Part of Harry’s skeleton buried with honors
Remains had been donated to medical examiner’s office as teaching tool, but veterans reached out to reclaim brother
Harry Bubolz died homeless and alone. As I shared in a column last year, his skeleton was donated by his estranged family to the Milwaukee County medical examiner’s office as a teaching tool.
That previous article mentioned that Harry served in the military. This caught the attention of fellow veterans and their advocates, who expressed a desire to get their brother out of perpetual morgue duty and into a veterans cemetery with full military honors.
They felt like he had been left behind.
On Thursday, six years after Harry’s partly skeletonized remains were found in a wooded area near McKinley Marina, several of his bones in cremated form were laid to rest at Southern Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Union Grove.
The medical examiner is keeping the rest and will continue to take Harry into classrooms to teach students about forensic science.
About 20 aging veterans gathered in the chapel at the cemetery for the Army hymn, a rifle volley, taps and a flag-folding ceremony. None of them knew Harry, but rather were summoned by the cemetery to make sure someone occupied the pews.
A wooden urn, crafted by an artist and donated for situations like this one, was then taken to the columbarium and placed in a niche — section H, bay 6, site 1J if you want to visit.
I stood alongside four men who said their final goodbye: Jim Duff, director of the Milwaukee County Veterans Service Office; George Banda, junior vice commander of Wiscon-
sin’s Military Order of the Purple Heart; Tim Baranzyk, commander of Greendale American Legion Post 416; and Jim Sullivan, director of Milwaukee County Child Support Services.
“He died alone, but he’s not alone today,” Duff said.
Born in 1942, Harry grew up on a farm in Manitowoc County. After earning a bachelor’s degree in economics at UW-Madison, he served in the Army as an intelligence special agent in Panama’s canal zone in the 1960s, a tense time as Panama pushed back against American control of the canal.
In the years and decades that followed, Harry cut himself off from his family. He lived in Nevada for a while but returned to Wisconsin. He never married or had children, and he presumably battled demons that convinced him it was a good idea to live and sleep on a shower curtain in the woods along Milwaukee’s lakefront.
It was an added indignity, some veterans felt, that his skeleton became an educational demonstrator, even though he never expressed a desire for that to happen. One VA doctor who contacted me offered to swap the medical examiner his own skeletal remains for Harry’s, “once I’m done with them.”
Duff, the veterans office director, contacted the medical examiner’s office to express concerns on behalf of veterans who preferred a military burial for Harry.
It wasn’t long before Brett Funeral Home contacted Duff to say the medical examiner had handed over several bones — from the feet and hands, I’m told — for cremation. In May 2017, the funeral home gave a small container of ashes to Duff.
“His remains are still here on my credenza in my office,” Duff told me in March of this year. Months had passed as he reached out to Harry’s nephew and closest living relative, Dean Bubolz of Reedsville, to ask as required by law if he was interested in claiming the remains.
At first, Dean, who had signed over the skeleton to the medical examiner on behalf of the family, did not approve of the idea of separating the remains and burying part of them.
But when I contacted him recently, he said he had come around to thinking that his uncle would appreciate the military honors. No one from the family planned to attend the service, he told me.
“Everything was actually given to the medical examiner. So whatever they wanted to do, that was up to them,” he said.
A temporary ID tag was attached Thursday to Harry’s cemetery site. Within two months, a permanent marker will be installed on the front.
Its message is appropriate for this veteran who was lost but now is found:
“Home at last, rest in peace.”