OLYMPIA, WA – Ralph Munro, Washington’s longest-serving secretary of state and a moderate Republican who achieved unusually broad popularity across the political spectrum, died early Thursday at his convalescent home in Lacey. He was 81 and had struggled with multiple health issues for the past several years.

Current Secretary of State Steve Hobbs announced his predecessor’s passing, saying Munro “embodied the drive and attitude of a true statesman.”

Munro was remembered for many things as word of his death spread quickly around Olympia and the wider Pacific Northwest. During his life, Munro championed diverse causes from orca protection, voting expansion and disability rights, to immigration, international trade, polio eradication and historic preservation.

“Ralph was known for moderation, civility and bipartisanship. He certainly exuded that in his role as secretary of state,” recalled friend and longtime collaborator Sam Reed, who succeeded Munro in office.

A jocular, tall man proud of his Scottish ancestry, Munro would command attention by sometimes showing up to formal occasions dressed in a tartan kilt. His force of personality expanded his sphere of influence beyond the normal confines of his elected office.

Munro’s colorful, decades-long political career began humbly with a job as a supply clerk in the basement of the Capitol building in Olympia. A couple of serendipitous encounters with Gov. Dan Evans scored Munro an invite to join the governor’s staff in the late 1960s. Evans, also a moderate Republican, mentored Munro and promoted him to special assistant.

That led to a legacy Evans and Munro expressed particular pride in during the years before their deaths: the successful resettlement of thousands of Vietnamese war refugees in 1975. This started when Evans dispatched Munro to a teeming refugee holding camp in California to extend an invitation to come to Washington state.

“I’m not sure to this day what percentage of those who volunteered thought they were going to Washington, D.C., instead of the state of Washington,” Evans kidded Munro during a 2017 panel discussion reminiscing about immigration policy. “What made that work so well, and it did work well, was because we asked the people of Washington to act as sponsors. There was great turnout… in spite of the fact that Vietnam was a very unpopular war.”

Concurrently, Munro befriended several institutionalized developmentally disabled youth, which led him to advocate for improved services for this population over the rest of his life, too.

A savior for whales

Munro’s diverse interests also included helping to end commercial whale captures in Washington waters in the 1970s, a cause he took up after encountering an orca capture operation for SeaWorld while he and his wife were out sailing on Puget Sound.

“It was gruesome, it was just plain awful,” Munro recalled in an archived interview with TVW. “You had parts of the pod inside and parts outside the nets and screaming. I can still hear those screams.”

A decade later, Munro helped Washington State Parks obtain Coast Guard property on San Juan Island around a landmark lighthouse to create Lime Kiln Point State Park. It is now a popular whale watching park, including a viewing platform named the Ralph and Karen Munro Overlook.

The orca removals for amusement park display caused a lasting reduction in the Northwest’s killer whale population. Munro served for many years on the board of the Orca Conservancy, which he co-founded to free the last surviving killer whale taken from Washington that was still in captivity. Munro and his wife even traveled to Miami to directly plead Tokitae’s case. The orca performed under the stage name Lolita in a small tank at the Miami Seaquarium. Tokitae died after five decades in captivity in late summer 2023 just as the return effort was finally gathering steam.

Elected and unrivaled five times

In elective office, Munro was one of the last Republicans able to consistently win statewide as Washington trended bluer and bluer. He squeaked into office as secretary of state in 1980 at age 37 and was reelected four more times until he chose to retire at the end of 2000.

During his tenure, Munro strongly advocated for expanding vote-by-mail. Washington also established “motor voter” registration on his watch, which encourages residents to register to vote when they apply for or renew a driver’s license. He also ushered in Washington’s first address confidentiality program to protect victims of domestic violence and stalking. That program allowed victims to receive mail through the secretary of state’s office in order to keep their actual addresses secret.

Munro faced minimal competition for re-election in his later campaigns. His political ads on the radio memorably entailed 30 seconds of bagpipe music with a brief tagline stating, “This interlude brought to you by” the Munro campaign.

Munro injected himself into many local, state and international issues over his time in public service and continuing into his private life. He was the state’s “unofficial ambassador at large,” according to a toast delivered by Consul General of Russia Andrey Veklenko at a retirement party for Munro in Seattle in 2000.

Later in life, Munro worked with his alma mater, Western Washington University, to establish the Ralph Munro Institute for Civic Education. The institute sponsors a seminar series and works to promote good government. Separately, Munro spoke up for moderate, inclusive politics through the group Mainstream Republicans of Washington.

He allowed archaeological digs for 11 summers on his family’s former waterfront estate on lower Eld Inlet outside Olympia. The digs uncovered remnants of a 1,000-year-old Native fishing and shellfish gathering encampment, including fragments of ancient fishing nets made of woven cedar bark. Selected artifacts recovered from the site are now on display at the Squaxin Island Museum.

Munro raised one son (George) with his first wife, Karen. He divorced, remarried and divorced again late in life. He has three grandchildren.

Munro also is survived by a daughter in Minnesota that he didn’t even know he had until a few years ago. Daughter Christi Stoll was given up for adoption when she was a day old. Her birth mother, with whom Munro had a brief fling earlier, never told him about the child he fathered. At age 50, Stoll tracked down Munro through a genetic database search. They established a warm connection once the daughter summoned the nerve to introduce herself, according to Facebook posts both shared publicly.

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