Two of Waterloo's WWII 'greatest' pass away a day apart
Hovey Brom, Evan "Curly" Hultman, both 99, served country and community.
WATERLOO — This past weekend has been a rough one in the Cedar Valley — and not just because of the weather.
Waterloo lost two of its “greatest generation” who served their country as soldiers during World War II, and as citizens on a number of fronts the rest of their lives.
Longtime Waterloo architect Hovey Brom passed away Saturday. Retired U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Gen. Evan “Curly” Hultman passed away Sunday. They were both 99.
Brom has been living at the Western Home Communities in Cedar Falls. Hultman had been living for a number of years at Friendship Village in Waterloo.
Hultman would have turned 100 in July; Brom would have reached the century mark in November. Both men maintained astounding good health for decades, but had mounting health issues in recent months.
Brom had suffered from falls while Hultman had just fought through a round of COVID in addition to other issues.
While their bodies may have given out, their minds and disposition didn’t. Both had been sharp and effusive. To the end, they were “ebullient,” as defined in Cambridge Dictionary — “very energetic, positive, and happy.”
Hultman greeted visitors and Friendship Village staff with “Happy day!” and Brom was equally sunny with Western Home staff.
Brom was well known to many for leading the Waterloo Rotary Club in song at its weekly meetings. Hultman was a bit of a showman himself - from his days performing at the Waterloo East High School Swing Show to pulling off an occasional Louis Armstrong number at the annual variety show fundraiser for Cedar Valley Honor Flight.
Both were at their best because they’s seen some of humanity’s worst during the war.
Brom was a forward observer for the 16th Armored division of Gen. George S. Patton's U.S. Third Army, scouting enemy lines in a Jeep mounted with a machine gun. In that job he had two windshields shot out by snipers and another round barely miss his head. On another occasion, a sniper shot punctured his radiator, disabling his Jeep. He commandeered a bicycle to continue and complete his scouting mission.
The tall, lanky Brom also spent time crawling on his hands and knees probing for German land mines with a bayonet and marking them, making the way safer for his comrades' advance. He finished his Army service as a sting bass player on a military big band, entertain troops waiting to head home at war’s end. He donated recordings of that band’s music to the Grout Museum District.
And Brom did a lot more than "sing for his supper" when he arrived in Waterloo after graduating from Iowa State University in 1952 on the G.I. bill.
As a partner at Thorson Brom Broshar Snyder Architects, now InVision Architecture, the Des Moines Roosevelt High School graduate with his partners designed many of the landmark buildings in Waterloo and on the University of Norther Iowa campus. They include, among others, the UNI-Dome, the Waterloo Center for the Arts, the Grout Museum and its multiple additions, the Waterloo Convention Center at Sullivan Brothers Plaza, many hospital additions and, also at UNI, Russell Hall, McCollum Science Hall, Rod Library and two renovations of Seerley Hall.
Brom also designed numerous churches throughout Waterloo-Cedar Falls. He received several community and professional awards.
Hultman had an incredible lifetime of service in the military, the law, and politics.
A 1943 graduate of Waterloo East High, where he was a multi-sport athlete, Hultman entered the Army as an enlisted man and worked his way up the ranks. As an Army captain in the Pacific, he and his soldiers were assigned the task of finding and destroying caches of Japanese weapons on the home islands at war’s end.
Among other ordnance, they found stockpiles of manned flying-bomb kamikaze suicide planes. Hultman said those planes would have been used on American troops in an invasion of the home islands but for President Truman’s dropping of two atomic bombs which forced the Japanese surrender.
After the war Hultman obtained a law degree from the University of Iowa but continued military service in the Army Reserve. He started a law practice in Waterloo and was elected Black Hawk County attorney, then attorney general for the state of Iowa. He was the 1964 Republican gubernatorial nominee, losing to first-term incumbent Democrat Gov. Harold Hughes in that year’s Democratic landslide win headed by President Lyndon Johnson. Though he never sought elected office again, he remained a fixture in local Republican politics.
Hultman returned to private practice, serving for a time as Waterloo city attorney. He then served as a federsl prosecutor as U.S. attorney for the northern district of Iowa from 1969 to 1977 under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and again from 1981 to 1986 under President Ronald Reagan.
In 1986 he became president of the Reserve Officers Assocation of the United States, and, later, chairman if the International Confederation of Reserve Officers, also known by its French acronym CIOR (Confédération Interalliée des Officiers de Réserve), an organization of reserve officers from the various countries making up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. By that time he had worked his way up to major general.
In his position with CIOR, he worked concurrent with NATO leadership in the 1990s on helping bring reserve officers of the former Warsaw Pact nations into the NATO alliance following the collapse of the Soviet Union, including some former Soviet republics. Over time NATO expanded from 13 member nations to 30, the most recent additions being Finland in 2022 and Sweden in 2024. Hultman remained involved with CIOR after retirement and was named honorary chairman for life of the organization — an honor shared by only one other individual in the organization’s history.
Just last week and days before his passing, Hultman entertained visitors from Sweden — the family of an officer with whom he had served in CIOR.
In 1984, Hultman received the Army Legion of Merit from President Reagan. The two had first met when Hultman was competing in the Drake Relays on the East High track team, and Reagan, then known as “Dutch” Reagan, was sports director of radio station WHO in Des Moines.
Services for Hovey Brom will be 11 a.m. Friday (Feb. 21) at the Diamond Events Center at Western Home Communities in Cedar Falls, with visitation 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday at the Dahl-Van Hove-Schoof Funeral Home in Cedar Falls.
Services for Evan “Curly” Hultman are tentatively planned for Saturday, March 8 with more details to follow. Locke Funeral Services in Waterloo is handling arrangements.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. They are listed below. Clink on the links to check them out, subscribe for free - and, if you believe in the value of quality journalism, support this column and/or any of theirs with a paid subscription.
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That we all could aspire to serve so faithfully and so well…
Thanks, Pat. You always show us “the angels of our better nature.”
Nicely done Pat