Uncle Buster

But first, a few words. The book White Trash Rising: Lessons My Mother Taught Me will be available on Amazon on December 2nd, 2025!! It will be available on Kindle December 15th. I'm excited to have it in print. I did redo and make a second round, hence the changed dates. I added pictures that my cousins so kindly sent! A warning, though, first! Names were changed, and so if you see your name and don't like the character, don't assume it is you! Unless it really is you, LOL.

I'm sharing a story about my Uncle Buster in this post. He was a beloved Husband, Father, Grandfather, and Uncle to many. He was an officer in Patton's tank crew and saw some of the worst horrors of WWII. He came home and got on with living his life. He was an even more hilarious version of my father, and I loved it when we got to go visit Uncle Buster and Aunt Millie.

Dad had a brother nicknamed Buster, who had been the wild child, committing pranks and encouraging all the others to join in the mayhem. When I knew my uncle, he was a jokester and a clown.   One piece of advice that he shared with me was, “Never drink green moonshine, Pooch; it will give you the blind staggers.”

"Green moonshine" referred to corn liquor stolen before it could age in the barrels. When I asked Mom what that meant, she told me, “Your uncle used to steal the neighbor’s barrels of moonshine that were aging in wooden barrels in the creek. I heard he liked to have a little taste before he sold it.”

Visits to Uncle Buster’s home, the uncle who lived far away and didn’t farm, were rare but memorable, and the entertainment value was well worth the two-plus-hour drive. When he said grace at family meals, he said: “Father, Son, Holy Ghost; longest arms get the most.”

Mom told me that when Liberace passed away, Buster called Dad and Mom to say, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; if he had stuck to pussy, he would still be with us.”

The religious gene had skipped a generation with Uncle Buster. He was irreverent and hilarious, a short, barrel-chested man who looked like Dad but treated children as his peers.

Dad told me that his brother Buster was the instigator of most of the pranks and trouble committed by the “Baumgart kids” in the neighborhood. The teacher of the local one-room schoolhouse was often an unfortunate target.

The young schoolmistress lived with the nearest family that had a room available.  During the school year, and each evening, as early winter darkness fell, she would walk down the gravel road for two miles. This road led through a swamp surrounded by tall oak, willow, and elm trees.

Beginning at the hill, the teacher, barely out of her teens, would hurry her way down the path, creating a misty, Sleepy Hollow-style scene. There was always a genuine threat of wolves, bears, or even the occasional bobcat lurking in the woods. Claws and fangs poised to pounce on the teacher after a long day spent educating feral farm children in the late 1920s.

Dad told me of the time Uncle Buster got all the kids out of school for months. “He took Pa’s (Grandpa Baumgart's) old black bearskin coat and a rope to teach the teacher a lesson.  She was always picking on us.  She used to make me sit under her desk while she was talking, until I whittled a hole in the desk and stuck my fingers through it.  Then she paddled me!

Buster had decided she needed to leave.  So, he tied the rope to a tree on the side of the road, where it dipped into the swamp, right under the hill where you couldn’t see anything but trees and weeds.  He strung the rope through the coat's sleeves and laid it flat on the road as the darkness began to settle in. 

Buster hid in the woods and waited for the teacher to come. The teacher had to go down that road because she was boarding with the Wilkowski family at the end, and it was long and dark. She came walking down that hill from the old schoolhouse, and just as she got to the low part, Buster pulled the rope.

That bearskin coat stood up in the middle of the road, looking just like a bear coming to eat her. That teacher threw everything she was carrying, her lunch pail and her books, and, screaming, ran off into the swamp.”

The teacher quit as soon as she found her way safely back out of the gloomy swamp to the house. That meant no education for the “Baumgart kids” for a while, as the township had to search for a brave teacher to take on the task. Pick a fight with one of them, and you'll fight with them all. 

When Dad shared one of his rare childhood stories, it often involved his older brother Buster getting him into trouble. For example, Uncle Buster convinced Dad that getting rid of the rats living under the granary would greatly serve the family. Buster planned to frighten the entire rat population into leaving the farm.

Following his instructions, Dad caught a rat in a snare and tied a rag to its tail. The rag had been dipped in kerosene and was easily ignited. However, the plan went awry when the rat was released and ran under the granary, igniting the structure.

“I didn’t stop to think that rat was scared shitless and would light the whole damn building on fire!” Dad told me, laughing. 

Buster rushed to the house to announce the emergency, leaving Dad at the scene. When the fire was extinguished and the blame fell on the arsonist, Buster denied any involvement. My father was standing by the burning building with rags, a box of matches, and a can of kerosene. My uncle was ten years older than my dad and was a teenager. He proclaimed his innocence.  Dad got a “whooping until I couldn’t sit down for a week!” 

Like me, my dad always had pets: Horses, dogs, and barn cats. Grandpa, being a horse trader, showed little regard for his children’s emotional attachments.

One day, Dad overheard his father at the kitchen table negotiating with a potential buyer for my dad’s favorite team of horses. My father became quite upset. Knowing that throwing a tantrum would lead to a beating, Dad did what I later learned to do: He got sneaky.

The old chairs around the kitchen table were made of metal. The seats were round and close to the floor, and each chair leg was adorned with a crisscross tangle of metal that met in the middle, forming a small platform. With the help and encouragement of Buster (and the plan formulated by Buster), Dad silently crawled under the table with a lit candle.

The adult men were too engrossed in their negotiations to notice.

Dad placed the lit candle on the platform under the buyer's metal chair. As time passed, the buyer began to wiggle in his seat, wiping sweat from his brow. It became increasingly uncomfortable for him as he fidgeted.

Finally, the buyer jumped up, yelling, “Christ, my balls are on fire!”

As he leaped from the chair, it toppled over, and the lit candle rolled away.

Fortunately, my Grandpa Baumgart had a sense of humor. As the buyer angrily stomped out the door, muttering and abandoning the deal, Grandpa laughed. Dad’s team was saved.

Dad told me that Grandpa bought himself a car shortly before he died.  It was a used car, of course, with a handbrake, no seatbelt, and absolutely no safety measures.

“Buster loved fixing on that car,” Dad said,

“Pa didn’t mind if he worked on it; there wasn’t much harm he could do to it.”

Then Buster decided to install the foot pedal brakes; it had previously run on hand brakes and a hand clutch rod.

“He never thought about telling Pa he had done it.” 

One day in 1930, Grandpa Baumgart decided to drive to the Evergreen store in his car.

“He was coming up to the Evergreen Road turn and going pretty fast,” Dad said.

I imagine it wasn’t a rapid pace, but it probably seemed fast for Grandpa, going from a horse and buggy to a car.

“He started grabbing levers, and the damn things weren’t hooked up to anything. He didn’t know about the foot brake. He shot across that road and straight into the ditch, scared the shit right out of him.

He walked back to the house and had to get a horse harnessed to pull his car out. He was madder than hell at Buster; never let him touch that car again.” 

Buster didn’t stay in the area and farm like his brothers. He moved to the city, drove a cab, and installed cabinets and wooden floors for a living. Mom told me that he served with Patton in World War II, driving a tank and never speaking of the horrors he witnessed.  When he developed dementia, he held off a group of ICU nurses with an E-tank, threatening to “blow you nazi bitches all to hell.”