Billie Joan Buller, nee Billie Joan McClanahan on November 30, 1935 in Saratoga, Wyoming, passed in her sleep in the early morning hours of December 14, 2018 after a long battle with cancer. She is survived by her husband of over 60 years, Hurley Clyde Buller; her adult children Doug, Richard, and Marshall Buller; her five grandchildren Abe, Jake, Adam, Tyler, and Skye Buller; and her sister Phyllis Farrar. She was soon to be a great grandmother at the time of her passing.
Charming, Ava Gardner beautiful, and talented, Billie led a life filled with laughter and creativity. As a young woman, she wrote poetry and short stories, and she painted beautifully complex pictures in chalk and in watercolor. With the arrival of her first son Hurley Douglas in 1958, she began to paint with oils. From then on into the 1970's, she created marvelous portraits of her family as well as gorgeous still lifes of flowers. Also in the 1970's, she and husband Hurley founded a thriving antiques and collectibles business, Buller Antiques. She specialized in vintage jewelry, especially in pieces done in the styles of Arts Nouveau and Deco; Hurley specialized in military medals and ephemera; and son Richard cut his teeth on vintage paper collectibles.
By the 1980's, Billie moved on from the antiques business and rediscovered her roots: the crochet and embroidery skills which she had mastered as a girl. Her embroidery was particularly impressive. As an extension of her interest in gardening, a passion she shared with Hurley, she designed intricate floral designs which she embroidered in various styles and patterns.
By middle age, Billie was approaching the epoch of her creativity. Indeed, by the early 1990's, she had settled upon what was perhaps her greatest passion: designing and making increasingly complex quilts and wall hangings. Fabric art afforded her full artistic freedom. Her early pieces were quilts boasting multifaceted geometric patterns and effects that she invented in her head. From here, she expanded into theme pieces which incorporated classic ballet, Biblical stories (especially Noah's Ark, which fascinated her), and even T-shirts. After retiring, Hurley began to quilt, as well, and together they produced numerous T-shirt quilts, haunting thrift stores for colorful pictorial T-shirts, cutting them up for use as quilt pieces, and designing eye-popping quilts, many with their own themes, such as their perennial favorite, Route 66.
When working in her sewing room, Billie enjoyed donning tie-dyed clothing which she herself created while listening to the likes of Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, Procol Harum. Moody Blues, Creedance Clearwater Revival, and old school country and western singers.
With the advent of home computers in the late 1990's, Billie found yet another medium with which to express herself. She mastered Paint Shop Pro and in no time was creating remarkable, multi-layered fantasias using family photographs (which she also found time to scan and to catalog).
In later years, Billie read voraciously. It was always the happy task of her family to find new books for her. She read the complete works of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, but she also enjoyed modern mysteries, oversized Penguin novels, and anything by Stephen King. Her active, searching mind seldom failed her. Beset by cancer, and corresponding strokes, in 2013, she resumed reading as soon as she was home from the hospital. Books were her final respite, her refuge from the bodily ills that hampered but never destroyed her spirit. When not reading during this time, she made and designed bold, colorful beaded necklaces. She also continued to delight in offending her family by singing off-key in the kitchen.
Several weeks after Billie had passed, a home health care nurse came to her house and was very much surprised not to have found her surveying her home with her quick blue eyes from her corner arm chair. "She did it all," she said of Billie.
Billie's philosophy of life was based upon kindness. A sharp and decisive lady, she was nobody's fool; but, her outlook was always rooted in common decency. She prided herself, for example, on buying dinner for those less fortunate when she and Hurley went out to eat. She often invited people whom she did not know to Thanksgiving dinner at her home. She once spent a year, during the Buller Antiques era, exchanging tape-recorded letters with a customer who was dying of cancer. She instilled this wise, hands-on morality in her children.
Billie was indeed a lady driven by creativity, but when necessary she could hold down a day job, as well. She worked as a car hop in the 1950's, which she later recalled with humor, and went on to enjoy careers as a realtor and as an office manager at a drug treatment facility.
Billie Joan Buller was vibrant and funny. She was a remarkably engaging woman: stylish, full of energy, brimming with beauty and intelligence. She loved others, but others loved her even more. Her compassion and kindness were boundless. The bright sparkling comet of her life left an indelible impression upon all who knew her.
