Michael Eugene Bussey; Expedition Member

Michael Eugene Bussey, 83, the last surviving member of the 1926 expedition to Brazil’s treacherous River of Doubt. Bussey dropped out of high school and ran away to work as a ship’s radio operator. He signed on with British explorer George Miller Dyott, whose 1926 research trip confirmed the observations made by Theodore Roosevelt on his expedition in 1914. Although Roosevelt had mapped the 900-mile-long river, most of his photographs and other records were destroyed in the river’s rapids. Dyott’s trip put the geographic controversy to rest. Bussey later became a social worker for the Baltimore Department of Public Welfare and a field director for the Red Cross. On Sept. 28 in Odessa, Texas, of cancer.