Today’s students would hardly recognize Robert Buckingham’s 1968 middle school commute. First, he preferred walking from his family’s old McGill Avenue trailer to the school on Center Street, now occupied by city offices. On the way, he would pick up his friend Adrian (and a couple of his mom’s cigarettes, unbeknownst to her) before passing Fern’s Bar and Café on North 2nd, where at times a caged monkey would launch its own excrement at the boys.
“This was the old Moab,” Buckingham said as he drove through town, recalling memories on every corner, every street. “Some wild stuff happened.”
In Buckingham’s lockdown-born memoir, “A Shade Western,” he chronicles these wild memories throughout the West as a nomadic family with four boys and a father who worked oil rigs from drill site to drill site.
“The pandemic gave me some extra time to kill, so I started digging through old photos and calendars and this memoir was born,” Buckingham said in the preface of his book. “To be honest, my wife got tired of hearing the same stories over and over again and finally told me to WRITE IT DOWN!”
The book consists of Buckingham’s stories (edited by Janet Lowe Buckingham, his wife), journal records kept by his parents from 1954 to 1973, and several photographs from these years. The Buckinghams bounced around Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, and Colorado until finally settling permanently in Moab in 1967.
In person, Buckingham’s vivid stories liven up conversations about growing up here: how the sloughs used to rise up to the highway, his encounter with Ed Abbey, visits to old diners and candy stores, the front yards they used to play in, how the roads looked before Highway 191 was built.
“A Shade Western” is no different, offering a hilarious and emotional tribute to his family and a Moab long-gone; full to the brim with good, bad, and ugly scenes of adolescence.
“I’ve had the ‘gift of gab’ since I was a young man,” Buckingham said. “I think it comes from the fact that I attended twelve schools during my childhood and learned from an early age on the playground that storytelling was a gift. I think I used it as a coping mechanism.”
In the memoir, these stories often revolve around the many front porches inhabited by the Buckinghams, from memories of friendly neighbors and hot summer popsicles to screaming matches with parents.
Buckingham’s brothers Jack, Dan, and Tim also play central roles. Nearly drowning at their father’s swim lessons, starting fires, and getting drunk on the Greyhound bus: the four boys encountered the unthinkable together.
One of Buckingham’s high school gigs was at the town mortuary, a field he has returned to as Sexton for Grand County Cemeteries, after a long career in radiology.
“My relationship with death has changed working at a place like this,” Buckingham said on a walk through Sunset Cemetery, pointing out the graves of old friends and community figures. “People are dying to come and see me.”
Buckingham’s only living relative is his younger brother Tim. The afterword of “A Shade Western” commemorates his older brothers and parents and pulls readers to Buckingham’s present life in Moab with an emotional contrast.
“I’m not writing this in anticipation of people feeling sorry for me for my weird upbringing,” Buckingham writes, “I enjoyed my strange childhood… with three brothers to share it with and two parents who basically left us to become whatever we would become. My wife says I was raised by wolves. Growing up I knew no difference in my upbringing than the next kid on the block.”
“And I’m back in Moab with no regrets, no remorse, just recalling a crazy ride growing up with some very interesting characters.”
This crazy ride with interesting characters waits for readers on shelves at Back of Beyond Bookstore (83 North Main Street), Dave’s Corner Market (401 Mill Creek Drive), and the Moab Mailing & Copy Center (375 South Main Street).
Jack, Robert, Dan, and Tim Buckingham pose in front of their trailer in West Moab in the early 1960s. [Courtesy]
