Vets Heed the Call : World War I Bugler, 97, Will Play Taps Today

When Fred Hummer plays taps today, the notes from his bugle will harken back to the Great War when he was an eager Army recruit, too young to fight, but just old enough to join the 22nd Infantry Drum and Bugle Corps.

The snowy-haired, 97-year-old veteran still plays the same bugle he placed to his lips each morning some 80 years ago. His job was to play reveille, waking the troops at the Army base where he was stationed in Virginia. Hummer has since played at scores of memorial services and funerals, using the same 10-inch-long, tarnished brass horn.

“When I was discharged, they said, ‘Gimme your sidearms, but you can keep the bugle,’ ” said Hummer, who lives by himself in a Fountain Valley mobile home park.

Hummer was all of 17 years old when he left his tough Brooklyn neighborhood to enlist in the Army. He had to bring a note from his mother.

“In World War I you had to be 21 to be drafted. They told me, ‘If your mother signs the papers, we’ll take you. Otherwise, you have to wait until you’re 21.’

“I took the paper home; my mother signed it and I brought it back. They said, ‘What can you do?’ And I told them I was a bugler in a drum corps and they said, ‘Good. We need buglers.’ ”

Hummer learned how to play the instrument after joining a drum and bugle corps at the Catholic grade school he attended in Brooklyn. He spent World War I alternating between bugle playing and guard duty.

“He guarded the Statue of Liberty for a while,” said daughter Joan Pfeiffer, a 62-year-old retired nurse who lives in Palm Desert. “One of his stories is that he was the one who found the crack in the arm of the Statue of Liberty.”

But Pfeiffer warns that her father often embellishes his wartime exploits, encouraged by admirers who are eager to believe even his most fanciful tales.

Hummer, who had a 43-year career with the Railway Express Agency after he left the Army, has collected quite a few admirers over the years from numerous appearances and performances throughout Southern California and beyond. He was featured in this year’s Huntington Beach Fourth of July Parade and he plays regularly for patients at the Long Beach veterans hospital. He also opens each biweekly meeting of American Legion Post 555 in Midway City with a bugle call.

“He’s the only active member we have from World War I,” said post member Ole Harris, 70, a Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War. “He’s always blowing his bugle for everybody. He sort of makes everybody else perk up.”

Post officials believe Hummer may be the only surviving World War I bugler in the United States.

He is scheduled to play today at 11 a.m. Veterans Day services at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills. And the gigs just keep on coming. His friend and unofficial booking agent, Long Beach resident Ski Demski, a man listed in the “Guiness Book of World Records” as owner of the world’s largest American flag, drives him to performances. Hummer stopped driving at age 93.

“He played taps for George Burns at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on the night he was buried,” Demski said. “He’s just the greatest. I really enjoy listening to him.”

Demski took Hummer to Washington two years ago where Hummer played at a memorial service at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery.

Though Hummer squawks a misplaced note now and then, the sound of his lone bugle is a stirring reminder of wars gone by. It is the one constant theme in a life begun at the end of the 19th century.

He does not foresee a time when his playing will stop.

“The main thing is practice so I can keep my lip in shape,” he said. “I’ve gotta keep practicing. Otherwise, I won’t be able to blow the thing at all.”