Coming inside on Saturday after my son and I had put in a couple of hours working in fairly hot sun on top of my roof, I picked up that day’s Chronicle to read whatever I had missed earlier in the day. A short piece told me about a man who was killed in a rockslide while hiking on the Tatoosh range in Mount Rainier National Park.
His name hadn’t been released at press time but, less than 15 minutes earlier my son had waited until we came down from the roof before telling me that the man was one of the giants in music circles in the South Puget Sound area and a good friend of ours, Burt Meyer. Burt had taken up hiking, hoping it might help him get over his wife Di’s death in June last year after a long fight against cancer. I wrote about that at the time.
As I write this, I have no knowledge of when and where a memorial will be held for Burt but I can predict it’ll be a big one. I no longer remember how, when or where we first met, but it must have been about 1962 or 1963 when he began coming to the back door of KELA after everyone else had left for the day. Burt was attending Centralia College at the time.
If I was busy being the local DJ on KELA’s “Record Roundtable,” we just talked about the current giants in pop music. Peter, Paul and Mary usually headed the list. But, if a ball game or a recorded mystery program was being aired, we’d play record after record in the control room, trying our best to copy them. He was better than me at that.
I remember, it was about that time, he had a friend who made his living building classical guitars, and we once thought that it was something we could do, too. Burt was better at that, too.
Later in our lives, he’d book my Mark Twain performances at a folk center that he and Di pretty much ran in Olympia called Applejam. Those were fun years.
After graduating from college, Burt took up the teaching profession, eventually teaching German at Tumwater High School. That was when another phase in our lives began. I was staying in Tumwater and a couple of times each month Burt would phone after school and ask if I wanted to “poke some holes in the sky” (his phrase).
Both he and Di were pilots by then and their plane was a strengthened and souped up Piper Cub called a Citabria (that’s airbatic spelled backwards), which they named “Himmelfahrt,” which is a commonly used word for “the Ascension.” Did I tell you that he had a great sense of humor? He was good at aerial acrobatics, too.
Together, Burt and Di formed small bands of all types: Irish — Cricket on the Hearth; sea chanties — Before the Mast; cornball — Snake Oil, in addition to The Bud Bay Buccaneers, Constellation’s Crew, and — starting it all — The Blazer Trio, formed while still attending Centralia College.
Burt later built a full-size string bass in the shape of a medicine bottle for Di to play in Snake Oil. Oh, and he built his own concertina for the Irish ballads as well.
Those who knew him cannot forget that he brewed a great beer as well.
The two of them faced some tough challenges and worked through them. The joy that they gave to all who knew them was an added bonus of their friendship. I never saw a frown on either of their faces. If only that could be said of the rest of us, too.
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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.
