Bucky R. Lord, Staff Writer
"Mommy spanked me for dropping a jar of preserves in the pantry."
So began the writing career of Bucky R. Lord, a relatively brief 2-page report to social services workers that launched the tender-fannied 6-year-old on a lifelong pursuit of telling it like it is.
Born in 1962 in Gary, Ind., Ellery Buckminster Righteous Lord determined at a young age not to follow in the footsteps of mother Queenie, a steelworker and part-time professional bowler, or father Phineas, who sank the family's meager earnings into a failing scrapbooking enterprise.
No, "Bucky," as he soon came to be called by his enemies, had a better path – the written word. As he watched his mother taken away on child-abuse charges, he realized the awesome power of the pen and the truth it brought to light.
It wasn't long before Bucky's love for writing again ruffled feathers. His 2nd-grade piece, "Mrs. Stein takes 14 smoke breaks each day" earned him an "F", an important lesson for Bucky on the price of telling the truth. More happily, his 5th-grade essay, "Miss Calliope says the shop teacher's looking for something under her dress (but he's been down there an awfully long time)," got an "A" from Fran Calliope, although it remains in her possession to this day.
The conformity of middle and high school were not kind to a hard-nosed dealer in truth, and during those years, Bucky's spirit was squelched as teachers steered him towards more innocuous projects. He found "Go, Wildcats, Go!" and "This is your brain on drugs" (stolen years later in a 1985 national ad campaign) distinctly unsatisfying.
College opened new worlds for a strapping young Bucky hungering for a meaningful outlet for his talents. At Clayton Community College in Fargo, N.D., he found a hotbed of "groovy" ideas stirring in the political and cultural upheaval that dominated the Plains states in 1978. Bell bottoms flapped wildly and massive shirt collars pointed the way to a new way of thinking.
It was in this environment that Bucky wrote his most incendiary piece, "How the Reds are infiltrating the Fargo-Moorhead FFA." In it, he charged that Russian spies disguised as bucktoothed farm youth were producing inferior show cattle, thereby crushing the morale of Americans by sabotaging their pride in their livestock.
The reaction wasn't pretty, and the term paper earned him powerful enemies in the ag community. It was at this point that Bucky, typically known among friends as "Ellery-y," earned the nickname that would follow him through the rest of his life. (He also had to give up his beloved vanity license plate, "LRE&I4E")
Bucky's unflinching attack on communist espionage in animal husbandry cost him a dairy sciences degree at Clayton, but it also caught the attention of hard-boiled newspaper editor Rory O'Surley of the Bloomington-Normal Panta-Gazette. O'Surley immediately brought Bucky on board to take on the hard-hitting issues of central Illinois – as arts and entertainment editor.
Bucky took to his new task with vigor. He began to churn out a series of insightful music reviews, including "Men Without Hats: The next Beatles," "A Flock of Seagulls: The next Eagles" and "DeYoung to leave Styx? 'Don’t Let It End'!" Once again, however, Bucky found trouble with his no-nonsense approach, this time in an article on the tremendous success of the Paul McCartney-Michael Jackson superduo, which he innocently dubbed "The Jackles." As luck would have it, it was precisely the billing McCartney and Jackson had in mind for their next joint album, the ultimately shelved "Sgt. Thriller’s Lonely Billy Jean Shears," and representatives for the two massively popular singers accused Bucky of plagiarism. The charge didn’t stick, but the inference did. Bucky was finished at the Panta-Gazette.
Spurned by the agricultural and entertainment writing communities, Bucky got it right the third time. With the explosion of belligerently aggressive right-wing talk radio in the late 1980s, Bucky finally discovered a field best suited to his penchant for wild, unsubstantiated blustering – politics. A print journalist to the core, Bucky wasn’t about to share the mic with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, but there wasn’t a print outlet in America that could handle Bucky’s truth. Instead, he concocted a new format through which he reported independently via typewritten, stream-of-consciousness tirades carbon-copied and distributed to loyal readers through the postal service. He dubbed this groundbreaking medium "Ssmailing" – short for "mass mailing."
Throughout the '90s, readers were treated to sporadic issues of "The Good Lord" (later rebranded "My Sweet Lord") that delved into the hot topics of an era that witnessed the end of communism, unprecedented economic growth and a general peace and prosperity unseen in decades. Bucky didn’t shy away from scratching at the evil behind all the good times. Among his more noted articles:
The 2000s saw an older, wiser Bucky return to established media. He cited the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as instrumental in the emergence of this kinder, gentler Bucky, despite his insistence that "it's obvious the government made the whole thing up."
Bucky's longstanding resistance to online media finally crumbled in 2003 with his addition to USA Tomorrow’s stable of unstable reporters. His first article, "Who's next? Putin, you want some of this?" heralded the triumph of U.S. forces in Iraq. Unfortunately, it was not published due to the fact that after two months of unsuccessfully attempts to link his Commodore 64 with the Internet, the piece was outdated. Bucky remains on staff as an unpaid intern.
A confirmed bachelor his entire life, Bucky continues to "court" Lewinsky and has written repeatedly of his desire to see her "in that blue dress" on their wedding day.
