As a little boy he said he was inspired by a neighborhood high school kid who played the guitar and eventually his dad got him one.
He was just six when he teamed up with his pal, Clyde Wagonfield for a novelty act that was in the process of becoming a hit in Darrtown when they were asked to entertain at the Father and Son banquet at the Lutheran Church in town.
“My uncle had made this little fellow on a stick that had joints and could move,” Bufler said. “He put him on a paddle and Clyde could keep time with him, so the little guy would dance as I played the guitar. People really enjoyed it.
“The only song we knew at the time was a real simple three-chord song called the “Little Brown Jug,” so that’s what we sang until some of the men really got on us. They said, ‘This is a church! And you come in singing about the Little Brown Jug?’”
An 1869 drinking song that became especially popular during Prohibition, its opening lyrics aren’t quite Father and Son fodder:
“Me and my wife live all alone
“In a little log hut, we’re all our own
“She loves gin, and I love rum
“And don’t we have a lot of fun.”
“We were just little kids,” he laughed. “We just knew the words. We didn’t know what it meant.”
Today, nearly nine decades later, Bufler has a more expansive view of life. He’s seen and done much, though in reference to Veteran’s Day, there’s one thing he’d rather not see again.
At Oxford Stewart — long since consolidated into Talawanda — he was a fullback on the football team, pitched opposite future Cincinnati Reds legend Joe Nuxhall, and was a basketball and track standout.
Kirk Mees III, who is one of Darrtown’s all-time sports stars alongside Walter “Smokey Alston — was mentored by Bufler as a young athlete.
He became a Wilmington College Hall of Famer, a college coach and spent 25 years helping guide the Washington Redskins to three Super Bowl crowns. He has said that longtime Oxford athletics director Larry Bowers told him Bufler was the best all-around athlete he’d ever seen.
While at Miami University — where he played baseball — Bufler decided to do something for the kids back in Darrtown and launched the Purple Skunks basketball and baseball teams.
He said he got an idea for funding the effort from a guy who used to spend plenty of time in the old Hitching Post Saloon in Darrtown:
“I remember him giving us 50 cents to start a uniform drive. He said we should go knock on doors here and other people would give too.”
After he got purple T-shirts to serve as the players’ basketball jerseys, Bufler said he lobbied his Aunt Addie, who was an excellent seamstress, to sew numbers onto them.
Someone looked at the newly-clad lavender lads and gave them the moniker they soon wore with pride, especially when they defeated the McGuffey junior high team.
In February of 1951, his senior year of college, Bufler married his girlfriend, Marjorie Durbin. A week after graduating that spring — with the Korean War in full swing — he was drafted into the Army.
He eventually was sent to Camp Gordon, a signal corps base in Georgia, where he was one of 30 guys pared off for special Military Police training.
He said when everyone else was sent to Korea, his group of 30 — all of whom he said were kept in the dark about their final destination — were first sent to Sandia Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was the principal U.S. nuclear weapons installation in the United States.
With no explanation he said he was transferred from the 8458th Military Police to the 516th. Eventually, he said he was told he was “going overseas on a highly-classified mission” that they were to discuss with no one.
Once he boarded a ship in San Francisco, he claims the Army and the U.S. Defense Department still says it has no knowledge of what he was doing during the five months that followed,
After two weeks at sea, he and the others ended up at the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. That would be their base, though his work would be done 25 miles away on the mostly barren Eludelab island.
“When we got there, they finally told us: ‘You guys are going to be part of the construction and detonation of a hydrogen bomb!’” he said.
It would be the world’s first thermonuclear explosion. The blast would produce 700 times the energy of the Atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, Japan, seven years earlier at the end of World War II and killed more than 200,000 people.
The day before the Nov. 2, 1952 blast, Bufler said officials began moving out the 30 MPs who had been guarding the building that held the Hydrogen bomb, the scientists who came and went, the equipment set up to measure the blast and a two-mile tunnel to another island put in to help monitor the extent and severity of the explosion.
“They took the first 10 guys off by PT boat and then came back for 10 more,” he said. “On their last trip they took the rest…except Dale Bufler wasn’t one of them.”
A little concerned, he saw 1st Lt. Vernon Bible, the company commander and his friend going back to their baseball playing days against each other in Southwest Ohio — and said:
“I wanted to have a good seat for all this, but not this close!”
Bible told him the two of them and lieutenant colonel who was the liaison officer connected to the Atomic Energy Commission were staying so they could escort the five physicists who were part of the firing team off the island just a couple of hours before the dawn blast.
When they finally went to the dock, Bufler said the physicists boarded the waiting PT boat first, then the other two officers.
He was the last man to leave the island. And no man would ever set foot on Elugelab again.
“It was gone,” Bufler said. “They blew that island off the face of the earth.”
‘Once is enough for always’
He said he had had no idea about the magnitude of what would happen.
The blast produced a fireball that grew to almost 4.8 miles wide. Where Elugelab had been, there was a crater 6,200 feet in diameter and 160 feet deep. The mushroom cloud from the explosion rose 27 miles into the sky.
When Bufler finally was allowed to view the spectacle, he was overcome.
“There was something awesomely angry about those colors that flashed through the explosion,” he told the Journal-News two years later. “I had a funny feeling inside….I don’t care about seeing another. Once is enough for always.”
Eventually taken back to another island, Bufler said they witnessed the test of an Atomic bomb dropped from an airplane: “It was bigger than the one that hit Hiroshima.”
By Christmas Eve he was back in San Francisco. He took a train to Albuquerque and soon was back in Ohio.
A day after he arrived home, he was teaching industrial arts at Oxford Stewart. That would lead to 35 ½ year career as a teacher, administrator and coach at Stewart, Talawanda and then in the Lakota school district.
Years later the military personnel who had been tasked with cleaning up the contaminated sites where that first H-bomb test and then other nuclear detonations occurred began suffering numerous health issues.
The U.S. government refused to give them health coverage until the 2022 passage of the Honoring Our Past Act.
Some years ago, Bufler had a bout with colon cancer, but he still adheres to that pact about not discussing certain details of the mission.
One story he will tell you is about the time — as blast preparations were ramping up — he was suddenly pulled out for another top-secret mission:
“I was asleep in my tent and the CQ came and woke me up and told me I needed to be at this little airfield by 7 a.m. and have enough gear to stay overnight. I asked why and he said he didn’t know.
“The next morning I’m standing at the airstrip, and I look out over the ocean and here comes an airplane. It lands and the pilot said, ‘You Bufler?’
“I got in and we flew an hour or so to another island. When we landed, they had a jeep waiting for me and they took me to a Quonset hut.
“I still had no clue, and in walks 1st Lt. Bible.
" I said, ‘What the heck is going on?’
“He said, ‘We have a ball game here tonight — the officers are playing the enlisted men — and I’ve got a lot of money bet on the game. We want you to pitch for us.’
“I said. ‘Man, there’s a war going on!’”
That night, for a couple of hours, baseball was the only battle that mattered.
Bufler pitched fine, another guy took the loss, and he was flown back in the morning.
‘I admire him greatly’
Bufler’s wife Marjorie died in 2010. They were married 59 years. He now lives at the Westover Retirement Community in Hamilton and is active in several ventures, including planning the annual Christmas celebration for their village.
He was on the Darrtown Bicentennial Committee and designed the veterans’ memorial for the town’s park.
A Hometown Heroes banner showing him in his Military Police dress white cap hangs on a light pole along Hamilton’s Main Street across from the Hue Mane salon.
His four children and numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren all live in the area and for several years now he’s been in the accompaniment of his good friend, Marcia Reist, who is quite a sports aficionado. Her son Marty is a tennis player in the Ball State Hall of Fame and her nephew is Hamilton Taft hoops great Kevin Grevey, who went on to glory at Kentucky and in the NBA.
Bufler’s sports resume now includes holes in one at three area golf courses.
These days though, instead of a golf bag, you’ll find him carrying his banjolele case.
On Thursdays at the Mary & Clyde’s, he and Don, a retired 84-year-old graphic artist who plays tenor ukulele, are joined by Ellie Mae Marcum — “She’s a pistol,” Dale said — who plays the spoons and is known for her signature song, the old Loretta Lynn hit, “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)”
Dale and Don’s songs are a little tamer — Harvest Moon; Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree; Let Me Call You Sweetheart ― but they are crowd favorites wherever they perform in town.
“I started to play when I was this tall,” Bufler said holding his hand about two feet off the ground. “And I never got any better than I was back then.”
Don shook his head: “That’s not true.”
The two have been friends for over 30 years and you can sense their mutual respect.
“I admire him greatly,” Don said.
One thing Bufler will admit has broadened since his Little Brown Jug naivete is his view of life.
Tell him the story of your conversion,” said Fred Lindley, the longtime Centerville High and University of Dayton educator, who grew up in Darrtown, had Bufler as his basketball coach at Oxford Stewart, and had come with his wife Debbie to see him on Thursday.
Bufler grinned and complied: “Well, my wife was Catholic, and I was raised Lutheran. We married in the Catholic Church, our four kids were baptized Catholic, and they all went through Badin.
“On Sundays they’d go to the Catholic church, and I’d go to Lutheran services, and nothing was ever said about me converting. Then one night — we lived in a tri level with three bedrooms — we were going up the stairs and my wife stops and says, ‘See that bedroom over there?’
“And I said, ‘Yeah, why?’
“She said, ‘That’s where Lutherans sleep.’
“Then she pointed the other direction and said, ‘See that bedroom over here?’
“I nodded.
“And she said, ‘That’s where Catholics sleep!’
“I said, ‘I think I want to be a Catholic! '
“And it wasn’t long after that that I became one.”
About the Author