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BILLY ROGERS' HALL OF FAME ★ William "Billy" Rogers ★ 1954 – 1998 ★ bowler • bagger • bus expert • Elvis man • food critic • my big brother |
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Welcome to the Hall of Fame. Please wipe your feet. Billy would have told you to.
I'm Diane Rogers. I'm 42, I manage a dental office here in Rochester, New York, and I'm the little sister of William Rogers, who everybody in this city called Billy. Billy had Down syndrome. He also had a 165 bowling average at his peak, a job he held for twenty-two years, a collection of 143 Elvis records, the entire bus system memorized and opinions about your casserole, and if you're going to remember one of those things about him, I'd rather it wasn't the first one. Billy died of heart failure on Sunday, November 15, 1998, at home in his recliner, with an Elvis record on. He was 44. When he was born in 1954, the doctor told my parents he wouldn't live to see twenty and that they should put him in an institution and forget about him. My mother, who was twenty-five years old, told the doctor what he could do with that idea, took Billy home, and that was that. He outlived that doctor's prediction by twenty-four years and, for all I know, the doctor. This page is not a sad page. Billy didn't do sad. This is a celebration, and you're invited. THE HALL Billy started bowling in Special Olympics in 1979, when he was twenty-five, on a team that practiced every Saturday morning at a bowling alley on the west side, and he didn't miss a Saturday for nineteen years unless he was in the hospital. He bowled a twelve-pound ball, black with red swirls, named "Hound Dog," and he carried it in a red bag with his name embroidered on the side by our mother. Here's his record, from his own spiral notebooks, which he kept in a handwriting nobody else could read.
The averages go down at the end because his heart was getting tired, not because he was. In 1998 he bowled sitting down between frames and still beat half the league. He wore every one of those medals to Christmas dinner every year, all seventeen of them at once, and you could hear him coming. THE 212 June 1991, the state games. Billy was thirty-seven and on fire. He'd bowled his first 200 the year before and he told everybody he was going to beat it, and he told the lanes, and he told the pins. Here's the actual score sheet, which hangs in a frame in my mother's living room:
Seven strikes. When the second strike went down in the tenth, he turned around to the whole building and did the Elvis lip, and when the 6 fell on the last ball he did the whole leg, too. The other bowlers on all the lanes around him stood up and clapped. Our dad, who was not a crier, had to go outside. Billy talked about that game every single day for the next seven years. Every single day. I'm not exaggerating. I counted once in 1994, and it was four times in one afternoon. BILLY'S BUS ENCYCLOPEDIA Billy started riding the city buses by himself in 1974, when he was twenty, and he never stopped, and somewhere along the way he memorized the whole system. I'm not exaggerating about this one either. He knew:
THE KING There was Elvis, and then there was everybody else. Billy owned 143 Elvis records, LPs and 45s, every one in its sleeve in alphabetical order in two milk crates, and woe to you if you put one back wrong. His favorite was "Burning Love," then "Suspicious Minds," then "Hound Dog," except on Sundays, when it was the gospel records. His favorite movie was Blue Hawaii, which he watched on our VCR so many times that the tape broke in 1987 and we had to buy him another one for his birthday. When Elvis died in August 1977, Billy was twenty-three, and he wore a black armband for a month, and nobody in our family made one single joke about it, not then and not ever. In 1988 our dad drove him all the way to Memphis to see Graceland, two days each way, and Billy stood in front of the grave for a long time and then said a prayer for him, out loud. Every Halloween for twenty years he went to our church's party as Elvis in a white jumpsuit Mom sewed for him, with the sunglasses and the sideburns, and every year he won the costume contest, and every year he acted surprised. BILLY REVIEWS YOUR COOKING Billy reviewed every meal he ever ate, out loud, at the table, on a scale of one to five stars, and he did not grade on a curve. Here are some real ones, collected by the family over the years. We wrote them down because we knew we'd want them.
22 YEARS AT HOLLIS BROTHERS In March 1976 Billy went to work bagging groceries at Hollis Brothers Market, the neighborhood supermarket four blocks from our house, and he worked there until three weeks before he died. Twenty-two years. He was never late, not once; he took the bus, and you know how he felt about the bus being late. He was there at 8:45 for a 9:00 shift, in a pressed white shirt and his red apron with the name tag that said BILLY. He had rules about bagging and he'd tell them to you whether you asked or not: cans on the bottom, bread on top, eggs on top of the bread, never put the cleaning stuff in with the meat, and double-bag anything for Mrs. So-and-so because her bags always broke on her back steps. He knew hundreds of customers by name. He knew who was expecting a baby and who'd lost a husband, and he'd carry out their groceries and ask about it. He knew what you bought every week, and if you forgot the milk he'd go get it. When he died, the store closed for two hours the morning of the funeral so everyone who worked there could come. More than sixty customers came too. Some of them I'd never met, and they came up to my mother afterward and told her that Billy was the best part of their week. One lady said he was the only person who ever asked her how she was and waited for the answer. The store sent flowers in a paper grocery bag. His apron and name tag are in a frame in the break room now, with a little brass plate that says BILLY ★ 1976–1998 ★ CANS ON THE BOTTOM. A WORD ABOUT WORDS I'm going to keep this short and plain, because Billy was plain about things. Billy was a person with Down syndrome. He was not "a Down's," or "a Down's kid," or any of the other names people called him, including the ugly word the doctor used in 1954 and the one the kids on our street used in the sixties, which I won't write here. The way you say it matters: put the person first and the condition second, because that's the right order. He was Billy, who had Down syndrome. He was also Billy who bowled a 212, and Billy who knew the buses, and Billy who was the best big brother anybody ever had. And please, don't call people like Billy "angels" or say they're "always happy." He was a grown man. He got mad, he got bored, he had a temper when somebody cut in line, and he could hold a grudge about a 4th place finish for sixteen years. He was a whole person. That's all anybody wants.
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