Bud Ellsberg came from a family of grocers. That’s what his grandfather did, and his father, and it was made pretty clear to him from an early age that being a grocer was what he was expected to do, too.

Back in the fifties, when Bud was in school in the same grade with Harold Hekkinan and Frank Matson, he got to go out for sports, but once he got into high school, he didn’t get to fool around with the gang that much. Whenever he had free time, he found himself working in the grocery store, which was still located downtown in the Janders block in those days, really a pretty small affair. But while the other guys were out with their girl friends or hanging out, Bud would be stocking shelves, sweeping floors, or running the checkout. He hated it.

When Bud graduated in 1958, he’d had hopes of going to college, like Frank and Harold – but no, there was that white apron that it was made pretty clear to him he was expected to wear. The day after he got his diploma, he went to work at the Spearfish Lake Grocery full time, and resented it even more. He spent the next several months trying to think of a way of getting out of the grocery store without having his father try to kill him.

One afternoon, he was chatting with a customer who was upset about their son being drafted into the Army, and found himself wishing he could be drafted too. From there, it was only a short step to the local draft board, where he had a long talk with the woman who did the administration. She didn’t get many kids coming in looking to be drafted, so she was glad to oblige him at the cost of keeping quiet about it.

Bud made out to his father like he was sorry it had happened, but unlike many, perhaps most, of the kids who got nailed by the draft in that era, he viewed it as a liberation, and not an enslavement. He knew what being a slave was. Unfortunately, after basic he wound up getting sent to a cooks and bakers school, and there he was, dealing with groceries again.

There was a way out, and he took it – at the price of a longer enlistment, he managed to get sent to helicopter mechanic’s school. Army aviation was going through a big expansion in those years, and there were never enough mechanics to go around. Bud was a good mechanic, and by late 1961 was a freshly minted buck sergeant, when the whole aviation battalion was sent to a place in Southeast Asia he’d never heard of before, to assist advisors and Green Berets in fighting a little brush fire war they had going. It was exciting to be heading off to a war, even if it was just a little one.

In those days, the concept of using helicopters in combat was brand new. There were a lot of theories about how the increased mobility of troops would change combat, and the 221st Aviation Battalion got the chance to try a lot of the ideas out in practice for the first time. Some worked, some didn’t, and others needed more work.

The old H-21 “Flying Banana” was a pretty good helicopter for its day, but with piston engines and limited power, its day was coming to an end. Bud was the crew chief on one, and it was one that had been around the block for a bit. It was tough to keep running right, and he’d spent a lot of time at it. Even worse was the fact that they discovered the Banana was about the worst helicopter built for surviving battle damage – there was a story going around about one being brought down by a well-aimed Viet Cong spear.

Bud didn’t normally fly missions, but there were some engine troubles on the ship, and one day he volunteered to ride along to see if he could figure out what was causing the problem. They dropped their squad of ARVNs in a hot LZ; there was a fair amount of ground fire, and the Banana took some hits in the engine compartment. The pilot got the old hussy up and away from the area, but it was wheezing and coughing, and Bud figured whatever the engine problem had been, a few AK-47 rounds hadn’t done much to help it. Finally it crapped out completely. The only place the pilot, Major “Smoky” Stover, could find to auto-rotate it into was the Mekong River, and they had to swim away from it as it sank. Fortunately, another banana from the flight was with them and picked them out of the river, little the worse for wear but shy one helicopter.

Smoky Stover was fairly impressed with Bud’s cool in the situation, and got him assigned to be his personal crew chief when a replacement helicopter came in. This one wasn’t a cranky old Flying Banana, but Bud’s first introduction to what some would argue was the best helicopter ever made, bar none – the Bell UH-1, which the Army had named the Iroquois or something, but which everyone called the “Huey” right from the start. Instead of a cranky old piston engine that barely had enough power on a good day, and rarely had good days, the turbine engine on the Huey had power to burn, and in time it would prove it could take a licking and keep on ticking.

Incidents like when Bud’s banana got shot up taught the powers that be in that the choppers needed to have a little firepower of their own in order to suppress defensive fire while discharging or picking up troops. The brains at Ft. Rucker promised to think about it, but the brains in Vietnam had reason to think about it a lot harder. With a little inspired acquisition of the equipment involved, ways were found to mount .30 caliber and later .50 caliber machine guns in the open doors of the Hueys – “slicks” wasn’t a term in common use then. The Hueys acquired some teeth, but someone was needed to operate the machine guns, and the crew chiefs were the first persons tagged. Thus Bud became one of the first “door gunners” in Vietnam.

Hot LZs were rare in those days – it’d happen once in a while, but rarely did they run into a lot of defensive firepower, so being a little closer to combat wasn’t a big deal, at least until the attack on the Special Forces camp at Dien Bat.

Dien Bat was rather exposed, and had a beret A-team and a couple companies of ARVNs. They got hit hard early one morning. They shot through a lot of ammunition, took some casualties, and needed some help. Major Stover volunteered to lead a four-ship flight in to relieve the place, bringing a platoon of ARVNs, while the Air Force dropped in ammo by parachute. The only place they had for an LZ was a rough airstrip right in front of the camp, where there was a lot of lead flying. They got the ARVNs off all right, but took some hits in the process before Smoky pulled some pitch and got them out of there. The Huey clearly wasn’t very happy, and Stover was having some trouble controlling it. “Ellsberg, see if you can figure out what the problem is with this beast,” he yelled over the intercom as he clawed for altitude the best he could.

Over the noise of the engine, Bud could hear some grinding noises, and it didn’t take more than a second to figure it out: “Tail rotor gearbox took a hit.”

People had messed around with the concept of helicopters for many years in the early part of the century without a lot of success. The problem was that in a single-rotor bird, the reaction from swinging the rotor tried to swing the chopper around the other way. No one cracked the problem until Igor Sikorsky invented the tail rotor. Without one, they were pretty well screwed, and everyone knew it.

Things only held together for another few seconds, and then there was a heckuva “BANG” from the back of the bird, and Smoky Stover had his hands full.

Stover knew his only hope was to get the bird going fast enough so the vestigial tail fin could help to keep the bird going straight, and the only way he could get that speed was to get the nose down. He chomped down hard on his unlit cigar, and somehow managed it, looking hard for some place to set the bird down

The only possibility was the airstrip at Dien Bat where they’d been shot up in the first place. It was the only place around long enough and straight enough that he could put the bird on the ground on its skids at 140 mph. Not even the test pilots had ever tried that, but it was the only shot in the locker. “Bud, strap in,” Stover yelled over the intercom as he somehow got the stricken Huey pointed toward the airstrip.

In later years, Bud was still amazed it went as well as it did. In the early phases of the landing things went pretty well, but as the chopper slowed what little directional steering coming from the tail fin was lost, and pretty soon the bird started to yaw and there was no stopping it. It got sideways on the skid, finally tripped over it, and rolled a couple times, coming to rest on its side.

Somehow, Bud lived through it, as did the copilot, but Smoky Stover didn’t make it – Bud could see his broken neck while he tried to free the unconscious copilot. He got the copilot out of the seat and out of the smoking, burning bird with no clear memory of how he ever managed it. They were a long way from the main part of the camp, but some beret sergeant with great big ones hopped into a jeep, raced out to the crash through a hailstorm of flying lead, and carried Bud and the copilot back to camp. Back under cover, the beret hauled the copilot back to the medic.

While the medic looked at the copilot, Bud had a cigarette to settle his nerves a bit, then another one. The beret who had plucked him off the runway went and got an M-14 and a box of ammo – the camp was still under heavy attack, and they needed all the help they could get. By the time Bud finished the second cigarette, he was in a sandbagged perimeter strongpoint, trying and on occasion finding something to shoot at.

It was a long afternoon, lasting several lifetimes. The gooks got into the wire several times, but there were a couple air force guys in Spads – the old A1E Skyraiders – that could lay napalm in close enough to burn your whiskers, and that may have been all that held them off. Bud couldn’t see how they could hold out, but somehow they did.

There was a breather right around nightfall, which came quick in the tropics, and it was clear they were going to get hit harder than ever as soon as it got truly dark, and so it was. Bud figured his chances of seeing another dawn were approximately somewhere between slim and none.

Then a miracle happened. All of a sudden, the sky in front of them lit up with a pinkish red tongue of flame, a bar of destruction that lanced down at an angle from on high. Bud looked skyward along with every other man in the camp to see that whatever that dragon’s breath was, it came from something with aircraft running lights and a rotating beacon, just like it was doing a routine flight back in the states, but this one was circling the camp and spitting flame. And the dragon didn’t roar, it screamed with the howl of banshees, but when it turned and flew away after only a few minutes, it had left nothing but death and devastation in front of the camp. The attack was effectively over.

What had saved Bud’s ass, and the rest of the camp, was an old C-47, nearly thirty years old and on its third war. He found out later some air force guys had been frustrated because they could only lay fire on a target for a few seconds from a plane moving toward a target, and someone had a brilliant idea. A few years before, the air force had realized that at the speed of modern air combat, only seconds might be available to get shots off, so they needed something that could spray a lot of lead in a few seconds. They turned back the pages to the Civil War Gatling gun, and came up with a six-barrel machine gun that could spray 4000 rounds a minute. Some brilliant shadetree mechanics had mounted one of these in an old C-47 Gooney Bird, which could haul more ammo than a fighter plane, anyway, but they mounted it so it could fire out the left side door – door gunning on a grand scale. That way, they could circle the target and shoot until they ran out of ammo. This one, being experimental, had only one “minigun,” instead of the three that soon became common. It was only the third time the thing had been used, the first time at night, and then only because of a mechanical breakdown that caused them to be running late. While the stream of 4-1 tracer was visible during the day, it was downright spectacular in the dark.

The camp commander radioed the fire controller overhead, “Send our thanks to the dragonship.” A song, Puff, the Magic Dragon was popular then, and the name “Puff” stuck in record time, to the intense and ongoing disgust of the pacifists who had recorded it. Bud had been merely among the first of many thousands relieved to see Puff roar out his flame.

Up until that day, Bud had been giving serious consideration to staying in the Army, but as the first of the dragonships flew off into the night away from Dien Bat, he lay back against the pile of sandbags, shaking with the realization he might survive the night after all. And then, an epiphany struck him: all of a sudden the grocery business didn’t seem that damn bad after all.

Bud returned to Spearfish Lake in the spring of 1963, the first guy from town to return from Vietnam, to find the grocery business had changed much in his absence. The day of the old downtown grocery store, with a limited stock and limited supplies, had been passing all over the country, and in his absence, his father had figured he’d better get on the bandwagon in Spearfish Lake before someone else did. He’d opened the Spearfish Lake Super Market, out on Central Avenue away from downtown. There was nearly ten times the floor space of the old downtown store, a seemingly huge selection on the shelves, and lots of free parking, not the metered parking downtown. It had been the right move at the right time; business was a lot busier, and it took a lot more help to run.

But, while the Spearfish Lake Super Market was a financial success that soon sucked up most of the grocery business in town, the store proved to be a jinx. About a year after Bud’s return to the business, there was an electrical fire back in one of the beer coolers. It must have started late at night, with the place locked up tight, and the fire had some time to get going pretty good before anybody discovered it. By then, there wasn’t much stopping it; the dawn broke with the building mostly rubble. Bud was on his honeymoon with his high school sweetheart, Kate O’Conner, at the time, and they had to break off the trip to return to help deal with the trouble.

Fortunately, the store had pretty good insurance, and there was a roller rink just up the street that had recently gone broke. In a few days the Spearfish Lake Super Market was open in new quarters.

They were a year rebuilding. Bud and his dad, who now got along better, reflected it might have been just as well – they were getting overcrowded in the old Super Market anyway, and needed to expand. The new Super Market was nearly twice the size of the old one; Bud couldn’t imagine how they were going to fill all the shelves, but they did easily, and the turnover of merchandise was at least as good as it had been in the old store. The fire had been a blessing in disguise.

Bud’s dad died suddenly of a heart attack not long after they moved into the new store, and Bud was sorry to see him go. They hadn’t gotten along well while he was growing up, but as adults they finally became friends of a sort. Bud wound up managing the store, owning most of it with his mother, and for a while thought it was just as well he’d gotten out of the Army when he did, since Vietnam was heating up more and more.

Things went on well until late 1968, when the Super Market again caught fire. The fire wasn’t quite as bad this time; a collection of half a dozen local fire departments managed to contain the fire in the back of the building, but the back third of the building was gone and the rest was unusable. Fortunately, the roller rink was still untenanted, and Bud knew the drill. He ran the Super Market out of the roller rink through the winter of 1968 and into 1969. Just days before the store was set to reopen, a spring thunderstorm marched through, spawning tornados. One of them got the nearly finished building right in its sights, and knocked it flatter than things had been at the first fire.

Bud’s insurance agents were getting a little tired of seeing him by this time, but they knew there was nothing he could have done about a tornado. Besides, the store had been getting a little small; all that space they didn’t think they could fill had once again proven to not be enough. Bud got some financing from Frank Matson, who now worked with his father at the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank, and with the insurance money built the fourth (well, actually, sixth, counting the roller rink twice) Spearfish Lake Super Market. It included one of the most advanced and high capacity fire sprinkler systems known to man. Bud wasn’t about to tempt fate again.

Things again went well until the summer of 1975, about the time that Mike McMahon and Kirsten Langenderfer started going together, when on a busy Saturday afternoon a fire sensor malfunctioned. Something in the system had been wired up wrong, and never discovered; while the sensor should have only set off the sprinklers in that area of the store, it touched off the whole thing. Before Bud could get to the master valve and shut the water flow off, the sprinkler system pumped eighteen thousand gallons of water into the place, the city Public Works Department later estimated. “Sprinkler system?” one wet customer told Mike McMahon, who was on the scene with the first fire trucks. “They ought to call that thing a flooding system. I thought I was gonna drown before I got out of there.”

The store wasn’t badly damaged, although virtually all the stock had to be replaced and the insurance company was less than happy, but that took the fur-lined pee pot as far as Bud was concerned. He’d never really cared for the grocery business, but had mostly considered it an improvement over Dien Bat. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life but was sure groceries weren’t a part of it. He couldn’t deal with the pressures, couldn’t deal with the hours, and most especially, couldn’t deal with the jinx that seemed to hang over the place like a rain cloud. Over Kate’s protests, but with his mother’s assent, the store was for sale within a month.

What Bud wound up doing even surprised him.

When he had been perhaps five years old, he’d waved to the engineer of a steam engine passing through Spearfish Lake – it had to have been one of the last steamers on the line. In the way of a good many small boys, he’d decided right there and then that someday he wanted to be the engineer of a snorting, puffing, hissing steam engine hauling pulpwood down through the north woods he’d grown up in. Like almost all boyhood ambitions, it had gone away, but he had always had a more than normal interest in what happened out on the railroad tracks west of town. When an Alco or an FM would whistle for the Central Avenue crossing, he’d look up in the grocery store, listen to the sound, and couldn’t help thinking it had to be the way freight heading up to Warsaw with a load of dye, or a load of rock downbound for Camden.

One day, this small part of his life threatened to end. Shortly after he put the Super Market up for sale, the Decatur and Overland Railroad announced plans to abandon the line from Camden to Warsaw, and service Jerusalem Paper in Warsaw and Summit Limestone east of Walsenberg over the nearly-abandoned Kremmling branch. Bud had picked the right person to commiserate with at Rick’s Café, down the street from the supermarket: a train buff by the name of Frank Matson.

The two knew of several short-line railroads that had been formed by local people when a major railroad abandoned their town, and they knew there were a few lumber yards, logging companies and the like between Spearfish Lake and Camden that would miss rail service. Somehow, the idea was born to scratch together some capital and maybe make salaries by running the line. That afternoon, at the counter of Rick’s Café, the Camden and Spearfish Lake Railroad had been born.

It was a talkative secretary in a D&O office who tipped them off that the railroad didn’t plan to run traffic over the Kremmling branch any longer than they had to, and that brought them the backing of Summit Pit and Jerusalem paper. Even with their backing, the initial cost of the expanded line was more than the infant company could possibly have managed. Garth Matson’s good political connections got them a state transportation department subsidy that was enough to make the purchase price and still have a little left over to upgrade really bad sections of track and buy some equipment.

The going was far from easy those first couple years, when there had been just the “Rock,” as they called their first GP-7, and the one crew to run it. It could take them a week to run from Spearfish Lake to Warsaw, switch the paper plant, the oil company and the fertilizer plant, then go on to Summit Pit east of Walsenberg, then return to Spearfish Lake, pick up the load at Clark Plywood and go on to Camden, stopping and switching at the various little towns along the way. Down at Camden, they would switch the various local plants and industrial branches, interchange the toilet paper and limestone and plywood with the D&O, pick up loaded log flats, chemistry and empty gondolas, then return north to Spearfish Lake, again switching at Moffat, Meeker, Albany River and a few other sidings that only the railroad knew by name.

In those days, the C&SL train – not even dignified by a number, since there was only one – had trailed a way car, not for a conductor and rear brakeman, but for the two-man crew to sleep in and live out of when they went over the 12-hour service limit. In those days, the train left on Monday for Warsaw and Walsenberg, and could usually figure on Tuesday night back at Spearfish Lake. They would take off for Camden on Wednesday morning, and could then figure on getting back home sometime between Thursday night and Sunday morning.

Bud usually had been the brakeman on that crew. It had been the happiest time of his life. The other crewman was a retired Norfolk and Western engineer, Adam Howland, who had moved to the north woods with the notion of getting to know by name all the trout in the little streams feeding the Spearfish River. He hadn’t known what he was getting himself in for when he had agreed to work for the little railroad part-time to stave off boredom when the trout season was closed. Bud couldn’t remember a time in those early years when the hoglawed caboose wasn’t sitting within a hundred yards of an interesting-looking trout stream.

On the long, slow trips, Bud learned about the operating side of railroading, and had become a fair engineer – only fair, since he lacked Adam’s lifetime of experience, and fortunately, those early days hadn’t lasted. Things got better as time went on; track got improved, and with it service. One by one, Bud was able to recover some customers that had turned their backs on the railroad. By the beginning of 1981, the tough years were over with, although much remained to be done.

Even though Bud still enjoyed being a kid and playing with the biggest model railroad that a kid could have, he could sometimes be heard saying it was getting to be too much like a regular business. Enthusiasm, economy and most of all, local ownership and backing had indeed made the Camden and Spearfish Lake a moderately successful business: it was in the black, and likely to stay that way unless something untoward happened. Being in the black was in itself something of an unusual adventure for a railroad, and Bud never wished for the untoward; he enjoyed playing with his trains too much.