Roger W. Brucker
Residence: Beavercreek
Age: 80
Background: Oberlin College graduate and past president of OIA Marketing Communications in Dayton.
Caving Contributions: A founder of the Cave Research Foundation. Organizer, explorer and surveyor in several excursions to find connecting passageways in the Mammoth Cave system. Has written five books popularizing cave exploration.
Honors: Honorary Life Fellow of The National Speleological Society and winner of the Spelean History Award (2004) and Spelean Arts & Letters Award (2009)
Books: "The Caves Beyond" (1955); "The Longest Cave" (1978); "Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins" (1979); "Beyond Mammoth Cave" (2000), and "Grand, Gloomy and Peculiar: Stephen Bishop at Mammoth Cave" (2009)
Current position: Speleology Instructor for Western Kentucky University.
For more information visit www.rogerbrucker.com
BEAVERCREEK — As a kid in Shelby, Ohio, Roger Brucker would build tunnels and caves from hay in the family barn. So when his mother took him to see the world’s longest cave system — Mammoth Cave in Kentucky — the 8-year-old refused to settle for less than the arduous daylong excursion.
Thus began Brucker’s love affair with all things underground. Today, seven decades and thousands of hours of caving later, the 80-year-old Beavercreek resident has co-authored 5 books on cave exploration, teaches a speleology course for Western Kentucky University and still crawls, climbs, squeezes and slogs his way on cave excursions up to 12 hours long.
Brucker’s books also continue to inspire new generations of cavers. His latest, a historical novel titled “Grand, Gloomy and Peculiar,” is based on the life of Stephen Bishop, an African-American slave who first systematically explored and mapped Mammoth Cave and helped make it a national tourist destination.
“I first knew Roger myself from reading one of his books. It led me up to Kentucky,” said Pete Lindsley, a past president of the Cave Research Foundation. In the 1960s, Lindsley traveled weekends from Dallas to go on expeditions with Brucker at Mammoth Cave. “His books have turned a lot of people into cavers.”
Although authors without caving experience have written books about Bishop, Brucker wanted do so from the point of view of someone who could understand his passion for venturing into passageways where no one has ventured before.
Cave exploration “is like solving a giant jigsaw puzzle,” Brucker said. “From the surface, all you can see is a hole in the ground. You have to explore it to put it all together and understand it.”
During the late 1830s, guides at Mammoth Cave were content to stop their tours after several miles once they reached The Bottomless Pit — a 15-foot divide across a hole 115 feet deep. Loose slopes around the pit made placing a ladder across it hazardous.
Then just 19 years old, Bishop was determined to reach the passage on the other side. Legend has it he placed a ladder across the pit and bravely — some might say foolishly — scrambled across it.
Brucker believes Bishop used his caving skills instead to do an end-run around the pit. It’s more likely he found a crawl space that goes partly around the pit and emerges closer to the farther passage. From there, Bishop could have skirted a ledge and climbed five or six feet to the passage, Brucker said.
By doing so, he more than tripled the known length of the Mammoth Cave system, adding 20 to 25 miles. Today, explorers have discovered nearly 400 miles of interconnected passages. Brucker predicts that, by the end of the century, the system will exceed 1,000 miles.
Brucker first came to the Dayton area while working as an instructional filmmaker for the Air Force in the 1950s. He settled in Yellow Springs, where he later became president of a technical advertising agency.
Like most cavers, Brucker has had his moments of panic and fear, including the time he was crawling over a muddy passage and suddenly slid head first through the muck into a lower chamber flooded with water.
“My carbide light went out and I was plunged into darkness,” he said. “I felt water moving into my clothing. I knew enough not to start thrashing around.” He tried to remain calm for the approximately 30 seconds it took him to resurface and was eventually retrieved by his fellow cavers.
The beauty and mystery of caving have kept him coming back for more, he said.
“It’s one of the few places in the world that’s nonlinear,” he said. “You go outside and you see traffic lights and telephone poles and roads and they’re all straight. You see houses and buildings with flat walls. But in caves, you have curvilinear surfaces — there are no lines at all, and it changes with the lighting. It’s a different world.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2437 or jdebrosse @DaytonDailyNews.com.
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