David Heistad said.

Mark's epitaph reads: "A professor, mentor, carpenter and friend."

Each one is true, said his brother. "He was all those things."