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'Wonderful dancer' ends life as 'walking wounded'

Those who knew Mel Luebbe plan memorial

BY PETER J. WASSON • WAUSAU DAILY HERALD • AUGUST 3, 2009

If you've spent much time in downtown Wausau, you probably knew Mel Luebbe. Or at least knew of him.Luebbe was the guy who trudged around day and night, blaze-orange stocking cap rolled up over his graying strawberry hair and cigarette clenched in his teeth.

Occasionally, he would talk to strangers. Or to himself. Or to parked cars.

And that's how most people knew him before his death in mid-July, as an unusual but essentially harmless old man they'd see on trips through the city, maybe shouting at them as they drove down Scott Street or walking the Pedestrian Mall and cursing under his breath.

He wasn't always that way.

So far as anyone can determine, Luebbe, 67, had no real friends or surviving close family members. His stepbrother, John, was chief deputy of the Marathon County Sheriff's Department until 1982, when he retired and moved to Texas. John died there about 10 years ago, according to Wausau Police Officer Mark Klein, leaving Luebbe without immediate next of kin.

By most accounts, Luebbe was an exceptional high school student. He was a member of the slide rule, archery and projection clubs at Wausau High School, where he graduated in 1961 with classmate Ginger Dennison.

"What do I remember about him?" Dennison said. "Oh, I know he loved to dance. Years ago, I would see him at the Labor Temple on Sunday afternoons, and he was always there. He was very light on his feet, and you wouldn't expect it because he was a pretty big guy. He loved rock 'n' roll -- jitterbugging -- and country-western. He was just a wonderful dancer."

After high school, Luebbe earned an associate's degree in business and accounting from the school now known as Northcentral Technical College.

After college, tracing Luebbe's history becomes more difficult. Many of those acquainted with him say he fought in Vietnam. Klein, the Wausau cop who grew to know Luebbe while walking the downtown beat, said Luebbe told stories of serving as a jet mechanic.

David Keeffe, legal assistant for a Wausau attorney and one of the handful of people who befriended Luebbe, has found discharge records proving Luebbe was in the Army Reserves until 1970, but Keeffe can find no verification of active duty service in Vietnam.

After that, Mel worked at a gasoline station in Chicago. Or at a local factory. Or doing odd jobs for Hall Motors, the downtown auto dealer that once stood where Burger King is now.

No one is really sure of the details. All people can say is that somewhere, somehow, something went wrong in Mel Luebbe's mind.

"He did a little bit of snow shoveling for us when I got to Wausau," said the Rev. Don Baumann, former pastor at downtown's St. Paul's United Church of Christ, who moved to Black Creek three years ago.

"When I was installed as pastor in the fall of '79, he came into the church one day and made a ruckus in the back, and the church elders actually had him arrested. In the intervening years, he would come into the narthex and stand and watch the service, and what he really wanted to do was deliver one of his envelopes full of his writings, strange writings, about conspiracies about the United States government."

Dennison and others believe Luebbe was injured in Vietnam or in an industrial accident. Baumann heard it was drugs that scrambled his brain, or simple mental illness. Keeffe said Luebbe displayed all the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

Whatever the cause, for three decades, Luebbe was alone and disconnected from the world -- with a few exceptions -- and apparently surviving on disability payments.

Always Walking

He lived in a series of downtown apartments and rooming houses, from the old Central Hotel on Scott Street to the apartment in which he spent his final days. And he lived on downtown's sidewalks.

"A friend of mine who worked at the mall, Polly Kurth, she worked in the parking ticket booth until 8 or 9 at night, and she lived five or six blocks from the mall so she walked home," Dennison said. "He would walk her home, but not with her. He would walk across the street, or way behind her, to make sure she got home. She said she always felt safe going home because he was there to protect her."

Luebbe didn't drive. He walked everywhere, except when former classmates such as Dennison would stop and give him a lift.

"He'd make his walk through Scott Street Steak & Pub when it was open," Klein said. "He'd have a beer and walk out. Mostly, I just saw him walking."

Those who took the time to speak with Luebbe at the pub learned more. That's where Keeffe became acquainted with him.

"I certainly include myself among those who took the time to find out who was in there," Keeffe said. "When you did that to Mel, he never forgot it. He always greeted you with a twinkle in his eye. He wasn't a dummy. He was very smart and had an infatuation with mathematics as they related to conspiracy theories. All that muttering and stuff was his way of keeping people at a distance. But if you fought through it, he appreciated it."

At one point, Klein was called to an incident at Luebbe's rooming house and he stopped to chat with Mel. In his room, Luebbe had an assortment of model airplanes he had constructed and painted.

He spent hours and hours at the downtown library doing research and taking notes about Vietnam and the government.

And he would walk.

'We'll Do It For Mel'

But sometime in mid-July, Luebbe vanished from downtown streets. On July 25, police were called to the apartment building on McClellan Street where a neighbor, sensing something was amiss, had found Luebbe dead in his bathtub.

He had perished a week or 10 days earlier of natural causes, according to police reports. In his wallet was a card directing police to call St. Paul's in case of an emergency.

"We had a number of people like Mel downtown, what we called the walking wounded," said Baumann, the former St. Paul's pastor. "It's just a sad story."

Keeffe and others aren't willing to let Luebbe's life end so sadly.

On Thursday, St. Paul's will host a memorial service for the man no one really knew. Peterson-Kraemer Funeral Home is donating cremation and burial, and downtown florist Evolutions in Design will provide flowers. A collection plate will be passed to fund a grave marker Keeffe hopes to purchase.

"An anonymous downtown bank has agreed to provide a luncheon afterward," Keeffe said. "That's the best we can do for him now. Other family we've contacted, they want nothing to do with him. So, if they won't do it, we'll do it for Mel."

Mel Luebbe never really had friends, just acquaintances who came to know him and accept his eccentric ways.

You'd never know that, though, by the crowd of people who turned out Thursday to say farewell to the 67-year-old character who forged a life on downtown Wausau's streets.

Classmates from high school. Local merchants. A city bus driver, a landlord, and people who only had waved to Luebbe as he made his way through the city. Almost 200 of them filled the pews at St. Paul's United Church of Christ to share stories of a man and reflect on their own lives. Read previous featured remembrances.

"That first story in the newspaper, it said he had no family," said Michael Mucha, a 57-year-old retired factory worker who knew Luebbe for years. "Well, look around this church. This was his family."

Luebbe was known primarily as the rusty-haired man who every day strode the sidewalks of the city's center, with an orange cap pulled down over his ears and growling or cursing to himself. He was found dead in his apartment on July 25 with no surviving close relatives.

Luebbe was born and raised in Wausau, left to serve in the Army Reserves and later returned home where he lived in a series of rooming houses and apartments. At some point, he was stricken with mental illness.

"He was a regular fixture downtown with habits that made him hard to ignore," St. Paul's pastor, the Rev. Philip Schneider, said to a round of chuckles that echoed off the stone walls of his church.

Those habits were fodder for dozens of Mel stories. He was always short of money. He always was kind to children. And he always considered himself a ladies' man.

One week, Luebbe walked around town with one half of his face clean-shaven and the other conspicuously bearded.

"People asked him why, and he said, 'Some of the ladies like it this way, some of them like it that way. I have to keep 'em all happy,'" said David Keeffe, a Wausau legal assistant who by virtue of sharing a landlord with Luebbe came to help organize Thursday's service.

Along with the laughs, though, stories of Mel also contained pain and guilt.

"Some of you laughed at him. Some of you were afraid of him. Some of you crossed to the other side of the street to avoid him," Schneider said. "For all of you, I am sorry."

A handful of people took the time to befriend Luebbe.

"When I first came to town, I actually called the police on him," said Mucha, the retired factory worker. "He was sleeping on a bench at the bus stop in the middle of winter. I called and said, 'Get this man a place to stay, or he'll freeze to death.' Later, I got to know him. But it took three years of talking to him before he'd even talk back to me."

The mental illness that isolated Luebbe in life became, in ways, the message of his death.

"Just remember, he could be any of us, any one of us sitting here," said Karen Zumann, a Wausau High School classmate of Luebbe's. "There but for the grace of God go I."

Rest in Peace Melvin

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