Friends & Family Celebrate and Remember Brian Pohanka’s Life
By Deborah Fitts
August 2005
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Those who loved Brian Pohanka and those who admired his wide-ranging impact on the fields of Civil War scholarship, battlefield preservation and reenacting said goodbye in a series of ceremonies June 23. Pohanka died at home June 15 after a long struggle with cancer. He was 50.
The extraordinary, daylong combination of events included numerous tributes and poignant remembrances. Jim Lighthizer, president of the 70,000-member Civil War Preservation Trust, summed up Pohanka’s accomplishments as “a life very well lived.”
On hand at every venue were more than two dozen members of Pohanka’s beloved unit, the colorful 5th New York Duryee Zouaves with their baggy, scarlet pantaloons and navy-blue shell jackets. Several served as pallbearers, and a squad with muskets fired a salute near his grave.
The day got under way at 9 a.m. with a funeral for family and invited guests at Immanuel Church-on-the-Hill in Alexandria. At the same church, in 1999, Pohanka married Marylynne “Cricket” Bauer, in a ceremony that the presence of the Zouaves made both martial and colorful.
On this sadder day, morning sunshine flooded the church windows. Outside the door the bright song of a mockingbird mingled with hymns and reminiscences.
Pohanka’s father, John Pohanka, said his son’s fame became clear to him when complete strangers would greet with a “Wow!” his acknowledgement of paternity. “Brian early on discovered a mission, which he pursued passionately all his life, to make his life worthwhile,” Pohanka said.
He recalled his son’s brave and uplifting words upon the death of Brian’s mother, in 1987, also to cancer. Brian accepted death and pain as a part of life, John Pohanka said, and at his mother’s memorial service Brian quoted Civil War poet Walt Whitman in words that today suited the occasion again: “To die is different than what anyone supposes — and luckier.”
Steve Thompson, president of the 5th New York and the son of Pohanka’s reenacting colleague Jack Thompson, recalled how as a child he watched “baggy red pants going in and out of my home.” Pohanka, with his love of history and storytelling, drew people irresistibly to him.
“He never intended to be, but he was always the center of conversation,” Thompson recalled. Even as Pohanka’s celebrity grew, he was unfailingly eager to help anyone who approached him with questions about history.
“He was a passionate, literate, civilized gentleman,” said Thompson. Referring to Pohanka’s intense interest in the battle that ended the life of Civil War officer George Custer, he concluded, “Right now he’s finding out what really happened at the Little Bighorn, and he is a happy man.”
The Rev. D. Stuart Dunnan delivered a eulogy that included several writings done by Pohanka himself in the last weeks of his life. “I will miss this life,” Pohanka said, but he was clearly looking beyond it. He spoke of the inspirational effect upon him of the West, “a sea of land, an eternity of sky.” He was drawn to the soldiers of the Civil War because of their “legacy of heroic endeavors,” and their “devotion to ideals they cherished more than life itself.”
“Brian was one of life’s romantics, with a capital R,” Dunnan said. “The tragedy that he died in the prime of his life also makes the statement of his life all the more powerful. Brian goes out in the thick of battle.”
At the cemetery in nearby Arlington the air was still in the heat of midday (the family asked that its location not be given).
Again a mockingbird filled the silence with song, as the mourners assembled in front of a massive slab of granite set on a knoll. Of Pohanka’s own design, it read, beneath his name, “Capt. 5th N.Y. Vol. Inf., Duryee Zouaves.” The pallbearers carried the coffin steadily up the slope to Pohanka’s final resting place. As the brief ceremony ended, the Zouaves’ musket salute shattered the stillness.
At mid-afternoon, under a tent on the Stuart’s Hill portion of Manassas National Battlefield Park, came the final event of the day, a public memorial service.
More than 300 people packed the rows of chairs or stood around the sides and back, trying to catch a piece of shade. Ignoring the intense heat, John Pohanka stood ramrod-straight in the sun, greeting attendees as they arrived. Park Superintendent Bob Sutton was among several staffers on hand.
Pat Schroeder, historian at Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, said Pohanka’s immersion in the era of the Civil War had given him comfort at the end. “Brian endured his individual battle solaced by the fact that many a Civil War veteran had endured worse,” Schroeder said. “He drew strength from the soldiers.”
Not unlike Union Gen. U.S. Grant, Schroeder said, terminally ill with cancer but determined to complete his memoirs, Pohanka succeeded in finishing his history of the Duryee Zouaves, a project of more than two decades.
“A virtual encyclopedia” of the war, Pohanka was Schroeder’s mentor and a mentor to many others. “Meticulous in his research,” he lived a life of “honor, tradition and respect.” And battlefields were all-important to him.
“Brian believed the best way to preserve the memory of a Civil War soldier was to preserve the land on which they fought,” Schroeder said.
Terry Daley, the first captain of Pohanka’s Co. A, 5th New York, and colonel of the National Regiment, recalled that even as a college student Pohanka had approached Daley and vowed to join the 5th N.Y. Over the years that enthusiasm never faded.
“There’s not a person in the hobby that can’t say ‘This guy touched our lives,’” Daley said. “This guy had a passion that, whatever he did, carried through to the end.”
Mike Kraus, captain of the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry and a collaborator with Pohanka on numerous projects, described his own “childlike fascination” for the 19th-century world that Pohanka so compellingly created in film and books.
“He insisted on portraying the highest standards of historical accuracy,” Kraus said. But he also recalled Pohanka’s “soft side,” his kindness and his deep love of animals. “We shall meet but we shall miss him,” Kraus said, quoting from the song. “I shall think of him often as the beau ideal of a soldier, the consummate Zouave captain.”
Bill Gwaltney of the National Park Service in Denver recalled how he, Pohanka and Jack Thompson had joined in 1988 to form the 46-man Co. B of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry for the movie “Glory.” A month before Pohanka’s death, Gwaltney, Thompson and Thompson’s son Steve had supper with Pohanka and his wife at the couple’s handsome Victorian home, Tower House, in Alexandria. As they sat on the porch reminiscing and sipping drinks from tin cups, Pohanka asked Gwaltney to speak at his funeral.
“He wanted you to know,” Gwaltney said, “that he was connected to the history of black Americans in the Civil War and in the history of the nation. What you may not know is the level of esteem that Brian was held in by the men of Co. B,” many of whom continue in reenacting 17 years later.
“His special understanding of the issues confronting black troops in 1863 and again in 1988 made for a special relationship” between Pohanka and the men of Co. B, Gwaltney said. “For myself, I can only say that Brian Pohanka was thorough and thoughtful. He studied everything and forgot nothing. He listened carefully and he cared about justice.”
Lighthizer, of the Civil War Preservation Trust, noted that Pohanka was a co-founder, in 1987, of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, “the first modern Civil War battlefield-preservation organization” and a precursor to the Trust. Since then, Lighthizer said, 23,000 acres of battlefield have been saved.
“That number continues to grow, thanks in part to Brian Pohanka’s vision and leadership,” Lighthizer said, as well as his contributions of money. “Brian, I can only tell you, has been extraordinarily generous to our cause.”
“But Brian was also willing to do the grunt work” of holding preservation demonstrations and vigils, and appearing before county officials to argue on behalf of preservation even when “they really didn’t want to hear what he had to say.”
“I happen to believe the measure of a man is what he does,” Lighthizer said. “In part Brian’s legacy is the gift of that land to the American people. And I would say to Brian, ‘For that we are all very grateful.’”
