Civil War re-enactor Edward "Ken" Bartle, who earned a national reputation as a bugler, died last week of heart disease.
By JAMES THORNER
Published September 10, 2004
LAND O'LAKES - In real life Edward "Ken" Bartle was a retired mailman with a penchant for playing the trumpet.
But as a Civil War re-enactor he was Sgt. Bartle, the battalion bugler whose brassy-toned reveilles and charges would ring over bivouac and battlefield from Gettysburg to Shiloh.
Dressed in his blue-striped Confederate grays, his circa-1861 kepi cap perched on his head, Bartle was buried in a pine box Wednesday afternoon. He died of heart disease three days shy of his 65th birthday.
Military flags - American and Confederate - graced his funeral at Loyless Funeral Home in Land O'Lakes. His wife, Linda, and the couple's three daughters donned antebellum Southern belle dresses with hoop skirts.
"He was very big on history," said Bonnie Blue, Bartle's 23-year-old daughter, named after Scarlett O'Hara's daughter in Gone With the Wind. "He loved the Civil War best."
Here was a man whose idea of family excursions for years consisted of roaming the Eastern seaboard in a mobile home to attend Civil War re-enactments.
A man who wore a Confederate dress uniform to his 1978 wedding while he and his bride passed under an arch of swords held aloft by fellow re-enactors.
A man who, despite his New Jersey Yankee birth, named his third daughter Brandy Lee for Confederate commander Robert E. Lee.
A man who built his own Civil War cannon and was rebuked by a sheriff's deputy when he practiced firing the iron monster in the woods near Port Charlotte.
"He was nationally known as one of the very best buglers in the re-enacting hobby," said Don Bowman, the Zephyrhills electrician who was Bartle's "colonel" in the Florida Battalion.
Bartle developed his chops on brass instruments as a U.S. Navy trumpeter in an admiral's band while stationed in Guam. In the mid 1970s, while attending a gun show, he signed up for his first re-enactment.
He and Bowman began as "privates." Their baptism of fire was a Gettysburg re-enactment in 1976. Their unit's annual ritual was the February re-enactment of Battle of Olustee near Lake City. The 1864 Civil War battle was the biggest to take place in Florida.
Tragedy marked much of the year for the Bartles. In June, Bartle's fourth daughter, Britney, learned she had leukemia. The past few months for him meant trips to and from the hospital to nurse his youngest to health.
On Sept. 2, after telling his daughter over the phone he felt faint, Bartle collapsed on the floor of his house in Lake Padgett Estates in Land O'Lakes. Doctors blamed heart disease brought on by undiagnosed high blood pressure.
Not all of their father's cherished keepsakes would be buried with him. Out from the coffin came his bugle. The leather belt with the lyre-shaped buckle - the accoutrement of a military musician - lies forlornly on the Bartles' kitchen counter.
His unit descends on Atlanta next week for a blaze of musketry to commemorate the Battle of Atlanta. The battalion will be missing its best bugler.
Bowman remembers years back when 5,000 re-enactors and their families encamped on a ridge near Gettysburg. Bowman ordered Bartle to play the melody that ends with the familiar taps.
As the tune reached its mournful climax, camp chatter suddenly ceased. "There was no sound at all in the valley. Everybody was listening to him," Bowman said. "Ken was awesome."
