The clan settled in Long Beach, where the boy caught his first sight of what would become his life’s passion, the Pacific Ocean. Bucher’s grandparents got jobs managing motor-court apartments; his grandfather tried to supplement their meager income by selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. The old couple had brought a supply of wheat from their farm, and they and the boy often boiled it for breakfast and dinner. Eventually Bucher’s grandfather fell ill and quit his sales job, and his grandmother decided they could no longer afford to raise Lloyd. At age seven, he was put aboard a train by himself and sent back to his adoptive father in Idaho.
By then paroled, Austin Bucher had lost his restaurant and moved into a shack by the Snake River with half a dozen other hard-drinking vagrants. The men played endless card games, brought in women for sex, and rustled sheep from nearby farms. They taught Lloyd card tricks, but weren’t at all happy about having a kid in their midst. At night, the boy often slept in a firewood bin outside the shack without benefit of blankets. He wasn’t enrolled in school and spent much of his time running around with a gang of other vagabond children.
After several months, his dad was again imprisoned and the shack’s remaining denizens evicted Lloyd. At a time when he should’ve been attending second grade, he had neither parents nor a home. To survive, he fished in the Snake and foraged in restaurant garbage cans. On cold nights he’d find a back alley and crawl into a flimsy shelter made of cardboard boxes. Sympathetic cops sometimes bought him a meal or took him to the town jail so he at least had a warm bed.
Soon he was arrested for trying to steal fishhooks from a five-and-dime store. He wound up in a Mormon orphanage in Boise, where other kids teased him mercilessly for being a “cat licker”—a Catholic. Yearning for his grandmother and the smell of salt water in Long Beach, he ran away but was quickly nabbed. At the behest of a well-to-do Catholic woman on the orphanage’s board, he was sent in 1938 to a Catholic children’s home in northern Idaho.
Bucher felt safer and happier there than he ever had in his life. For three years he thrived at the wilderness mission school run by the Sisters of St. Joseph. He helped milk the mission’s cows and shuck its corn. He devoured the adventure novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rafael Sabatini, author of such stirring maritime classics as Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk.
One day Bucher read an article about the movie Boys Town, starring Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney. It told of the famous Omaha, Nebraska, home for abandoned and abused boys founded by a lanky Irish priest, Edward J. Flanagan. Besides being a bookworm, Bucher also was an aspiring athlete, and Boys Town boasted an excellent football team. The boy wrote to Father Flanagan, pleading for admittance. By the summer of 1941 he was on a train for Omaha.
Then 14, Bucher dove into the “City of Little Men” with the gusto and ebullience that were becoming his trademarks. He sang in the Boys Town choir and served as captain of the school’s cadet corps, organized after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He did well in subjects he liked—math, science, and geography—and not so well in those he didn’t, such as grammar and Latin. He made friends easily, as he was to do throughout his life. He read everything he got his hands on and began to envision a career in the Navy.
His favorite extracurricular activity was the football team. Though he stood only five-ten and weighed less than 160 pounds, he played tackle regularly from his sophomore year on, impressing his coach with his intelligence and hard work. Bucher and his teammates traveled by train from one end of the country to the other, going up against powerhouse squads from public as well as parochial high schools, often before huge crowds. It was during this time that the boy shed his given first name and adopted the nickname “Pete” in honor of his idol, All-America end Pete Pihos of Indiana University.
At the start of Bucher’s senior year, in 1945, his peers elected the popular footballer mayor of Boys Town, a top school honor. But someone spotted him kissing an usherette at a local movie theater and informed Father Flanagan, who criticized Bucher for “irresponsibility” and stripped him of his title. Angry and embarrassed, Bucher asked the priest to sign papers so he could enlist in the Navy as a minor. Flanagan obliged and, just eight months short of graduation, Bucher dropped out, hitchhiked to San Diego, and entered boot camp.
The product of rigidly controlled institutions for much of his young life, Bucher did well in the service. He trained as a quartermaster, honing his navigation and signaling skills aboard a supply ship in the Pacific. But the war had ended and the humdrum routine of enlisted life eventually began to bore him; he realized he’d made a mistake by not staying at Boys Town until he graduated. He wrote to a former teacher, asking for another chance. In 1946, he was granted a diploma after completing his remaining coursework by mail.
The Navy discharged him the following year and, after working as a bartender in Idaho and a farmhand in Oregon, he enrolled at the University of Nebraska in 1948. He joined a fraternity and lettered in freshman football.
On a blind date in the spring of 1949 he met Rose Rohling, a shy, pretty Missouri farm girl with silky brown hair and a brilliant smile. A devout Catholic, the 20-year-old Rose was a telephone switchboard operator in Omaha. After a summer of picnics, hand-holding, and long drives past fields fragrant with ripening wheat, Bucher had fallen hopelessly in love.
The couple married 15 days before the Korean War broke out in June 1950. The Navy recalled Bucher, but let him stay in college on the condition that he join the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps and serve two years of active duty after graduation. In 1953, he finished his studies with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education, an associate degree in geology, and some credits toward a master’s in micropaleontology.
Commissioned that year as a reserve ensign, he was assigned to the USS Mount McKinley, a communications ship. He found Navy life much more agreeable as an officer and, about a year after reentering the service, applied for submarine school. A sub assignment, he knew, would be accompanied by hazardous-duty pay. And with a wife and, by then, two young sons in tow, he needed the money.
In 1955, Bucher moved to New London, Connecticut, for training. His neighbor and fellow classmate turned out to be Chuck Clark, future commander of the Banner. The two young officers became friends, sometimes getting together with their wives for an evening of charades.
But there was little time for such diversions, given the intensity of the classes. Students were expected to know how to operate every piece of equipment on a sub, how to troubleshoot electrical problems, and how to outwit and kill Russian captains. After graduating in the middle of his class, Bucher was detailed to the USS Besugo, a World War II–era diesel sub home-ported in San Diego.
Elevated to lieutenant, he enjoyed the challenge of navigating huge expanses of ocean. He also savored the adrenaline rush of spy missions. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he served on three subs that engaged in surveillance of communist naval operations.
Bucher’s boats sat silently outside Vladivostok harbor, watching for Soviet warships putting to sea in telltale formations that would signal the start of World War III. He and his comrades monitored Soviet torpedo tests and antisubmarine warfare exercises. When a Russian sub fired a test missile, Bucher’s vessel radioed a one-letter code to another American submarine waiting near the splashdown site. The latter would then measure the telemetry and photograph the rocket as it zoomed downrange and plunged into the Pacific. In one particularly tense operation, Bucher’s boat landed an agent on an empty North Korean beach.