The Small-Town Nebraska Tim Walz Put Behind Him, but Never Fully Left

Tim Walz was 14 or so, trouble-seeking with his cousins across a shaggy patch of family land where they liked to shoot air guns at birds.

They had come upon his uncle’s “junk pile” one day in the late 1970s, a little scrap heap with a broken-down car and one unambiguous rule.

“Dad specifically — specifically — said, ‘Now don’t shoot them windows,’” one cousin, Matt Reiman, said of the car recently.

What happened next was probably inevitable: Pop. Shatter. Gleeful profanity from Mr. Walz — and a knee-jerk confession with no adults around.

“My gun went off!” he shouted, as if it might have been an accident, formulating his pre-emptive defense in real time. “My gun went off!”

Relatives said Mr. Walz would later deny culpability of any sort.

“He could make something unbelievable believable,” Casey Reiman, another cousin who was there, said fondly, if still a bit grudgingly, some 45 years later.