BOULDER - The wake for Brownlee Guyer began two hours before his funeral service, over too many cups of coffee and a restaurant full of gravelly chuckles.

Not long after a snow-clouded sunrise, members of the old-timers coffee klatch ambled into the back of a McDonald's where the booths are unofficially reserved for some of the last true natives of the town - the ones who remember when sheep used to graze where the fast-food joint now stands.

Wednesday, there was one empty seat.

For decades, a man with the Donald Duck coffee mug helped anchor the old-timers - a man they all once feared, and later befriended.

"Yep, Brownlee was good people," said 88-year-old Ollie Shepherd, who was born in Boulder and ran a filling station where an office building now stands.

"Good company, Brownlee," he said, sipping his coffee. "Good, long life."

A parking lot away, in what is now an Applebee's, Shepherd's wife's family used to work from their homestead. Wednesday morning, luxury SUVs and Subarus whizzed past in the snow, around the land that some of the old men once rode on horseback.

In Brownlee Guyer's garage, he kept a Model T touring car he built from the frame up. He didn't need vanity plates. Everyone knew that he called her Nelli-belle.

"So many changes," Shepherd said. "Brownlee saw most all of 'em."

Inside the restaurant there were no formal toasts for the missing man. Ross Harp said it's too late for all that.

"They say, 'Honor me when I'm alive. Don't make the big fashion show when I'm gone,' " he said.

The men brought their coffee cups to their weathered, wrinkled faces.

"Well," Shepherd said, "I guess it's about time to head to the funeral."

John Brownlee Guyer died at home on Feb. 7. He was 94.

Pinching them all fairly

Inside the Boulder Masonic Lodge, nearly everyone in the funeral crowd had grimaced the first time they met him. As Boulder's first game warden, he took his job seriously, ticketing anyone he caught poaching, taking too many fish, or hunting out of season. More than one of them said, "Ol' Brownlee would give his mother a ticket if he caught her fishing over the limit."

"I've pinched a lot of people over the years - U.S. marshals, preachers, cops and people I felt so sorry for I wanted to pay the fines myself. But there's only one way to do it, and that's to play the game fair," Guyer said in an interview in 1998. "They knew they were taking a chance, and they knew I might get 'em. But we always talked it out, and now some of my best friends are the ones I pinched."

Many of those friends attended the service, where he was remembered for his passion for wildlife preservation and a bottomless arsenal of practical jokes.

Whether in his Model T or walking down the road, it was difficult not to hear Guyer before seeing him. His voice echoed the honesty of Jimmy Stewart with the resonance of Wilford Brimley. Top his 6-foot-2 Ichabod Crane frame with a distinguished straw hat and add the Model T, and Guyer exuded a charm that allowed him to get away with anything.

So he did.

In his home, he kept a piece of foam bread with rubber spiders hanging out ("I use that one in restaurants a lot," he said). There was a can of dehydrated water ("mix with a gallon of water and stir"). There was a plastic chocolate doughnut ("I gave that one to the preacher once, and he bit right into it.") Then there was the dissolving spoon, which he would place in his coffee cup, pull out the warped utensil and accuse the waitress of serving corrosive coffee. "I also got a spoon with a hole in it that you put in the sugar bowl," Guyer said. "Yeah, my dad gave me that one - boy did we have a lot of fun."

He soaked his friends with squirtguns well into his 90s; those who didn't know him were prime victims for the dreaded plastic chocolate doughnut. They found plastic in their hamburgers, and retaliated with cardboard in his pancakes.

Born in Denver, Guyer moved to Boulder to attend the University of Colorado. He and his wife, Lois, bought their modest home on Forest Street in 1943 for about $2,500. Homes in that area now sell for more than half a million dollars.

Guyer, his wife and two daughters eventually split their time between Boulder and Nederland, where he kept a cabin, spending the bulk of his time working on his old cars, building toys for needy children and hand-feeding squirrels the leftover doughnuts from the coffee klatch.

He taught schoolchildren the importance of conservation, and scoured the county at every opportunity - by Jeep and on foot - always looking for a new way to see the land.

When people asked Guyer how he was doing, he had the same response, always enunciated with perfect diction, serious and smiling: "I'm darn good."

Practical wisdom, too

Inside Green Mountain Cemetery, Guyer's daughters, Donna Gease and Betty Nelson, set up two Valentine's Day hearts near the graveside, one for Brownlee and one for Lois, who died last year.

"They're back together again, for Valentine's Day," said Donna.

At the committal service, the minister read a note from Guyer's doctor, who said, "His humor, even in his last gasp, was there."

The old-timer's coffee klatch will continue, the men said. They plan to fill the empty chair with Brownlee stories. One of those stories comes from one of the last instances when he had to bury one of his friends. There were no practical jokes. Only practiced wisdom.

"At this point, I think I've got more people I know in the graveyard than walking the streets, but I've had a great life," he said. "If I had a chance, I'd sure do it all over again."

sheelerj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2561

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