Childhood sweethearts

They were born four days and seventy miles apart in the same hot Kansas summer of 1926. She arrived on the twenty-fifth of August, in El Dorado, the youngest of three, to Henry Crocker Billings and Sudie Belle Bonard. He arrived on the twenty-ninth, near Fowler, the last of the nine children of Harry Martin Harrison and Ola Almyra Brown.

When Billy was seven, her family moved to a farm outside Mulvane, in the teeth of the Depression. It was there at the country school that she met Herbie — a boy who milked cows before class and again after, and worked the railroad besides, and still found time to run track and play football, basketball, baseball and tennis, and was good at all of them.

Billy lost her mother to cancer when she was only twelve, and she lost her father at twenty. Her father had gone to France in the first war, drafted in his twenties, and came home gassed, with Bell's palsy and what they then called shell shock. He kept a map of the country he had crossed — the Argonne, Saint-Mihiel — and almost never spoke of it. He had one line for the whole of it: the blood, the mud, and the cooties.

Both Herb and Billy finished high school in 1944 — he at Mulvane, she at El Dorado — and the war took them in opposite directions. Herb enlisted in the Navy and served in the South Pacific. Billy entered the Wesley School of Nursing under the Cadet Nurse Corps, finishing in 1947. They married that October in Wichita, a union that endured for seventy years.

He enlisted and would have done so earlier, but as I recall, his mother wouldn't sign. Good decision, as he wouldn't have finished high school.

Billy, on Herb joining the Navy, 2016

It started as a 4-H project

Herb came home from the Pacific to Wichita University, studied liberal arts, and played tailback on the teams that went to the Raisin Bowl on New Year's Day of 1948 and the Camellia Bowl that December. He had started at Hawk's Pharmacy as a delivery boy; he left it as president. When he and his partners sold that business, he started over in construction.

They lived in Andover, and had seven children: Reed, Paul, John, Eric, Leslie, Kelly, Nancy. When they were young, Billy sewed most of their clothes. She was the school nurse at Andover Elementary, a leader of the Andover Aces 4-H club, a Sunday school teacher, and a room mother. Herb chartered the Kiwanis club, took the boys of Troop 533, and gave eighteen years to the school board.

In 1965, he bought a registered Angus heifer from his friend Fred Adair, so that the children would have something to show in 4-H. Sixty years on, the herd has never once left registered production — foundation stock from the McCurry brothers and the Laflins, bloodlines carrying names like Sedgwick's Erica and Blackcap Roses.

If you'd visited the house in Andover, you'd have been met with fruit orchards and grape arbors, rose gardens and vegetable plots, chickens and bees, German Shepherds they trained themselves, ornamental pheasants and quail raised under the name Swa-Har, with his friend Don Swaney. You'd have found a record playing most evenings, and a bowl of homemade vanilla ice cream for you at the table.

Room to grow

In 1971 they bought a section of ground in Elk County. The same year, Billy went back to nursing.

She became head nurse of the first oncology unit at Wesley, in years when the treatments were blunt and the nursing counted for a great deal. She was given the HCA First Humanitarian Award. She helped start the Harry Hynes Memorial Hospice, which is running still. She retired in 1992, twenty-one years after going back.

Herb spent those same decades on the Elk County water district, helping frame the rural lines much of the county still drinks from; on the state wind farm task force; and in the Silver Haired Legislature. He was a 32nd-degree Mason. He started the county recycling program, and went to the commission meetings whether or not there was anything on the agenda.

They moved to Howard for good in 1992. She kept close to an acre of garden and canned what it gave. She knew birds by their call and plants on sight, and she did the crossword every day.

An unbroken legacy

In December 2015, the American Angus Association named 7HAR a Historic Angus Herd: fifty unbroken years of registered production.

Herb had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's five years before. In 2015, he moved to a care facility, because keeping him at the ranch had become more than Billy could carry at eighty-nine.

That spring, Paul and his elementary school friend, Rick Stephens, rode bicycles from Wichita to Winnipeg, to raise funding for Alzheimer's research. Nine days, nine hundred and sixty miles, in purple shirts reading A Ride for Herb. People kept asking two men in their sixties what they were doing, and they kept explaining, and people kept handing them money: five dollars from a woman in a Nebraska convenience store, five more outside a café in Minnesota, twenty from a man in Grand Forks who had only stopped to give directions and sent a hundred more when he got home. Twelve thousand dollars by June.

Herb died on November 23, 2017, five weeks after their seventieth anniversary. Billy died the following March, at the ranch, with all seven of her children around her. A scholarship in both their names is endowed at Wichita State.