Ralph Munro, a long-tenured and much-beloved politician who worked to better the lives of people with disabilities, hone Washington’s election system and stop the capture of orcas in Puget Sound while serving as secretary of state from 1980 to 2000, died Thursday. He was 81.
His death was announced by the Secretary of State’s Office.
The grandson of a Scottish stonemason who helped to shape the sandstone blocks that built the Capitol in Olympia, Munro would go on to serve five terms there, ushering in seismic changes to make voting more accessible and easier for Washington residents. But his legacy is perhaps defined as much by campaigns he made outside of elected office.
As an aide to Gov. Dan Evans, he got the governor to spend part of a day in a wheelchair, to understand what it was like. He helped expand state law to protect people with disabilities from discrimination and he helped pass the state’s “Education for All” law in 1971, the first law in the country to grant all children with developmental disabilities the right to public schooling.
“Ralph was the one who taught me how to care,” Evans, who died last year, said when Munro retired as secretary of state.
Evidence of Munro’s advocacy can be seen on every street corner. He lobbied for a bill that required curbs to have ramps to accommodate wheelchairs. It passed in 1973, nearly two decades before the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
“The fact that in this community we have cuts in the sidewalk at the corners so a wheelchair can get up and down from the street is nothing more than the extended shadow of Ralph Munro,” said Jim Dolliver, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court, who died in 2004.
People with disabilities were still largely shunned by society, stuck in state institutions, when a chance encounter with Evans led Munro to a job in the governor’s office.
Munro had befriended a 7-year-old boy with developmental disabilities, Terry Sullivan, who had been abandoned as a toddler. He began volunteering at Fircrest School in Shoreline, where Terry lived. Evans arrived at the school on March 21, 1968, to dedicate a new building. Munro introduced him to Terry. He made an impression.
A few months later, Evans named Munro, at age 24, to lead a committee studying volunteerism. Two years later, he became the state’s first volunteer coordinator.
Munro eventually became Terry’s legal guardian.
He’d go on to serve Evans as an aide on education and social issues and he helped President Richard Nixon establish ACTION, a short-lived government agency that coordinated volunteer programs and oversaw VISTA and the Peace Corps.
“Ralph Munro was a dedicated servant of the people,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a prepared statement Thursday, “using his compassion and commitment to improve the lives of people in Washington and around the world.”
In 1975, as large numbers of Vietnamese refugees arrived in the U.S., California Gov. Jerry Brown said he didn’t want them resettled in California. Evans, infuriated, sent Munro to a military base in California that was housing refugees, temporarily, with instructions to invite them to settle in Washington.
“He said, ‘If you see that son of a – Jerry Brown, you just remind him what it says on the base of the Statue of Liberty,’” Munro recalled.
Washington, which had virtually no Vietnamese community at the time, now has the third-largest Vietnamese population in the country.
Munro was an aide to Evans in 1976, when sailing on Budd Inlet near Olympia, he happened upon an orca hunt — whales being chased by aircraft, speedboats and firecrackers.
“It just didn’t seem right,” Munro recalled in 2018. “Like going down the street, and seeing someone kicking a dog.”
He called Evans and then-Attorney General Slade Gorton, and the three worked through the federal courts to bar the capture of orcas in Washington.
“He was the catalyst,” Gorton, who died in 2020, said.
In that battle and others, Munro said he learned to listen to protesters. “You might think their ideas are a little off-center,” he said in 2018. “But you might find as time goes by, they have a story to tell you.”
In 1980, at age 37, Munro launched his campaign for secretary of state, running as a moderate Republican. He won by just 2 percentage points and embarked on a push to make voting easier and more convenient.
Munro established mail-in voting in state elections, published the first Braille voter information pamphlet and created the “motor voter” law that enabled residents to register to vote at the same time they applied for a driver’s license.
He also became Washington’s unofficial ambassador to the world, traveling with trade and cultural missions abroad, including to the Soviet Union in 1990.
He was reelected four times, with no opponent ever coming within 15 points of him.
Though he likely would have won a sixth term, Munro moved on when he was 57, telling a Seattle Times reporter in 2000 he had “watched too many old guys hang around the building too long.”
More than 800 people, Democrats and Republicans, showed up to his retirement party. Then-Gov. Gary Locke and all five of Washington’s other living governors were there to celebrate Munro, who had preached bipartisan cooperation in the halls of the Capitol.
“The people send us here to get something done,” Munro said at his retirement. “They don’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat.”
Ralph Davies Munro was born in Seattle on June 25, 1943, but raised on Bainbridge Island. His father, George, was an electrician who worked through both world wars at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and his mother, Elizabeth, taught kindergarten and first grade.
He graduated from Bainbridge Island High School and Western Washington State College (now Western Washington University), where he studied education and political science.
He began his career in state government right as he was finishing college, working as a supply clerk in the basement of the Capitol.
He also worked for Boeing, in Renton, as an industrial engineer.
Munro married his first wife Karen Hanson in 1973, and they had one son, George, born in 1977. They divorced in 2012 and Munro married Nancy Bunn in 2013.
Known for his cornball sense of humor in addition to his statesmanship, Munro wore a kilt to launch legislative sessions, often breaking out a bagpipe.
He contributed to multiple wildlife-protections efforts, championing the establishment of a sanctuary on the Skagit River for bald eagles.
Long after his electoral career, he helped fund an educational center at Lime Kiln Point State Park on San Juan Island, built with a wheelchair-accessible overlook where visitors can watch for orcas.
He continued to volunteer, ringing a bell every Christmas season for The Salvation Army, helping out at his neighborhood elementary school in Olympia and serving on at least a dozen boards and commissions.
“I see people today trying to find fulfillment in all these screwy places,” Munro said in 2000. “If people would just go down to their local school and walk in and talk to the first-grade teacher and offer to volunteer, they’d find a hell of a lot more fulfillment than they’d find in the spa at Palm Springs.”
