If every word he read or wrote got him a nickel, he’d have been a billionaire many times over.
Born in coal mine country (Benham, Kentucky), my friend of 25 years was raised in a God-centric, Church-going Appalachian country home environment built upon Generations that held firmly to the principles of God, Family, and Country. And in that order.
Thirteen years my senior, we first crossed paths 25 years ago, and once the two of us realized we shared deep ancestral ties to the Appalachian country Folk legacy, it didn’t take long to establish a bond that felt a whole lot more like we were Kinfolk rather than internet friends. We shared a similar upbringing in church-based and God-centric homes; both of us come from Families with a deep appreciation for hard work, kindness and human decency, humility, grace, self-respect, and good manners. We also shared a great disdain for the taste of soap, which was introduced to us frequently in our younger years.
Bridging The “Two Men In One“
God called my friend home on February 22, 2025 (about a week ago as I write this), and I have spent this time trying to think about how best to share his whole story with both the people around him in his everyday life at home who knew him as Pete, as well as sharing it with the internet world that has known him as Vassar for well over 25 years. His family knows the decorated Vietnam Vet who served as a Captain in the army (Judge Advocate General), the loving husband, the dedicated father, grandfather, brother, and son. They know he was a teacher, a corporate man, and a number of other things in his work life over the years, that he loved books so much he built a business buying and selling them (after reading them), and that he was a self-made historian who drove them crazy sometimes with so many things he knew that nobody else had ever heard of. Not very many of the people he knew in the internet world could ever have possibly known these things. Now they will.
The internet world knows that Vassar published nearly 1700 articles on his website, that he published thousands more at various other websites around the internet, and if you add up all of his words between his essays and his sometimes ungodly long comments in response to other essays (and the nearly 200 draft posts at his website he never published), he has contributed countless millions of words to the national and international conversation over the span of his public writing career. His family doesn’t know much about this, but now they do.
Little Old Lady Quilting Circle Bitch Sessions
Sometime around 2008, I was invited to help set up a website for a number of people who had come together at the same website where I met Vassar. That website had a very successful 10-year run before the membership dwindled and people began to go their separate ways. In the internet world, website lifespans are dramatically lower than 10 years, but everyone is proud of their accomplishments.
Roughly 3 years after its inception, Vassar being one of a few contributing almost daily content, he reached out to me and asked if I would build him a website of his own where he could develop his content (within and outside the normal scope of topics) so that he might be able to put all of his work in one place to hand down to his children and grandchildren at some point in the future. I happily did as he asked and will continue to keep that promise I made to him all those years ago to maintain his website, “vassarbushmills.com,” until I can no longer do so.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, also at his request, I set up a website for him and a mutual friend that was part of the larger project mentioned above in order to create a place for veterans to come together and share their stories, experiences, and memories of the years they served and the things they experienced during their various deployments. He was very proud of the work that was done there, the people he met, and the joy so many of the members got out of sharing their own stories and listening to those of others. Not a veteran myself, serving only the function of managing and maintaining the functionality of the website, I was incredibly touched and deeply humbled by so many stories written by so many brave men and women who willingly risked life and limb in service to their country.
I reached out to him in 2018, not long after I had created a new website, initially named “Unwashed Philosophy,” because, given his extensive work in some of those areas over the years I thought he might have a little fun. Because the overall tone and tenor of his works are both educational and philosophical, I thought he might enjoy branching out. Neither of us could have imagined in the early days of that project that what would follow brought the two of us together for weekly 2-hour phone calls that would continue through the last 7 years of his life.
We collaborated on our first book, to which he contributed almost 50%, which ran over 65,000 words and was self-published on Amazon. After a rebrand of the original website and the development of a second book under the name Essential American Wisdom (a collection of long-form essays with a long-form closing argument, all of which spanned over 240 pages), it’s important for people to understand that if you could have been a fly on the wall, Vassar and I sounded like a couple of little old ladies sitting around a quilting circle, having very intense bitching sessions. I went on to self-publish a third nonfiction, inspired mainly by our countless discussions about Thomas Paine, his place in the historical record, and his influence in the work that led to an independent American Nation. The eternal teacher that he was, he insisted that I put that book together on my own, but he proofread and guided me through the review process so much that he is effectively everywhere in that pamphlet as if he was standing over my shoulder when I put it together.
If you asked her, his wonderful and loving bride having come into his office off and on over the years, she would surely quietly smile and say this is the best way to describe those weekly “meetings.”
Teacher & Taught
In our respective lives, Vassar and I found ourselves in the fronts of classrooms teaching adult students about a quite diverse range of topics. The sorts of things we taught are not so relevant here, but the dynamic of two teachers- with very different teaching styles- collaborating on novel-length books, long-form essays, and multi-thousand-word treatises and dissertations was something you would have had to see to fully understand. In all the years we spent doing this together, there was never one cross word between us. There was never any anger, frustration, yelling, or hang-ups on the other end of the line. We each let the other proselytize as long as they needed to to make a point, after which the other would ask questions for clarity, challenge an assertion here and there, and ultimately come to the realization that they had learned something they were so sure of but ultimately had wrong altogether or had misunderstood something along the way. Even though he was 13 years my senior, there were plenty of things I taught him, and he would publicly admit to that, but the things he taught me were, frequently, life-changing and affected the way I went about my own writing as the years went by.
My favorite example of this, at least the one I can state publicly, started back when I first came across him and his commentary at the website where we first crossed paths. It would be years before I told him this, but the one thing about him that always used to drive me nuts… I mean completely nuts… Is how long some of his material was. In the 2000s (and to some extent still true today), any content longer than 350 to 500 Words is a waste of time because readers rarely stay longer than the first couple of paragraphs. We both believe it is a generational thing, starting with the Millennials but even worse with the subsequent Generations and the Advent of cell phones, YouTube, TikTok, and the like because everyone has their chin on their chest and their thumb scrolling through their gadgets at lightning speed.
When we sat down and hammered out the outline of the first book, haggling over which one of us would be doing each of the chapters and in what order the overall book would flow, I brought up the issue of chapter length and word count and the other little pieces of minutia that goes into writing a book, and before I even broached the subject he had already told me no good book chapter is shorter than 3 to 5,000 words. Of course, when I started mentioning the length of some of his essays, suggesting that each chapter should be brief and concise, he quickly pointed out that he hasn’t even gotten warmed up a thousand words into something he wants to “teach” readers about on a topic to which he is quite emotionally attached.
Failing miserably at every attempt to negotiate him down on this issue, he told me to try and experiment. Literally a homework assignment, he told me to take one of his favorite essays that I had written (1,500 words initially, and ultimately the 2nd chapter) and force myself to add 2,000 words. I didn’t argue, although I certainly muttered under my breath more than once as I went through the process of forcing myself to add 2,000 words to an essay I was already perfectly content with, but when all was said and done, I had added 2,500 and spent so much time researching the topic further that I ended up feeling like I could have said more.
Humility, Grace, Self-Respect, And Good Manners
When I was 19 years old, I got a job as a bank teller. Located around the block from the White House, I was required to wear a suit and tie, and my first day of work put me in a classroom with a group of other newbies who would be learning how to do the job, deal with customers, and manage money. I took a seat and noticed a petite Vietnamese lady sitting quietly in a corner by herself, making no eye contact with any of us as we settled ourselves into our seats. At exactly 9:00 a.m., without looking at anyone or speaking to any of us, she walked up to the front of the room, got up on a step stool, wrote the word ”Tact” in big block letters, and returned to her seat where she quietly finished her coffee… A few minutes later.
When she returned to the front of the room, before introducing herself, she wrote under this word the following: “Is the ability to tell a man to go to hell and have him look forward to the walk.” Mind you, I was 19 years old and not yet mature enough to appreciate the deeper meaning, but by the time I left that job, moved out on my own, went back to college, married and had kids, and eventually crossed paths with Vassar all those years later, I knew in my bones how very true those words are.
I share this story here because, over the years the two of us collaborated on writing projects, and one or the other of us would bring my memory of that story up in conversation. He had always loved that story, especially because he appreciated its subtle genius and how much he had always tried to conduct himself that way without ever knowing such a quote existed.
We often laughed about how much of our respective writings, especially on matters of politics, Society, and culture, used tact as a gentle bludgeon in our comments, essays, and interactions around the internet and how much each of us would softly grin, quite proud of ourselves, at how well we could slap somebody down without knowing they had been slapped down until much later after they’d had enough time to think through what we might have said to them on the web.
He always preached to me that, even before we realized what our upbringings gave us, the four cornerstones of being a decent human being and productive contributing member of society would require of us some degree of humility, grace, self-respect, and good manners. We were taught that starting very young in life, it was strictly enforced, and after boot camp, it was deeply ingrained in him. I had the same upbringing, but while he was busy serving his country, I was busy being a rambunctious hippie teenager, so it took me a bit longer to fully appreciate how right he was. And trust me, he never missed an opportunity to remind me whenever he was right about something… But always in a tactful way.
Faith, Fellowship, Frivolity, And Fate
By design, and to best honor his memory, I have ensured that the telling of this Tale about my 25-year friendship with the man I only met once in person will exceed the word count of the chapter my friend Vassar “Pete” Bushmills made me rewrite in the first book the two of us wrote and published together. Over the span of our two and a half decades of knowing each other, teaching each other, learning from each other, and following along with the ebbs and flows of our respective lives, it is important that readers recognize just how rare and unlikely our story is.
In a world of 8 billion people, far too many of whom are in an all-fired hurry (as the two of us said all the time) to live their lives and go about their daily business, the nature of human connection today bears no resemblance to the way things were when we were born. Be it fate, destiny, or even a random accident, that the two of us were able to find a way to personify and perpetuate the “good old days” has been a gift from God that I will carry forward on his behalf and in his honor for the rest of my days.
No one knows beyond projection what happens when our bodies breathe our last breath, but with both of us being well-versed in Biblical scripture both in childhood and over the years that we have aged, I am as sure as I can be that if there is a Heaven, my best friend, Vassar has not only found his way there but is sitting in the middle of a circle of serene and gentle souls listening to him tell stories that never seem to end so much as they all blur together. I’m also sure that since everyone in the audience has an eternity to listen to them, they are all perfectly content to sit there and listen in rapt attention. Perhaps God, fully aware of Vassar’s dwindling capacity for storytelling, decided it was time to give my friend a new audience.
If I clean up my Act in time before it’s my turn to make the trip, once I get there, I’ll quietly pull up a chair and listen right alongside everyone else. He’ll smile softly, scold me for being late for the benefit of everyone else in the audience, and pick right up where he left off… Without even skipping a beat.
Thank you for this.