This is roughly the text I shared yesterday for Buck’s funeral in Indianapolis. Liberties were taken, but this is essentially what I said, plus the music cues where Joyce & Chris played.
[“Danny Boy” prelude by Joyce]
[play “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” by Les Paul & Mary Ford]
Buck Meredith loved to tell the story about the barracks in Germany during his service in the Army during 1951 & 1952. At night, Armed Forces Radio would go off the air around midnight. The custom in the barracks was that most of the men with radios would leave them on.
Because at 6 am, Armed Forces Radio would play the Les Paul & Mary Ford song “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” That was their reveille, their wake up call, each morning. Buck was a fan of Les Paul and never forgot waking up that way everyday in that significant part of his life.
Myron Leland Meredith was born right here in Indianapolis on February 28, 1929, to Lemmie and Hattie Page Meredith, who had come from Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, in the 1920s. Buck was “Buster” to his family as a child, but when his father Lemmie died in 1940, many things changed for him, including a new neighborhood friend on Winthrop Avenue deciding to call him “Buck.” The new name stuck.
He was the youngest of five: his older brothers Woody and Damon were born in Kentucky, twin sisters, Rethel Jean Fiscus & Reta Moffett born in Indianapolis after Lemmie began working for Indianapolis Power & Light at the (appropriately enough) Kentucky Avenue Power Plant. In his childhood, the family rented a home on 30th St. just west of Emerson, with a barn and farm fields around: this place was a childhood paradise to which his memories would often return, with large gardens and even a bit of orchard, animals in the barn at times, and adventures which weren’t much slowed by the injuries he got, by jumping out of hay lofts or trying to ride animals not interested in passengers. A broken foot at this time never healed properly, but didn’t really slow him up. There were adventures that came to him there on his doorstep, specifically a Navy airship, a dirigible that landed in the field next door, and while he didn't get to fly in it they let him into the underslung cabin while they waited for a new propellor to be delivered, something he traces some of his lifelong interest in mechanical affairs back to.
Lemmie had served in the Army during World War I in France, and was a member of the American Legion almost from its beginning; both Woody and Damon would serve in World War II in duty stations spanning the globe, from Alaska to Italy. Damon’s last post in Bari, Italy and his letters home and stories later stuck with Buck as well.
With his father’s death just before the war, and his older brothers in the military far from home, Buck began contributing to the household income at age 14, working at the neighborhood Kroger at 30th & Winthrop Ave., where he gained experience he never forgot. A lady ran the store, a butcher ran the meat counter, and to stock produce and fill coolers with ice and wait on customers and make home deliveries all fell to Buck. He remembered in particular deliveries to a Mrs. Montgomery and her large extended family, a point we’ll come back to.
Before graduating from Arsenal Technical High School in 1947, he began working at Colonial Bakery, and therein lies a tale. Buck and his mother were called to a counselor’s office, and it seemed there were reports that Buck was often falling asleep in class; this was no doubt because he was working effectively full time on the night shift, then getting in a few hours of sleep before getting up for classes at Tech. The counselor suggested that they arrange a graceful exit for him and reduce his course load and allow him to leave school at 16. Hattie was not having it, and said so loudly and firmly; Buck wasn’t intending to drop out either.
The ruckus attracted the attention of a vice principal who stepped in and asked for the story; when Hattie explained her husband’s death a few years before and her son’s work at the bakery, but how they intended for him to graduate, the vice principal said to the counselor “let’s move them over to my office; I’ll take care of this.” He made a few adjustments to Buck’s schedule, and said to Hattie, “Ma’am, rest easy; I will see to it this boy graduates,” which indeed he did.
Of course, once he graduated, he went to work full time at “the bakery,” and steadily moved up the ladder from errand boy to night maintenance to assisting the head engineer. He made a trip to Chicago at one point with a fellow Colonial employee to receive some technical training, and was intent on mastering the vast equipment that in those days baked almost half the bread eaten in Indianapolis.
But there was that family heritage of service. Lemmie in France during World War I, Woody & Damon in World War II. When the Korean War began, Buck showed up at the induction center in downtown Indianapolis. During his physical, the doctor looked at his broken and poorly healed foot and said “I can get you an exemption, son.” Buck replied “please don’t, I want to serve.” The doctor replied “Well, you’ll be no infantryman,” but promised he could mark his papers for a transportation battalion, and he went on to Camp Breckinridge for training in Kentucky with the 101st, and then transfer to a Transport battalion overseas.
In Europe, he saw Germany from Bremerhaven on the North Sea to Sonthofen, the furthest south city in Germany. He chose to drive a high explosives truck, where he wouldn’t have to drive with a relief driver because the only trucks with a single were high explosives loads, and he'd rather drive alone; he even slept under it, which his fellow drivers said was crazy, but Buck said of the chance of an accidental explosion “you’d never know it.” Bad Nauheim and Butzbach would be home bases but the deliveries were all along the East German front., with Russian soldiers often in view. He took away from that time the observation that the Russian & German people weren’t all that bad individually, it was the leaders you had to look out for.
He began seriously playing guitar during his Army days? Though Buck probably started as a young kid, as he remembered his father Lemmie being really good, and even playing Spanish style. Lemmie came from the same area of Kentucky that Merle Travis came from.
Somewhere along the way, perhaps spurred by that Les Paul tune that woke him up most mornings in Germany, he got intensely interested in playing the guitar. His Gibson guitar we have here, and while performing in public was never something he was comfortable about, by his own account at least in the 1950s he attended quite a few concerts and appearances at clubs along E. 10th St. and around the southside of downtown Indy.
As a young man he was particularly interested in the playing skills of Wes Montgomery. You remember Mrs. Montgomery he delivered groceries for? That’s Wes’s mother, and Buck would come up to the side door of various clubs and venues during breaks, when the musicians would come outside to smoke. After initially reminding Wes Montgomery how he knew him, Buck would ask him for guidance in fingering and playing chords and riffs and such. Over time, Wes would say “Here he comes again,” on seeing Buck. To the end of his days, Buck Meredith was proud to say he knew him, and learned from Wes Montgomery.
He was also a huge Chet Atkins fan. Joyce says she never really heard about Wes Montgomery growing up, but they had every album Chet ever made, and she grew up listening to that music her whole young life.
Buck was pleased and proud that Joyce became a musician. She enjoyed playing jazz and pop standards from the 30s and 40s on the piano, and he loved listening to her play – ["Dream (When You're Feeling Blue),” words and music by Johnny Mercer (1944) by Joyce & Chris]
Buck Meredith liked Christmas a lot, just didn't think it had to be celebrated on the 25th if it wasn't practical. Family - his own small one with Nory and Joyce, and his extended family - were what made it special. For many years, Buck and Nory hosted Buck's family on Christmas Eve back on Marrison Place.
One reason for his pragmatism about Christmas celebrations was due to the fact that, on his return to the States at the end of his service, taking ten days to sail across the Atlantic he landed in New York on . . . December 23rd, as it happens, and was processed out of the Army at Ft. Kilmer (now the Rutgers campus in New Jersey), and put on a train the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1952 . . . one of only a handful of passengers on a full train. He had an entire train car to himself, and was in it all through Christmas Day, crossing New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Ohio and on into Kentucky, depots empty when they stopped and switches slow to be thrown at junctions, delaying them even more — finally arriving in Louisville near the end of Christmas day when he could call home and let them know he was back in the USA. It would be midnight before he was transported to Fort Knox and a warm bunk, but no food until the next morning. It would be a few days into January 1953 before his separation papers were cut and he returned home, to Indianapolis and Colonial Bakery.
While overseas, Hattie had moved from Winthrop to LaSalle St., but Buck stayed in touch with the old neighborhood, and friends like the Yount family. Most of you know how that turned out, with his marriage to Nory in 1955, and their daughter Joyce born in 1959. From Colonial, he left for a time as he worked to support his family seeking advancement by working for West Baking Company starting in 1965, then returning to Colonial in 1970 where he rose to the position of Director of Engineering by his retirement in 1990. He was also Director of Engineering at home, making sure everything in the family's house, not to mention the cars, worked in tip top shape. He was a regular repairman for Joyce's broken toys, having performed surgery more than once on a talking doll that stopped talking (one on Christmas morning, in fact).
Nory died in 2015, and Buck was left alone in the home they’d shared since 1977. He was, shall we say, resistant to any plan other than him staying in that home, and in his chair, and doing what he was used to. By his 90s, his habits were fixed. But a brief trip to the hospital in March 2020 began a decline which his daughter Joyce and her husband, me, tried to buffer and support him through, trying to honor his desire to stay at home. We were successful for all but his last few days: he died at the age of 94, but as Buck himself would say, “close enough to a hundred, don’t you think?”
He saw the Great Depression and a World War as a child, growing up perhaps too fast; he navigated the Cold War serving in the middle of it during the Korean conflict, but on guard against the Russian opposition in East Germany. He saw a neighborhood bakery grow by leaps and bounds as he worked his way up within it, saw it get bought out by first one corporation and then another, then downsized and not long after his retirement be closed. He went from working on manual transmissions in shop class to emailing on an iMac; he lived out his life in Indianapolis and was content with the world he found within it. Buck sought stability in a changing world, and held onto it as best he could while trying to keep up with those changes all around him. We pray for peace to him and his family of which he was the last surviving member, peace of the Kentucky hills and valleys that were their heritage, and the peace of a garden plot with grapevines nearby and a barn to play in, whose memory always brought him contentment. We lay him to rest next to his wife, not far from his parents, in the Indianapolis he always called home.
[blessing prayer]
[closing Chet Atkins “O Come All Ye Faithful”]