Bruce was born in Michigan, where his father owned a chain of drugstores. He attended Prep School at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts, where his roommate in his senior year was Orson Wells. After graduation, he attended Dartmouth in New Hampshire. Four years later, he graduated from Dartmouth and joined the United States Navy Aviation Corps. Stationed in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked, he served with Pappy Boynton a la the Black Sheep Squadron. Not actually in the Black Sheep squadron; he was the commander of his own squadron, but he was in the same arena, the south Pacific. He flew an F4U Corsair, which the Japanese called "Whispering Death". Bruce left the navy after the war; he had attained the rank of Lieutenant Commander. He returned home to Michigan and ran his father's drugstore chain until it was sold.

Bruce moved to Florida and invested in a few business ventures that did not pan out. He bought an old doctor's house and turned it into a drive up package store/small bar. It was allegedly the first bar on Vine Street. The bar was originally decorated with WWII memorabilia. As construction workers and businessmen started coming into the bar, and started leaving their cards and baseball caps, t-shirts, etc., those items started going up on the walls.

Bruce was friendly with several execs at Disney; they frequented the bar for a long time, but as the word got out, animators and other Disney personnel started frequenting the bar, so the execs went elsewhere and it became predominantly a cast-member hangout. For a while, there were a lot of pictures up on the walls that animators had drawn for Bruce; there are still some there but Bruce took most of them home when his health started failing. Over the years, quite a few celebrities have frequented the lounge; Yogi Berra, Wesley Snipes, Larry Dierker, Ralph Kent (famous Disney Imaginer and animator), just to mention a few.

Check out some of the news articles and pictures that adorn the walls of the Big Bamboo; there's a lot of history posted there. Here are a couple more pictures of Corsairs (the background of this page is one also), the type of plane that Bruce flew in WWII.