In Memoriam | Bill King: 1940-2022

A large stock of rural ranching folks mingled with early California families before streaming into Mission Santa Inés in late February for the celebration of Los Alamos cattleman Bill King’s funeral mass. The priest met “Cowboy Bill’s” coffin in the vestibule. The pallbearers were Bill’s working cowboy crew — wearing blue jeans, boots, and the new black cowboy hats they’d each bought for the privilege of escorting Bill on his last trip up the aisle of the old mission. As they walked, Bill’s own robust baritone, recorded in slow triple meter, welcomed his family and friends “ … like a storybook ending … my heartbreaks and troubles are just up and gone … I could waltz across Texas with you” — Bill’s signature song.

Bill’s life was a storybook of the cowboy western genre. Its most far-reaching chapter occurred in 1962 in southeastern Monterey County. Bill had completed several months of law school at Santa Clara when he and his brother, Chuck, leased Myrtle Flentge’s rough, brushy 2,500-acre ranch near Parkfield. Bill always maintained that his life changed the day he watched cattle jostle down a loading chute there, bawling, tail-swatting flies, and smelling of manure, anxiously scanning their new pasture for the best forage among its poverty grass and chaparral. In that moment he knew he would always be a cattleman and never be a lawyer. King Bros. Cattle Company was born as the brothers learned the cattle business in Parkfield.

Bill’s storybook was already full of family adventures in farming and ranching. He was the namesake of his great-grandfather William H. Rickard who emigrated from England to Hawai’i in 1867 and became a pioneer sugar cane planter on the Big Island, in Honoka’a, on a 67-acre land grant he purchased in 1876 from King Kalakaua for $128.61. In 1878, Kalakaua’s sister, Lili’uokalani — a devotee of her Hawaiian culture, composer of Aloha ‘Oe, and later the last monarch of the Hawaiian kingdom — acted as godmother for Rickard’s son, James B. Rickard, who came to be Bill’s grandfather after he sailed to California and married Acacia Oreña, granddaughter of Don José De la Guerra, Santa Barbara’s paterfamilias.