Helm Would Have Disliked Funeral Fuss, Mourners Say

As Buck Helm was buried in a small mountain cemetery Tuesday, friends eulogized the longshoreman as a kindhearted man who would have thought the attention to his death was overblown.

At his funeral in this town of 3,500 people in the Trinity Alps, his son, Marc, said Helm, who survived for 28 days after his dramatic rescue from freeway earthquake rubble in Oakland last month, “lived with nothing, so his children could have everything.”

Marc, 22, tearfully told how his father wanted his children to stay in Weaverville rather than “live in the violence of the city.” Helm, 58, a member of the longshoreman’s union, supported his family by working on weekdays as a clerk for various shipping companies at the Port of Oakland--”and never once complained about the commute,” Marc said.

“We are very proud of him,” his former wife, Lorene, said, speaking briefly and emotionally at his funeral. The service lasted only a few minutes, and the family drove to a cemetery 30 miles away where Helm was buried next to his mother.

His funeral attracted about 100 friends and family members, plus more than 20 reporters. Some locals, like Dale Larson, attended simply because Helm’s rescue after 90 hours in the rubble of the fallen double-deck Nimitz Freeway structure struck a chord.

Larson had only crossed paths with Helm, but felt a kinship with him. A few years ago, Larson was badly injured when a car hit him. He felt the warmth of Weaverville when 150 people showed up to donate blood.

“It’s like we were teased,” Larson said of Helm’s death. “It’s like you lose something, then get it back, and then it is taken again. It was cruel, very cruel to his family.”

Perhaps because Helm spent much of his time in the Bay Area, he was not well known in Weaverville, an old gold mining town now known for its proximity to the prime steelhead trout waters of the Trinity River. Some people who knew of Helm said the burly, 240-pound man had a reputation for being a hard drinker who could be overbearing.

But Dan Tennyson saw Helm’s “tender, loving, soft side.” His daughter played with Helm’s youngest child, Desiree, 12, and Tennyson recalled that “there was a sparkle in his eye when he was with kids.”

“The community is not trying to philosophize about his death. Other people can do that,” said Tennyson, who is pastor at the Weaverville Church of the Nazarene, and brought his daughter to the funeral. “We just rejoiced at his rescue, and we are saddened by his death.”

The locals had found cause to cheer when they learned that one of their own had miraculously been pulled from the freeway. “This one’s for you,” a sign at the New York saloon had read. A local dance band, High Mountain Express, had written an ode to Helm, as a symbol that there’s a “hero on every corner.” Students at Weaverville Elementary School, the school that Desiree attends, raised $1,200 for earthquake relief, partly from the proceeds of weekly ice cream sales.

School Ties

Helm once spent his state income tax refund to buy ice cream for students at the school. He also helped tend a planter box in front of the school.

“That kind of shows his character. His heart was in the right place,” said Dan Goularte, acting principal and superintendent of the school.

Many people who knew him said Helm would not have wanted such a fuss.

“I don’t think he would have thought it was that big a deal. He would have thought it was overdone,” said Nancy Pitz, owner of the Sawmill, a bar he frequented.

Helm lived in a customized van when he was in the Bay Area, a trip of about 250 miles that he made once a week. He had been driving a Chevrolet Sprint on Oct. 17, when the earthquake hit. Helm remained trapped, his seat belt on, in the front seat for 90 hours before he was found and pulled free.

His chief physician, Dr. Tom McDonald, had been hopeful that Helm would survive. But McDonald said a final infection caused sepsis, or blood poisoning, and that apparently placed too much strain on Helm’s already diseased heart. Helm was the 42nd victim of the collapsed freeway, and was the 67th death attributed to the earthquake.