Friendship survives decades and faraway death

By LORNA THACKERAY Of The Gazette Staff

Word circulated last month among cyber-connected members of the Sheridan (Wyo.) High School Class of 1969 that Earl Plumbtree was dead.

Rumor had it that their enigmatic classmate had been murdered in a foreign country, probably in South America, where some said he had once served as a Peace Corps volunteer.

"We were doing a search for him when we heard he might be in Honduras," said John Thies, a classmate who is a chef in Alaska. "I e-mailed all the consulates who might know anything. We had spent a lot of time searching for him."

"We" includes classmate Tony Marshall, a real estate agent in Polson, and Mary Wilson of Sheridan, who was a year behind them in high school.

They followed his trail from Billings to Houston and on to California.

There was no murder, but Plumbtree was dead, Marshall found out.

Word came from the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Jan. 20. Earl Plumbtree, 57, died of natural causes in La Ceiba, a city on the Caribbean coast. No one had claimed the remains.

Plumbtree had been adopted as an infant by Dorothy and Eldon Plumbtree. He had no siblings and his parents have been dead 15 years or more. If there are surviving relatives, no one knows where they are.

But Plumbtree did have friends, many of whom hadn't seen him in the 40 years since walking out Sheridan High's doors for the last time. And they did not want him buried in an unmarked grave thousands of miles away.

"It's just our feeling that rather than him being buried in a pauper's grave, we'd bring him back to be buried with his parents," Marshall said. "It's just friends doing something nice for a friend. It isn't any more than that."

But it was more than that. There were calls and e-mails back and forth to embassy officials in Honduras and dealings in Spanish with the funeral home where his body had been kept since his death Nov. 3.

And there was the $3,000 it would take to have the remains cremated, flown back to Wyoming and buried, with a headstone, in Sheridan Municipal Cemetery.

Thies had built an e-mail list that included many classmates, and organizers of the 40th reunion that is planned for July had more addresses. Soon an electronic message was flying to far corners of the country where the 300-plus members of the class had landed.

Money poured in to Wilson, who had agreed to act as treasurer for the fund. More contributions than they needed were soon in the bank, and money to cover the costs of bringing Plumbtree home should be on its way to Honduras any day, Thies said. He's hoping the remains will be repatriated this month. Donations exceeding expenses will be used for the class reunion.

When the class gets together in July, Plumbtree's friends plan an informal grave site memorial. There is talk of planting plum trees around Sheridan in his memory.

Wilson described her old friend as "so damn intelligent and so kind. He was brilliant. I think that's why the response has been so good."

• • •

Plumbtree is a hard man to pin down. Marshall said he was born in Cheyenne and lived in Cody with his adoptive parents until eighth grade, when he moved to Sheridan.

They were close in high school, "sort of the party guys," Marshall said. "Everybody knew him. He was a conspicuous guy. He was sort of transportable between groups."

Plumbtree could hang with the jocks and the cowboys, the science geeks and musicians, and "went from one flaming romance to another," Marshall remembered. "He was very serious about his girlfriends."

After high school, they lost track of each other. Through Thies, they reconnected last year, exchanging e-mails and phone calls. Plumbtree was in Houston then.

Thies said he and Plumbtree in high school had a common love of music. They saw each other only occasionally after graduation, but stayed in touch until Plumbtree's e-mails abruptly ceased at the end of October, about the time he left on his final journey to Central America.

"We'd sit and talk for hours about music," Thies remembered. "I bought him an iPod just before he went to Honduras and put some music on it. He was pretty jazzed about that."

Plumbtree was a slow convert to technology.

"Earl was always one to shun technology, dismissing it as wasteful and needless, except for the automobile he was never without," Thies said. "Our biggest argument took place in Laramie, Wyo., on the night of the first moon landing (1969). While I was marveling at the engineering it took to accomplish this amazing feat, he was insisting that the money would have been better spent feeding the poor and unfortunate."

Thies said that after high school, Plumbtree joined the Peace Corps. He later returned to Sheridan and worked road construction in Montana and Wyoming. Plumbtree smashed his hip in a work-related accident that caused him problems the rest of his life, Thies said.

Friends said Plumbtree spent a good deal of his life on the road. He taught English in Mexico and traveled in Colombia and Bolivia.

There was trouble, too. He did time in federal prison; the U.S. Bureau of Prisons records show he was released in 1990 but don't say what his crime was or how long he served. In August 1999, Montana records show, he became eligible for parole from Alpha House in Billings on three forgery counts.

Plumbtree apparently liked to be unburdened and mobile. He never married or acquired property.

"He kept it very small," Thies said. "He didn't own a house. >From what we were told at the embassy, all he had in his hotel room were his clothes."

The room he rented in California before he left for Honduras contained little of value, either.

"It was typical of Earl to travel light and keep only the minimal amount of possessions," Thies told their friends in an e-mail.

Plumbtree had a gift for languages and was fluent in Spanish. Records at MSUB show that he earned a bachelor of arts in languages in April 2004. While in school and after he graduated, Plumbtree worked in a Billings copy machine store, Thies said.

Classmate Jon Scherry may have been the last of Plumbtree's Sheridan friends to see him. He stayed with Scherry when passing through once or twice a year; the last time was last summer.

Plumbtree never was very forthcoming about his life, Scherry said. If Plumbtree had wanted him to know more, Scherry figured, Plumbtree would have told him.

It isn't clear when or why Plumbtree left Billings for Houston and then California. Details of the trip to Honduras are sketchy, too. Thies said Plumbtree had been there before, perhaps many times. He'd heard that Plumbtree may have gone with a friend who was a scuba diver or was to meet a scuba diver there. But no one reported him missing to Honduran authorities or contacted the embassy.

The hotelkeeper who helped him get to the hospital apparently told medical personal that Plumbtree was in the country to try to establish a foster home for kids.

Edwina Gagitto, an embassy spokeswoman contacted by The Gazette, said a person who had assisted Plumbtree reported that the American was trying to buy a house in La Ceiba for that purpose.

Whatever his reason for the Honduran sojourn, Plumbtree clearly was not doing well by the time he got there. He was diabetic and checked himself into a private hospital for a few days. Feeling better, he went back to his hotel.

But he soon was sick enough that someone at the hotel took him to a public hospital. Thies speculated that Plumbtree went to a public hospital because he was low on money.

"Mr. Plumbtree was hospitalized on Nov. 1, 2008, at Hospital Atlantida and passed away on Nov. 3, 2008, of a septic shock due to pneumonia," Gagitto wrote in an e-mail to The Gazette.

The embassy was notified and Plumbtree's body was removed to a morgue, while efforts to track down next of kin proved futile.

Closest kin appear to be those who as teenagers who slogged through the tumultuous 1960s with him.

It was easy to become unmoored in a world where they could not vote or have a legal drink, but could be drafted to fight in Vietnam - a bloodbath the country was so ambivalent about that it was referred to as a "conflict" instead of a war. Anthems for a generation pounded a driving rock 'n' roll beat on eight-track tape players, and hundreds of thousands massed at Woodstock to sing along with Country Joe, "Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box." Civil rights, race riots, assassinations, the 1968 Democratic convention and Richard Nixon - a bewildering watershed of an era that forged a bond for a generation that itself was a watershed.

Even in cowboy country, the queasiness of shifting times - of unstable ground - shaped a unique relationship among many students in the Class of 1969. Maybe no relative, living or dead, could understand Earl Plumbtree and his restless spirit as well as they.

Published on Thursday, February 12, 2009. http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2009/02/12/news/wyoming/31-friends.txt