L.B. “Bud” Walker died peacefully at home on Friday evening, January 27, 2017.

He was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan on April 17, 1925. From the age of 12 he was drawn to airplanes and his wish to learn how to fly led him to a life in the air. 

Over his career he earned licenses to operate (both VFR and IFR) single-engine and multi engine airplanes, seaplanes, and helicopters, and from there to acquire licenses to teach others to fly them, up to and including an airline transport pilot’s rating.  Among his military and civilian honors was the Orville and Wilbur Wright Award, given to him by the FAA in 2010.

Bud Walker flew thousands of hours in peacetime and also in combat during the Korean War.

A special joy at age 65 was his purchase of an aerobatic airplane, a Pitts Special, in which he entertained himself and those on the ground with his poetic and precise aerobatic maneuvers. He maintained the airplane largely himself and with close friends for twenty years.

In 1952 Bud married Joan Radcliffe. The romance began in Greece and lasted for 65 years.

Their children, Laurie Lysle Walker, Brian Browne Walker, and Julie Sands Donaldson, survive him. David Radcliffe Walker, their first son, died shortly after birth in 1955.

After his wife and family, the Grumman F8F-2 Bearcat, and his Pitts Special, Bud liked fast automobiles, swimming in cold water, and jazz music. He was an elegant drummer until very near the end of his life. He had good friends, told good stories, supported the needy, and remained the beautiful person he was throughout and until the end of a long illness.

His kind and generous spirit and faith in God lives on in his deeds and in the memories of those who knew and loved him.

A memorial service will be held at the Holloway Funeral Home in Oldsmar. Donations in lieu of flowers can be made to the Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranch in Safety Harbor.

It is

a signal honor when

the best man one has ever known,

the best friend one has ever had, and

one’s own father are one and the

same man. I love you,

Papa, always and

forever.

 

I heard a loon call on a TV ad and my body gave itself a quite voluntary shudder. As in the night in East Africa I heard the immense barking cough of a lion, so foreign and indifferent.

But the lion drifts away and the loon stays close, calling as she did in my childhood, in the cold rain a song that tells the world of men to keep its distance.

It isn’t the signal of another life for the reminder of anything except her call call: still, at this quiet point past midnight the rain is the same rain that fell so long ago and the moon says I’m seven years old again.

At the far ends of the lake where no one lives or visits — there are no roads to get there; you take the watercourse way, the quiet drip and drizzle of oars slight squeak oarlock, the bare feet can feel the cold water moves beneath the old wood boat.

At one end the lordly, great blue heron’s nest at the top of the white pine; at the other end the loons, just after daylight in a cream-colored mist, drifting with wails that begin as querulous, rising then into the spheres in volume, with lost or doomed angels imprisoned within their breasts.

 

Baba Jim Harrison the Beloved

 

If my

body is my home

what is this house full of blood

within my skin? I can’t leave it for a moment

but finally will. It knows up and down, sideways,

the texture of the future and remnants of the past.

It accepts moods as law to matter how furtively

they slip in and out of consciousness.

He says, “Pull yourself together,”

but he already is. An old voice

says, “Stay close to

home.”

 

Jim Harrison

 

 

It is

hard not to see

poets as penitentes flaying

their brains for a line. They have

imaginary tattoos that can’t be removed.

They think of themselves as mental Zorros riding

the high country while far below moist and virginal señoritas

wait impatiently in the valley. Poets run on rocks barefoot when

shoes are available for a dime. They stand on cliffs but not

too close to the fatal edge. They have examined their

unfamiliar motives but still harvest the

wildflowers they never planted.

The horizon has long since

disappeared behind

them.

 

They

have this idea

that they have been cremated

but aren’t quite dead. Their ashes are eyes.

At night the stars sprinkle down upon them like salt.

At noon they are under porches with the rest of the

world’s stray and mixed-breed dogs, only

momentarily noticed, and are never

petted except by children

and fools.

 

His Majesty Baba Jim