At 94 years old, Walter Buescher has written four books and is working on his fifth, has visited every state in the union plus much of Europe and Canada, has clocked 2.5 million miles on car odometers without a scratch or ticket to his name, and has lived through what he calls “the glory years” of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Walt is one of those laymen whose love for the church has been a thread that weaves together all aspects of his life.

 

Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Mo.

He now lives in the Milwaukee area and recently saw an ad from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis in the South Wisconsin News that triggered an “I remember when” moment.

 

Walt remembers being present at the dedication of the seminary on a hot, humid day in 1926. “I was a boy of about 12 years old,” he recalls. “About 30 train cars brought people from all over the country to the dedication. It was beastly hot and attendees consumed bottles of soft drinks that were served from tank cars. That farmland area west of St. Louis had no trees or grass,” he said.

 

He described the building as being “like something you’d find at Harvard.” It was made of Indiana limestone, Vermont slate and had leaded glass windows. “It was a gothic building in the cornfields,” he said. The building pictured in the newspaper ad includes Luther Tower, which was completed in 1966.

 

Walter’s father, the son of an Iowa farmer, attended what today is Concordia University Chicago. There he met a girl from St. Louis, married, graduated from college and taught for 39 years at St. Paul, Bremen, Ind., one of the founding congregations of the LCMS. He also played the organ, directed the choir, kept the furnace going and mowed the grass.

 

Walt planned to follow in his father’s footsteps, but because he couldn’t play the piano, a must for teachers of that day, he went instead to Valparaiso University, graduating in 1935. In the midst of the Great Depression, he found himself literally walking the streets of LaPorte, Ind., when he heard that Allis Chalmers Corporation was looking for workers. He began working at AC in 1936, retiring in 1975 as sales promotions manager after 39 years of service.

 

When LCMS was 100 years old in 1947, young Walter and his wife, Norma, had started a family and were settled in Toledo, Ohio. They were present at Synod’s centennial celebration at Soldier Field in Chicago.

 

Allis Chalmers transferred Walt to its corporate headquarters in Milwaukee in 1955. The family resided in Brookfield and was founding members of Elm Grove Lutheran Church. Walter remembers the little white building where the church began.

 

“We added 10-20 members each month. Victor A. Bartelt was our pastor and I was president of the supper club,” said Walt. Because Walter’s job required that he travel most of the time, the Bueschers, who then included three sons and two daughters, took summer vacations to many of the places Walter had seen on his business trips. Many outings were by car, which added to the millions of driving miles he has logged.

Walt and Norma retired to the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee. They built a unique house that was heated and cooled with ground water, and also helped build a LCMS congregation in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.

 

The church began as a mission congregation of Holy Trinity, Seymour, Tenn., served by now retired Rev. John Johnson. Services were held across from the Holiday Inn in Pigeon Forge, in what is still a wedding chapel, in hopes that the location would attract travelers. The area is host to 20 million visitors a year to view the natural beauty and attractions such as Dollywood, said Walter. The fledgling congregation also grew through the evangelism outreach efforts of a group of seminarians from Fort Wayne who rang doorbells in the area. It eventually merged with St. Paul, Sevierville, Tenn.

 

His sales work with Allis Chalmers required that Walt lead countless meetings and do public speaking. At the time when “instant everything” was the buzz word of the day, Walt was approached to write a book reflecting his career expertise. That resulted in the 1982 publication of Instant Meeting Planner.

 

Walt has always enjoyed humor and laughter and peppers his conversations with amusing stories and one-liners. He began collecting humorous sayings and jokes when he was 15 and has two file drawers filled with 850 index cards containing his findings. In 1984 he published Walt Buescher’s Library of Humor, a collection of 398 topics from accident to zoo. And, in 1996, Religious Humor was published to provide pastors, teachers and other public speakers with bits of humor to add sparkle to sermons, bulletins, speeches and lessons. His book Plow Peddler, published in 1991, is a history of Allis Chalmers.

 

“Being an author doesn’t make you money, but it makes you feel good,” he quipped.

 

Today Walt is completing a book titled With Friends like These, a collection of short biographies of the hundreds of people he has met, some famous, some extremely interesting, some notorious and some just plain good friends. Widowed since 2003, he resides at a retirement community in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, because his “children got tired of driving 700 miles every time I got sick,” he said. He is again a member of Elm Grove Lutheran Church.