Vets featured in Waterloo Halloween spirit walk

Posted by Pat Kinney on Tuesday, October 13, 2026

Mendoor Smith stands in character in a Union Army uniform at the grave of Black Civil War soldier George Butler of Waterloo and tells his story in the first person during the Grout Museum District’s annual “Strolling With the Spirits” event at Waterloo Cemetery (Pat Kinney photo)


WATERLOO — Verle Buck survived June 6, 1944. He died June 7 2018 — D-Day plus 74 years and one day.

He never forgot that June 6 when he and thousands of others became men or memories on a beach called Omaha in the pivotal World War II invasion of Normandy, France. 

Evan “Curly” Hultman died five months short of his 100th birthday in 2025. But for a twist of fate, he may not have lived past his 20th in 1945. 

As a young Army officer he uncovered stockpiles of Japanese suicide planes — cigar-shaped flying bombs — that would have been used against him and his comrades in an invasion of the Japanese home islands.

George Butler did not survive his war. Lured with false promises into enlisting in the Union Army, the 43-year-old widowed barber served honorably with a Black infantry unit in Arkansas. He and a third of his comrades perished. He died of disease Dec. 31, 1864 and was survived by an orphaned son. His grave and story was re-discovered by retired Waterloo teacher and historian Olabelle Reed nearly 150 years after his passing.



Buck, Hultman and Butler were three of the late Black Hawk County residents of note featured in this year’s “Strolling with the Spirits” event at Waterloo Cemetery, in multiple presentations Saturday, Oct. 10. The event is put on annually during Halloween season by the Grout Museum District, which operates the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum.

Museum staff and community volunteers researched and role-played the various individuals featured as part of the walk. Surviving family members were invited to attend. Also featured were Waterloo pioneers Clyde Orrin Lamson and Lillian Russell Lamson, son and daughter of Waterloo pioneers and community leaders in their own rite who built the historic landmark Russell-Lamson building in downtown Waterloo.


Some of the re-enactors for “Strolling with the Spirits” 3PM walk at Waterloo Cemetery included, from left to right, David Slaughter as Verle Buck; Gail and Tami Snyder as Clyde and Lillian Russell Lamson; Mendoor Smith as George Butler and Jesse Swan as Evan “Curly” Hultman. In later performances, Yolando Loveless played George Butler and Scott Herman-Keeling played Verle Buck (Pat Kinney photo)


George Butler’s unit — the 1st Iowa Infantry (African descent), renamed the 60th Regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops — and others fought off a superior Confederate force in a July 1864 battle at Wallace’s Ferry on Big Creek near Helena, Ark. But he contracted scurvy and consumption and died Dec. 31, 1864. 

He was one of 76,000 Iowans who served, nearly half the state’s adult male population. Nearly a fifth of them, more than 13,000, died, including more than 300 of the 1,100 men in his regiment. According to the National Park Service, more than 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors served in the Union forces — 10 percent of the total — and 40,000 died. Black soldiers had a higher mortality rate from disease than their white Union counterparts, in part because of disparities in their treatment, according to a study by LabXchange, a research site funded in part by Harvard University. Additionally, Black women served as nurses, spies and scouts according to the National Archives.

Ryan Madison, director of Waterloo’s African-American Historical & Cultural Museum, provided additional research on George Butler.

Verle Buck was a sergeant in the U.S. Army’s 149th Combat Engineer Battalion. More than 4,400 Allied troops died in the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944 on the various invasion beaches, including more than 2,500 Americans and half the men in Buck’s unit. They were pinned down under Nazi fire from 6:30 a.m. until mid-afternoon when a Navy ship pulled up broadside, fired its guns into the enemy fortifications and “turned that beach upside down,” Buck said in a Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier interview, allowing he and his men to advance and eventually go inland.

Buck, who was born in La Porte City and lived in Elk Run Heights, worked 41 years at The Rath Packing Co and 25 years at the Northeast Iowa Food Bank. He passed away at age 95.




Hultman recalled in interviews that many of the officers he trained with went off to overseas battlefields and never returned. He was part of an invasion force headed for Japan when its surrender was announced following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hirsoshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

He enjoyed a career as a prosecutor and a soldier. He obtained a law degree at the University of Iowa and served as Black Hawk County attorney, Iowa attorney general and U.S. district attorney for the northern District of Iowa. 

Hultman also rose to the rank of major general in the U.S. Army Reserve and headed the U.S. Reserve Officers Association and the International Confederation of Reserve Officers, associated with NATO. He worked with reserve officers of former Warsaw Pact nations to bring them into NATO as part of the Partnership for Peace program.




One of Hultman’s daughters, retired U.S. Army Col. Heidi Warrington, chairs the Waterloo Cemetery association and helped make the event possible. She also sits on the Black Hawk County Veteran Affairs Commission.