Bill Buckley came and stayed.

Buckley started employment with Mower County — truth be told — April 1, 1974.

He celebrated his 35th anniversary of employment with Mower County Wednesday, April 1. No foolin’.

Born in Grand Forks. N.D., Buckley spent 10 to 11 years at Duluth and graduated high school at La Crosse, Wis.

After high school, the Buckley family moved to Detroit Lakes, Minn., where his father had taken a new insurance adjuster’s job. His mother worked in medical and dental clinics before retiring.

Buckley is the oldest in a family of five boys and one girl: Bill, Becky, Greg, Paul and Tim.

Buckley has a son, Craig, with whom he enjoys a close relationship. His wife, Kathy, a special education teacher in the Southland school district, has two sons: Brian and Andy.

The couple live south of Austin in a log home along the Cedar River, where their chocolate Labrador, Mo, presides.

Buckley earned a bachelor of arts degree from Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he majored in biology with a minor in chemistry.

“At that time there weren’t a lot of choices for people who wanted to go into the environmental field,” he said. “I wanted to work in the environment in some capacity, but I didn’t know which field.”

Game warden, park ranger, water quality, even law enforcement all tempted him before making a choice.

And, he said, a “respect for God’s creation.”

Also, growing up in the countryside outside La Crosse helped influence his life’s work decision. “We lived on the edge of town just outside the city limits on French Island,” he said of his formative years at La Crosse. “It’s an island between the Black River and the Mississippi River.”

“I spent a lot of time hunting and fishing and playing in the water,” he said. “There were three major floods there while I was growing up, and I helped sandbag each time.”

Both his father and grandfather also influenced his respect and appreciation for the outdoors.

Experience behind him and degree in hand, Buckley looked for a career that suited him.

Construction jobs came first, but soon enough he found himself hired as the Austin city and Mower County sanitarian.

It was April 1, 1974.

He held the joint city-county position until 1990, when Mower County split from the city.

Buckley worked first in the basement of the Mower County government center before moving to the current environmental services office building behind the Mower County highway department garage.

To appreciate Buckley’s tenure and loyalty to his job one must consider this: It hasn’t been easy.

“I’ve been threatened on several occasions,” he said. “Twice, I had a gun waved in my face and told to stay off property.”

“Another time I was threatened with an ax in a stump next to the property owner,” he said.

Buckley was the city’s and then the county’s “enforcer” of new and controversial environmental regulations.

Beginning with recycling — not nearly as popular three decades ago as it is today — and continuing with solid waste and landfill issues in the 1980s and on to such challenges as the first-ever sewage treatment ordinance, which stopped straight pipe discharges of raw sewage into county ditches, well-sealing, improving water quality and other initiatives to protect the environment, Buckley was in the midst of the frays.

To unforgiving citizens, Buckley was the enemy. There were the public battles in the commissioners’ meeting room with hostile crowds and private confrontations even more nerve-racking.

Individual Mower County Commissioners supported his efforts, but not every elected official.

Still, Buckley and the laws he enforced to protect “God’s creation” prevailed.

Today, he prefers to say that education and awareness were the keys to convincing citizens in non-compliance to change their ways.

“The solid waste issue was really the first big issue that I became involved in,” he said. “Finding a place for our solid waste became a priority. Commissioners (Bob) Shaw and (Duane) Hanson were involved in the early days. That led to us looking for alternatives, such as incineration, and ultimately led to the building of our recycling center and the hiring of Jeff Weaver to run the program.”

Buckley and Daryl W. Franklin, now-retired environmental services department director, were called upon to “envision” the county’s future handling of solid waste.

Buckley was baptized into his work early.

Larry Landherr started the city’s own recycling program when Buckley came on board. Ten days after he was hired, Buckley took over the city’s recycling program started by Landherr.

“I had to dive right in and fight the garbage haulers. It was very controversial. It wasn’t easy getting along with the garbage haulers then,” he said.

That Buckley remained on the job 35 years is even more surprising with a confession: Despite his craving for an environmental job after college graduation and landing in Austin-Mower County, it wasn’t a “perfect fit” in the beginning.

“Let’s just say there have been a number of times in my career when I’ve looked for other things,” he said. “I’ve wondered whether it was worth it, what I did.”

“In the early days, there wasn’t a great deal of public support,” he said. “It might have been easier to have been a policeman in those days, because of all the political pressures.”

“There was not the support for protecting the environment then as there is today,” he said. “Besides the change in technology, perhaps the biggest change in the last 35 years has been the change in attitude.”

“I think it took awhile for people to realize things were getting bad,” he said. “Finally, about 20 years ago I started seeing a change in public attitude. That started shortly after the recycling program got going and our sewage treatment ordinance became stricter. At first, people were vehemently against mound systems, but now they realize something needs to be done to protect the ground water,” he said.

Another accomplishment — done in cooperation with Franklin and the Mower County Soil and Water Conservation District — was water planning, which led into the county’s respected well sealing program.

To also appreciate Buckley’s perseverance, another story illustrates how far he and the environment have come.

Only a month after he was hired to be the city-county sanitarian, he got a call in May 1974 to investigate a report of dead pigs floating in East Side Lake.

“True story,” he said, immediately qualifying the outrageous account.

It’s a story only Buckley can perfectly tell. Suffice to say, it involved the discovery of pig fetuses in the waters of Dobbins Creek and then East Side Lake.

The fetuses came from a company no longer doing business in Austin, according to Buckley.

As he tells the story, two employees of the company “got bored” on a Friday night and dumped sacks containing dead pigs — “There were over 100 fetuses found” — in the creek/lake.

The pigs were removed and no contamination of the waters found.

The fetuses were being collected by the company for sale to high schools and colleges for dissection in biology classes.

The stories flow as Buckley recalled his years of employment with Mower County.

He has two mentors, according to Buckley. “Larry Landherr and Willie Mattison,” he remembered as the interview nears its end. “They worked for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and I was on the phone it seemed every day with them,” he said.

No longer sanitarian, his title today is “environmental health specialist.”

It’s been an interesting, if not always good, ride for Buckley.

“I appreciate the cooperation people have shown throughout the years; particularly in recent years,” he said. “As you can understand from the early years, it hasn’t always been there.”

Presently, Buckley ranks sixth on the list of Mower County’s most senior employees.

Mower County Recorder Sue Davis tops the list with 40 years.

Three Mower County highway department employees are on the list. Paul Hylle, a heavy equipment operator, ranks second with 39 years of employment and Keith Johnson, assistant maintenance supervisor, ranks third with 38 years.

Mary Ann Lueders, a social worker in the Mower County Department of Human Services, has worked 37 years or the same length as Wayne Edgar, accounting technician-senior.