60 OMAHA s u l p
May 2021
˝Initially there were only 14 of the 1879 Gatling Guns built for the U.S. Army,˝ Kirk Brumbaugh
60+ FEATURE // STORY BY CHRIS HATCH // PHOTOGRAPHY BY BILL SITZMANN // DESIGN BY DEREK JOY
History in the Present Day Kirk Brumbaugh’s Collection of Historical Weapons
irk Brumbaugh knows how to time travel. He’ll take anyone along for the ride, too, if they listen. No DeLorean screaming up to 88 miles per hour, no hyper-spinning sci-fi contraption that catapults people back into a wormhole somewhere out near the moons of Jupiter. Just tangible, real-world history. A human compass, pointing people in the direction you need to go. Those talking to Brumbaugh find themselves transported, lifted from this moment, and this place and taken over whole continents and centuries, delivered to, then through, the cracks in the decades that others might not know were there.
Brumbaugh’s knowledge will lift listeners, like an updraft of expertise that has one suddenly cruising at altitude, looking at the big picture below. Although seated, when he takes listeners up to view the history he will lay down below, they suddenly see battles in South America and Naval skirmishes in the choppy waters of the Atlantic. When he begins to tell listeners about his award-winning gun collection, the one full of so much backstory and detail it could fill a library, it becomes clear that this timeline of a man has a few stops he wants to make sure people hit on their way to the present day. ►
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t’s a story not only of the cold precision of automatic weaponry, but the human hands that toiled to find the automation that would make them so powerful. One of the stars in this particular historical constellation is Brumbaugh’s meticulously restored 1879 U.S. Army Gatling gun, delivered to the Army in 1880. Like many of the guns in his collection, there was a process in pulling it back from the brink of being lost to the ages; fading away in a location so far from the spotlight that it was nearly too dark to find. “This gun: it sat from, as best I can tell, the early 1900s until 1967 in a rural community in Missouri. Where generations of school children had carved their names into the brass receiver and wooden carriage,” he said, detailing his search and rescue mission of this artifact from small-town America’s forgotten shadows. “The gun had been unprotected, left to rust and decay in a public square in a small town in Missouri,” Brumbaugh said. “The individual that I purchased it from, when he bought it, it had been rusted solid. The carriage had rotted away, so the only things left were a pile of rotted wood and rusted iron.” This is what Brumbaugh does, finds above-ground buried treasure. He relishes in relics. Items so rare and so unique they could be lost, if not for his pinpoint studies and encyclopedic memory, his determination to restore the guns both physically and in the consciousness of the people they once protected. “Initially there were only 14 of the 1879 Gatling guns built for the U.S. Army,” Brumbaugh said. Once he locates an item he determines to be historically significant, he moves in—using a team of like-minded, highly skilled restoration experts—and attempts to bring these weapons to their former glory. For Brumbaugh and his team, people as far away as Boston, the U.K., and Australia that he knows and trusts with such delicate work, this is a full and honest recreation. This is no mere spitshine or quick coat of paint.
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60 PLUS • MAY 2021
“The Gatling gun I have is highly specialized, so if you have an item of historical significance—then you have to research and find the best people to work on it.” Brumbaugh truly cherishes the historical accuracy of his restoration projects. “I wanted it to be a historically accurate restoration. So, when I got it, I sent it back to the guy that had done the initial reconstruction: Barry Anderson in Ohio. I contacted Hansens (a world renowned wagon and carriage restoration company in South Dakota) and got blueprints from Cullity & Son Co. in Boston, to rebuild the carriage from a pile of scrap and do a final restoration of the metal parts. They made it possible to build a historically accurate carriage for an 1879 gun.” With so few of these types of weapons still in existence, this was no paint-bynumbers job. It was custom and required creative work and lots of digging through the archives to make sure that it was as close to accurate as could be. The Gatling gun from 1879 is one of the primary pieces, but it isn’t the whole show for a collector like Brumbaugh, who has been interested in collecting guns ever since he was 18 years old. “My father was a World War II combat vet and he fought in North Africa and Sicily in the 7th U.S. Army under General Patton. He came back from World War II with a Luger that he had captured from a German officer in Sicily. He also had a law enforcement career for a number of years, and so firearms, and particularly handguns, were a part of my childhood and young adulthood.” While his father’s profession and history introduced guns to Brumbaugh, it was his own fascination with the British Empire that led him down the rows of library books. “The collection I more or less developed on my own. I was fascinated with Winston Churchill and the Victorian era. I started by reading as much as I could about Churchill, the British Empire, and the two world wars from the British perspective” It was this fascination with Great Britain, how a country with a population of 50 million came to rule a landmass that ultimately accounted for approximately 25% of the world, which enabled him to study and become an expert on the type of weaponry that would give Great Britain its world supremacy during the late 1800s.
That fascination with the British, and the weapons of the Victorian era, gave him the knowledge to obtain an 1887 Nordenfelt battery gun .450/577 Martini-Henry Caliber as used by the Royal Navy. “The Nordenfelt was much lighter than the average Gatling gun. A five-barreled Navy Nordenfelt weighed in at about 70 pounds,” Brumbaugh said. “The primary purpose of machine guns in naval use at the time was to sweep the deck of ships during combat. Firing down on gun crews, because exposed gun crews were still a common feature, as was ramming a ship,” he said, explaining the rare guns’ usage and how it was a devastating weapon in naval battles of the era. “You would want Marines in the crow’snest shooting at exposed men on the deck,” he continued. “The Nordenfelt was just better for it. I think I have the only British Navy Nordenfelt in the U.S. The only other two I’ve been able to find in the U.S. were used in Spain.” Also featured prominently in his collection: an 1889 (made in 1895) Maxim Nordenfelt. This weapon represented the inevitable, perpetual motion of progress to Brumbaugh. A weapon so effective that it essentially rendered many of the other machine guns at the time obsolete. One of many inventions created by Hiram Maxim, a man so adept at making dreams reality that he held patents on curling irons, mouse traps, a flying machine, and many claim he actually invented the light bulb that Thomas Edison would later be credited for. The Maxim gun, capable of firing over 700 rounds a minute, was so fearsome and advanced technologically that it remained relatively unchanged until after the second World War. When Brumbaugh takes people through time, he speaks of poetry and history, of technology, and of the ever-present, always-ticking clock that connects us all. He talks about weapons and guns, to be sure, but more than that, he talks of the people behind them. The ones aiming them and the people pouring the liquid metal and casting the barrels in their Victorian era laboratories. To someone like Brumbaugh—what matters is finding the ability to run his hands over the cool metal of history, to feel the alchemy that comes from the past meeting the present and know that you’re at the crossroads of the two converging.
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“It was completely empty when we were there. It was like being in northern California without the people.” Sarah Newman
STORY BY DAISY HUTZELL-RODMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY BILL SITZMANN DESIGN BY DEREK JOY
avid Harding and his wife, Sarah Newman, traveled to New Zealand last March. They flew into the country’s largest city—Auckland, population 1.67 million—and then went to Nelson, population 52,000, to stay with the two people they knew in New Zealand. After driving for a couple of days with their friends, Harding and Newman began their own adventure, driving around the south island. They drove to Te Anau, and went to Doubtful Sound, where they took an overnight tour of this area. They noted, however, that the boat was only about half full, and March is in the back end of the tourist season for New Zealand. The couple drove back to Te Anau in mid-March 2020 to discover Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared the borders of the country shut. COVID-19 was making its way across the world, and New Zealand had an aggressive plan of attack that included closing their borders. This border closure remains in place to date.
According to government statistics, New Zealand welcomes more than 240,000 tourists in a normal March. The government declared Alert Level 3 on April 27, which allowed people to move outside their cities. Harding and Newman traveled about an hour and a half from Christchurch to Akaroa on Banks Peninsula, as they wanted to get out in nature. The couple still found themselves two of the few people there, but that suited them. They stayed there for two weeks in May. Akaroa was the only French settlement in New Zealand, and thus is a huge tourist destination, with French colonial architecture and fine food.
“The whole place was deserted, like ghost town,” Harding said. “We were close to the downtown area, and there are buildings downtown that have a lot of rubble… they had an earthquake about 10 years ago there. It added to the atmosphere of ghost town.”
“Some of the regular tourist things were shut,” Harding said. “We wish we could have seen more of the north island. There was one place—Stewart Island—that we didn’t get to.”
“It was the most enchanting place,” Newman said. “It was a family-owned sheep farm. The [film crew] rented the place and built Hobbiton out of styrofoam. A couple of years after the movie came out, the farmer called the director and said ‘people are showing up wanting to see Hobbiton.’” A business opportunity was born.
Their flight was about two weeks away on April 2, and they, like everyone else, were unsure how the disease would affect people from day to day, let alone from one week to the next.
Thus began 33 days in Christchurch. In between cooking meals, drinking New Zealand wine, and relaxing in the hot tub, the couple took walks.
Harding and Newman were encouraged by family to stay in New Zealand, where, by June 8, the ministry of health reported no more active cases of COVID19 in the country. New Zealand went to alert level one at that time, which meant they could fly home. Their adult children, however, strongly suggested their parents stay in the country.
Harding and Newman saw New Zealand in a way they never will again. On the advice of friends from home, they went to Hobbiton in Matamata. The couple were somewhat lukewarm on this site, thinking they were walking into Disneyland, but decided to enjoy the adventure. They were two of about 20 tourists that day. On a normal day, Hobbiton welcomes about four busloads of people each hour.
They returned to their rooms at Te Anau Lodge, and the owner told the couple that within the last hour or two, he had lost all his reservations. Harding and Newman watched the news closely, wondering whether to fly home to the U.S. or stay in New Zealand.
They chose to stay instead of trying to get a flight out. The couple drove to the south end of the south island and found their motel. The manager said “something big was coming down.” Rather than stay in the small town where they had just arrived, Harding and Newman dashed to Christchurch and rented an Airbnb on March 24, the day before Ardern announced a lockdown of the country.
“There’s this placid water in Caldera, and when we went onto the ocean, the boat was swarmed with Hector’s Dolphins!” Newman said, referring to the smallest, rarest marine dolphin in the world. They had not seen any boat activity for eight weeks, and they were curious where all the people had gone.
“It was completely empty when we were there,” Newman said. “It was like being in northern California without the people.” During that time, New Zealand declared no new cases of COVID-19, and on May 13, New Zealand shifted to Alert Level 2, effectively reopening businesses. People could gather in groups of 100 or fewer with masks and remaining at least 2 metres (6.5 feet) apart.
They also encountered stretches of empty beaches with seal colonies on them and birds that were so unafraid of people they almost walked beside the couple. Their visa was up in September. So, in August, the pair returned to their home. Harding and Newman have returned to their normal lives, as much as anyone’s life is normal these days. Their time in New Zealand is still a topic of conversation with friends, and it’s a topic they’ll gladly share with people.
The couple were two of about a dozen people who took the first nature boat tour that day. The boat normally holds about 25 people.
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ARE FEET DANGLED
from the rear window of the 1958 white station wagon. The father wadded a used cigarette pack, laughed at his two daughters, and tossed the pack out the window. An empty Orange Crush bottle followed, shattering against the side of the highway. The parents puffed on cigarettes while their girls played games. Who could hold the Life Saver the longest without it breaking? The wind ruffled its hot fingers through the girls’ blonde hair as each sucked diligently on the cool mint of their candies. His wife, in a casual skirt and blue blouse, exhaled cigarette smoke. While her husband enjoyed the ride with their children, she drove the entire trip from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Scottsdale, Arizona. The girls looked forward to stopping for chocolate ice cream at the Howard Johnson motel, with its iconic orange roof. Karen Palmer, now 69 and a retired teacher from Millard Public Schools, recalled the rules of the road were different back in the 1960s. Palmer, a frequent traveler who has visited 20 countries and too many states to count, believes the bygone days of family adventures have been left by the roadside. “I think people have a Bluetooth on or are playing on their iPads,” Palmer said. “You don’t have that unique family opportunity anymore.” A motel along the highway became an oasis after a lengthy drive. Roadside motels peaked at 61,000 in 1964, wrote Mark Okrant in his book No Vacancy: The Rise, Demise, and Reprise of America’s Motels. Bright neon “No Vacancy” signs faded when interstates paved paths across America. The industry seemed checked out, diminishing to a mere 16,000 operating motels by 2012. Many of those motels were locally owned, but the brand that inspires the most nostalgia is the one with the signature orange roof—Howard Johnsons. According to the website hojoland.com, by the late 1970s, Howard Johnson’s had more than 1,000 restaurants and over 500 motor lodges, including two in Nebraska—one on 72nd Street in Omaha, the other at 3201 S. Jeffers St. in North Platte.
There are still old-school motels around, but they are not always on the beaten path. Situated on the old Lincoln Highway, off I-80 to the west, is the Lazy K Motel in Ogallala, a classic motel that has been maintained since 1956. It has colors of pink and blue with a midcentury sign bearing an askew “K,” and offers rooms at $35-$65 per night, with an additional fee of $5 per pet, if needed. The rooms come with a refrigerator and microwave, but no swimming pool. Those who head north through the sandhills can stay in Valentine at the Raine Motel, which has been in existence since 1963. This brick building boasts 1960s architecture, notably a low-hipped roof with extended section at the front to protect arrivees from inclement weather. Rates range from $60-$90, and the motel has an attached bar and grill called the Neon, featuring classic steakhouse fare. During the heyday of back-road travel, most small towns in Nebraska had motels. Mullen, Nebraska, population 320 as of 2019, offers The Sandhills Motel. It has 19 recently renovated rooms and includes RV hookups and a trailer to be rented by visitors during deer hunting season. Many motel owners and managers are making design changes to lure in travelers, adding modern twists with oldfashioned décor. The North Platte Inn & Suites had a $2 million facelift after breaking its former Howard Johnson chain link. Only the bright orange walls remain. The motel now caters to longerstaying travelers, offering amenities such as full-sized fridges, microwaves, and two-burner stovetops. Instead of eating the well-known clam strips and double-butterfat ice cream, people can head to the grocery store for the basics to stay in. Christy Kackmeister, the general manager at the North Platte Inn & Suites, mentioned traffic increased at the motel in April during the height of the pandemic, up 234 rooms from the previous year. Kackmeister, though, wasn’t sure if the North Platte Inn & Suites would be considered a motel or hotel. The line is often blurred and somewhere in between. Hotels, typically centered in urban areas, had been around the states since the late 1700s. Even before author John Steinbeck named Route 66 the “Mother Road,” people cruised for convenient places to rest. Some camped, stayed at cottage courts, or slept in cars. Architect
ALTHOUGH SOME MIGHT HAVE A SWIMMING POOL OR PLAYGROUND EQUIPMENT, MOTELS LACKED THE LUXURY SERVICES A HOTEL WOULD OFFER. Arthur Heineman filled the gap, designing a “motor hotel” specifically for drivers, the Milestone Mo-Tel Inn. The “mo-tel,” as he later coined it, cost $1.25 per night. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid-Highway Act, motels increased in popularity in the 1960s and ’70s. Bright signs beckoned in all their cheesy glory next to plain one- or two-story buildings made from regional construction. Although some might have a swimming pool or playground equipment, motels lacked the luxury services a hotel would offer. People parked cars right in front of rooms, providing easy access. Guests could walk out into exterior corridors for a smoke rather than navigate endless interior hallways. These mom-and-pop lodgings offered affordability and anonymity. But the latter earned motels a sinister edge. Anyone who watched Alfred Hitchcock’s slasher film Psycho still remembers the infamous blazing vacancy light on the Bates Motel Sign, luring in Janet Leigh’s character Marion Crane off the dark rainy highway to her death. Even the famed Rosebud motel from Schitt’s Creek, located in Orangeville, Ontario, served as a backdrop for the thriller A History of Violence. Motels still have a long way to travel to reclaim the neon glow of their glory days.
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“Since most of the cats and dogs that are transported are pulled from death row, their only chance for any sort of a good life is through the pilots that get them safely out.” Jill Longshaw
MISSIONS OF MERCY FORMER USAF NAVIGATOR FINDS PURPOSE IN FLYING 60+ ACTIVE LIVING // story by Joel Stevens // photography by Bill Sitzmann // design by Derek Joy
im Arbuckle is descending to 3,000 feet; the low altitude turbulence and gusty Midwest winds whipping his single engine Beechcraft around like a kite—and his passengers are barking. Arbuckle, 78, is a decorated former U.S. Air Force navigator who flew reconnaissance missions during the Cold War, yet on this day he is somewhere between Wichita and Nebraska City with a cargo of rescue dogs ear-marked for adoption. Since last fall, Arbuckle has been volunteering his plane and plethora of pilot experience to fly dogs (and some cats) from animal shelters all over the Midwest and deliver them for adoption. The pandemic has been a boon for pet adoptions—more time working from home gives pet owners more time with their four-legged companions—but there are gaps regionally. Funding is short and, while the network of shelters and the work they do is strong, transportation is always an issue. These flights are often the difference between life or death for some animals. It’s a supply-and-demand math problem and the flights widen the field of where adoptions can take place. The mission, a word Arbuckle likes to use, works like this: dogs facing euthanasia are loaded on planes and flown to locations with shortages of adoptable pets. Groups such as California-based Wings of Rescue and Pilots ‘N’ Paws, based in Landrum, South Carolina, lead the effort, recruiting volunteer pilots such as Arbuckle who, at their own expense, ferry dogs to new homes, shelters, and rescues all over the country. PNP has a roster of more than 6,000 registered pilots scattered all over the U.S.
He and his wife retired to Omaha for good in 1993. The RC-135 was the workhorse of Cold War operations for decades with missions flown all around the world, typically in 22 hour sorties. But it was not a spy plane, Arbuckle insists. “We did not ever use the word ‘spy,’” he said. “We used ‘reconnaissance.’ Spying implies illegal actions. We stayed over international waters at all times. We did not penetrate enemy territory.” Arbuckle was a pilot long before beginning active duty. He starting flying at age 19, while studying at Penn State, where he would go on to receive his commission and meet his wife, Pam. They’ll celebrate their 53rd anniversary this spring and have two grown children and three grandchildren. The Arbuckles have spent the majority of their retirement traveling, but a new hobby beckoned. Arbuckle first heard about the Pilots ‘N’ Paws group on a blog he follows for Beechcraft owners. They were looking for pilots to assist with transportation.
“We’d come in at about 7,500 feet, high out of the turbulence, and we come down to about 3,000 feet, and it’d get bumpy. It’s a short time but they don’t tend to like that.” Most trips, though, his passengers are fairly calm. Most dogs curl up and sleep for the duration of the flight. Arbuckle’s wife, Pam, is a reluctant flyer but usually accompanies him on his missions. She loves flying with the dogs. Far more than she does flying with just her husband, he said. “I wouldn’t mind flying three hours but my wife…” he said, trailing off. They don’t own a dog. “With all our travels it really wasn’t fair to a dog,” he said—but he and his wife grow attached to the rescues they transport. Through PNP, Arbuckle has flown mostly for Hearts United for Animals, a no-kill shelter and sanctuary based in Auburn, Nebraska.
“My eyes had sort of glazed over during COVID,” he said. “So I was looking for an excuse to fly.”
Jill Longshaw, public relations manager with HUA, agrees with Arbuckle’s nomenclature. The work their web of pilots do are indeed “missions”—missions of mercy.
His first mission, should he choose to accept it: fly to Wichita, pick up two rescue dogs that were in danger of being euthanized, and fly them back to Nebraska City.
“Since most of the cats and dogs that are transported are pulled from death row, their only chance for any sort of a good life is through the pilots that get them safely out,” Longshaw said.
It wasn’t high-altitude reconnaissance of USSR military operations, but it was exactly what he was looking for.
Rescues like HUA are part of a network attempting to mitigate the problem of unwanted pets, especially in the South. Where a shelter animal in Georgia or Texas might never find a home locally, if that animal is flown to New Jersey or Nebraska, it could find a home within a matter of days.
“They asked me if I was interested, and I gulped,” he said. “But I said yes.”
Arbuckle signed on with PNP in October. He’s flown nine missions so far, mostly in Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas— the farthest being Dodge City, Kansas, and the closest Red Oak, Iowa. The missions typically take 90 minutes to two hours, round trip.
The animals fly in kennels, usually two to four per trip. Arbuckle admits rescue dogs are probably the strangest cargo he’s flown in his more than 50 years of flying. The work is entirely volunteer, from the flight time to the maintenance and fuel. Arbuckle covers all costs for the singleengine, Beechcraft Bonanza B35 he’s owned since 2015.
That’s about 20 hours less than the missions he undertook as a navigator on the RC-135 reconnaissance plane during active duty.
“They take to it a lot better than I do,” Arbuckle said of flying with a planeload of dogs. “Except when we land. They get a little excited.”
Arbuckle served with the 55th Wing at Strategic Air Command at Offutt Air Force Base for nearly three decades.
And, as it turns out, in the autumn in the Midwest, in that high wind and low altitude turbulence. Thus, the barking.
HUA’s website features dozens of stories of pets surrendered by or rescued from owners, their journey to shelters, and their many happy endings. The stories of what many of the pets have gone through before Arbuckle transports them are heartbreaking. The whole experience has been eye-opening. “I really hadn’t paid much attention to [rescuing animals],” he said. “It’s rewarding.” Visit pilotsnpaws.org for more information.
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60+ e Prim e T im PAUL PRENTISS // 64 STORY BY NICHOLAS MOORE PHOTO BY BILL SITZMANN
Like most in the past year, Paul Prentiss has made some adjustments, and, at 64, that can be a daunting task. Fortunately for Prentiss, some constants remain, like the love of his two daughters, Rachel and Eva, and a great head of hair. Before a successful law career in workers compensation defense, Prentiss earned a master’s in agronomy. Now nearing retirement, he enjoys living in the midcentury bachelor pad designed by his eldest daughter, Rachel. “I don’t really have a bucket list,” he said, “except for travel.” Having recently met a woman online who’s also into travel and bicycling, he now has a companion with whom to visit the old country of the British Isles and experience the natural wonders of every state in the Union. Prentiss continues to work from home and occasionally dons suit and tie to go into the office. “You do better work when you’re dressed up,” he said. Prentiss favors putting together business-casual looks from his assortment of sport coats and vests. “Suit and tie is almost too easy—I like the challenge of working with patterns and fabrics…and at my age, vests keep me warm!” Prentiss’ innate sense of style will transport him into new adventures, while his vintage record collection will allow him travel back in time every now and again.
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