Cuppy and Buzzy, school chums from Missoula, were staying at their favorite hunting stop. It consisted of a room with three small windows, a table, an old burned-out iron stove and rusty bed springs in the corner.
A sign above a ramshackle cupboard read, “Fill your belly if you can, but don’t fill your pockets.”
Cuplin and Harold “Buzzy” Heyer, born within two months of each other in 1918, found an open box of Bisquick in the cupboard and decided to make biscuits for supper.
But let’s let a master tell the rest.
“You’ve never seen more beautiful biscuits in all your life,” typed Cuplin, who died Nov. 5 at age 90. “Since we had no milk we substituted water - the net result was most memorable. They had the texture of a granite boulder.
“Being hardy souls we each ate a couple and left the rest on a pie plate on the table. Later after we’d turned in for the night Buzz laid wide awake waiting for the hobgoblins to take him and he woke me to say he’d heard something and was sure it was a bear.
“Whispering to each other, I slipped a .22 long rifle round into my trusty single shot rifle and aimed at the door while he manned the flashlight. The beam of light cut through the blackness (and) we saw it - a mouse, not much bigger than the end of your thumb, sitting on one of Buzzy’s biscuits, munching away.
“Enough of this! I had to save my buddy. So I drew a careful bead on the critter and squeezed off a round. The room went dark, Buzzy dropped the flashlight and our ears felt as if the atomic bomb had gone off in the room. Ages later Buzz found the light, and we began a thorough search for our caller. Never saw him again. I missed him from a distance of five or six feet. Instead I had hit the biscuit plumb center and the results were like shrapnel - bits of biscuit were everywhere.
“Far as I know Buzz never outgrew his fear of noises in the night. I don’t suppose the mouse got over his fear, either.”
This is a story of a storyteller, but also of old friends.
Cuppy Cuplin grew up on Vine Street in the lower Rattlesnake, within a few blocks of Heyer and Frank Whitmoyer. The three attended Prescott School and Missoula High School together.
Cuppy was 13 when he made his first trip to the Rattlesnake lakes. “Did a lot of fishing and stayed four days,” he reported in the delightful three-page letter he mailed to his son Tracy and his wife, Shirley, sometime in the mid-1970s.
The creek and those lakes became favorite haunts for the three boys. Cuplin came from an outdoor-oriented family whose father, Ralph, was good friends with conservationist Bob Marshall.
“They used to go up on the mountain on Jumbo a lot,” said Tracy Cuplin. “Summertime, wintertime, it didn’t matter. They’d go up there in the winter and ski down. I remember my dad telling me one time he went through a barbed wire fence on the way down. There were no brakes or anything on his skis.
“If he hadn’t been bundled up because of the cold weather, he’d probably have suffered a few lacerations or something.”
World War II came along. Cuplin, Heyer and Whitmoyer all joined the Army but drifted apart.
Cuplin served in the Pacific theater and at one point received distressing news from home. Heyer, his mother told him, had been killed in action.
Cuppy loved to tell the tale of the day he returned from the war, Shirley Cuplin said. He arrived in Missoula at the Northern Pacific train depot at the end of Higgins Avenue.
“I’m coming across the street with my bag and this car whips around and almost runs over me, and here it was Buzzy,” he’d say. “So I get out and say, 'Buzz, what the hell are you doing? I thought you were dead.’ But he wasn’t dead. He was alive and trying to run me over.”
After a failed marriage, Cuplin returned to the Army and went to veterinary school. He served a total of 20 years in the military.
At one point early in his second tour with the Army, he found himself in Nevada at a nuclear test site. Tracy Cuplin said his dad was in charge of wrestling sheep into cramped, underground tunnels where he kept them fed and watered until the next bomb went off. Then he returned the sheep to the surface, where they were tested for radiation.
In Seattle, Cuplin met and wed Catherine Copeland, a Social Security administrator. The two were married 40 years, living in Hawaii, in Denmark, in Stockton, Calif., and in Reno, Nev., where Cuplin worked as a newspaper and magazine distributor.
Catherine died of cancer 13 years ago, when they lived in Pocatello, Idaho. There was nothing to keep him in Idaho, Cuplin said, so he packed up his beloved, overweight dachshund and moved back to Montana, to a house in Turah next door to Tracy and Shirley.
As soon as he’d settled in, he grabbed a phone book and looked up Buzz Heyer, who’d returned with wife Pauline to Missoula a few years before. A housekeeper who answered the phone said Buzz wasn’t in. Did he want to leave a message?
“Tell him Cuppy’s back in town and here’s my number.”
They hadn’t talked in 50 years.
And so it began, sporadically at first, since Heyer was still running a business back then.
But before long, Cuplin, Heyer and Whitmoyer - octogenarians all - were meeting regularly in Missoula for lunch. Each had lost his wife along the way.
The old stories flowed like wine from a table at Harry David’s, most of them from Cuppy.
“Grandpa was a great storyteller, and he loved to talk,” Shirley Cuplin said with a chuckle. “Any time we had a get-together he dominated the conversation and, like Tracy said, he told the same stories over and over again. But I think we all do that.”
They were back in the Rattlesnake on one of those golden fishing trips, or up Monture Creek hunting with Cuppy’s father. Maybe they were tripping down a hallway in old Missoula High, or pedaling a heavy two-man boat on their bicycles over to the river to launch downstream. Probably there were war stories, in those days when they’d lost touch.
“They really liked one another,” said Bob Heyer, Buzz’s younger brother, who along with wife Phyllis often joined in the lunchtime gatherings. “It was kind of a mutual admiration society. I think they were tickled to get back together after so long.”
Buzz Heyer passed away in 2006. The other two men carried on the lunchtime tradition, though Whitmoyer is hard of hearing and had trouble any more following Cuppy’s stories. He doesn’t drive either, so he was in the habit of calling up Cuplin and asking for a ride.
Whitmoyer’s last message was on the answering machine a month ago when Tracy and daughter Karra found Cuppy dead on his bathroom floor, a victim of cardiac arrest.
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Rhonda Maclay wrote on Dec 4, 2008 6:54 PM: