Roadside Rest

A Little Ruff Around the Edges

When we who knew him and there are legions learned of Lester Ward Ruffner's death in June of last year, our enormous sense of loss immediately doubled. For we not only woke abruptly to a world without "Budge" Ruffner, we no longer had him to turn to, as we had for solace, so often, when other original pals and public idols were taken from us. "Friends who make salt sweet and blackness bright."

Readers of this journal followed his shenanigans and scribbles for years. But more blessed were recipients of a small town newspaper, The Prescott Evening Courier. As Jim Garner would later recall, "Of my many decisions as editor, none compares to the one in the early 1960s when I asked Budge to consider writing a column. From Day One, my subscribers couldn't get enough of him."

Inasmuch as Budge was getting on during these decades, he often bemusedly commented on growing-older pains: "Almost everything hurts; what doesn't hurt, doesn't work."

"Your knees buckle but your belt won't."

"You join a health club and forget the address."

But Budge's more enduring "tracks along a paper trail" were sketched from his wanderings as a footloose youth in a sparsely populated Southwest, its books, and its developing intellectual centers. Budge was born to a pioneer family on St. Patrick's Day, 1918, just six years into Arizona's statehood, making plausible a favorite boast: "I became a fairly close acquaintance of every governor the state ever had."

And senator, representative, and judge, it seemed. Yet to Budge, equally valued were alliances dating to his formative mid-teen summers spent driving and cooking for archaeological expeditions into the Navajo Nation of northeastern Arizona and parts of other states. As a boy, he gained insight into a tribe of native people that had prevailed - their value system, arts, matriarchal order, religion, and language intact through centuries of foreign invasion and cultural stress. Early on he resolved "to judge people by their standards and not my own."

So Budge embraced life with a tolerant attitude, a disciplined Jesuit education, and an unabashed sentimentality. As a daughter once sighed, "Father weeps when we send out his laundry." And how he also loved an irony, a sweet spiritual victory, an explosive laugh.

Where he encountered his subjects, at their level, from their point of view, Budge wrote of them. The brokenlegged spinster herding skinny cows beneath the Vermilion Cliffs. The frontiersman who became a millionaire baking pies for a dollar apiece. A Mexican family fighting to save their restaurant. The West Point cadet who turned renegade Indian. The cowboys who went on strike. The addled highwayman who robbed a road-grading machine. The black man whose discoveries revolutionized understanding of New World prehistory.

Budge was present when Carl Chukima, Hopi elder, applied for federal Social Security. The clerk asked the age of Carl's house at Old Oraibi, and was told that pottery shards indicated human occupation predating A.D. 1150. Budge dryly advised the clerk, "A title search might be difficult."

Typical of his generation, Budge lamented the passing of simpler frontier ways. He, himself, was a member of the coroner's jury attending the brief fireside probate of the estate of a cowboy who died of natural causes on roundup far from town. As Budge reported: "The wagon boss told the deputy that the deceased, Buster, had no living kin except a nephew 'counting Sundays' in a Texas prison. The probate began."

"Does anybody here owe Buster any money?' the deputy asked. None."

"On the asset side, $22 was found in Buster's chaps pocket. One waddy offered to buy the chaps for $30. Buster's N. Porter saddle was on a Port Parker tree and had tooled fenders. It brought $85 from the wagon boss. Nobody wanted the bedroll, but the tarp was bought by the cook for $16. Buster's spliteared bridle was a beauty. It had Navajo conchas on each cheek strap, and the bit was engraved. After obtaining financing, a newly married cowboy bought it for $32. A search of Buster's warbag produced nothing but some toilet articles, an unopened pint of whiskey, and a pocket-size Bible. This was too personal to purchase. It was decided to send the warbag and its contents to be buried with its owner. A pair of California-style spurs and a fine reata brought $38."

"When the boss pulled into camp in his pickup, the deputy had $223 cash. On the chuck wagon table in the hissing light of a Coleman lantern, the boss counted out enough dollars to assure that when Buster went over the fence line, he owed no man or mortuary."

Lester Ward "Budge" Ruffner is sorely missed."