restaurant trashcans and sleeping in cardboard shelters. Eventually he was arrested for stealing fishhooks from a five-and-dime store and sent to a Catholic children’s home in northern Idaho. At 14, he moved on to Boys Town, the famed Omaha, Nebraska, refuge for abused and abandoned boys. He played on the football team and served as captain of the school’s cadet corps, organized after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1945, when he was 17, he enlisted in the Navy, but the war had ended by the time he was assigned to a supply ship in the Pacific.

Bucher later attended the University of Nebraska and married a Missouri farmer’s pretty daughter. He rejoined the Navy as an officer in 1953 and two years later entered submarine school. Inthe late 1950s and early ’60s he served onboard three subs with the delicate and dangerous task of eavesdropping on Soviet naval activities in the Far East.

Perhaps because of his Dickensian childhood, Bucher craved the company of others. He was the life of any party, telling jokes, gulping martinis, and leading everyone in song into the wee hours. Smart and well read, he could converse knowledgably about anything from U.S. naval tactics in Vietnam to Shakespeare’s sonnets to the ups and downs of the San Diego Chargers. He enjoyed fraternizing with enlisted men and occasionally jumped into a brawl at some wharf-side dive. One longtime friend aptly described him as an “intellectual barbarian.”

In the submarine corps he earned good job reviews as well as the respect of many