Loren Bruce Henley

This world lost a brilliant and generous spirit when Loren Bruce Henley, MD, died on October 4, 2021, in Kalispell, Montana. He was able to say again how much he loved his wife of 64 years, Wanda, before succumbing to multiple chronic sources of suffering including heart disease and diabetes. 

Bruce was born on August 31, 1936, in Ava, Missouri, to Loren Arthur and Lily Aurora Henley. He overcame a rough impoverished childhood, often in foster care or at relative’s homes after his parents divorced. As a kid he spent time harvesting potatoes with his brother in California, working with his cousins on a chicken ranch, following harvest work in Oregon with his mother, painting duck decoys in Kansas City, and working in his father’s drugstore as a soda jerk, all the while doing well in his frequently interrupted school studies. 

Back in Missouri for his last two years of high school, he met his true love, Wanda Buchanan. They were at Bolivar High where he was on the school’s undefeated football team and she was in the Drum and Bugle Corps. Once again living in California after graduation, he took up hitchhiking back and forth to see her. Finally he joined the Army so he could support her and they married on April 6, 1957. 

He stayed with the Army for over twenty years and retired as a Lt. Colonel awarded the Legion of Merit. His military service facilitated his education from lab tech training through a Bacteriology degree from the University of Kansas and on to an MD from the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1967. He finished at the top of his class and was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society. His medical internship at Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco was devoted primarily to caring for the many wounded flown in directly from Viet Nam. He chose to specialize in Pathology and completed residency training at Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. He would return to Brooke years later to serve as department chief. He always loved to call old friends from all the phases of his long medical training and career every New Year’s day. 

Bruce and Wanda survived moving every one or two years and made it through medical school with three children in tow - Cheryl was born in 1958, Bruce in 1960, and Brian in 1962. He was the best Dad ever, driving thousands of station wagon miles dragging the Starcraft camper out west for family vacations, encouraging us in our passions and educations, making us all laugh so many times. There has always been a happy terrier at home. He gave us everything he never had when he was growing up. 

After the Army, Bruce went to work with Winfield Pathology Associates at Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield, Illinois. He greatly enjoyed the staff and his colleagues there, making lifetime friends. In those years he and Wanda lived in Batavia and enjoyed the Chicago Symphony, Broadway shows, and great shopping. He bought her a loaded Mustang to cruise around in, and they traveled to their dream destinations around the world. Bruce was an avid audiophile from back in the reel-to-reel days so the house was always filled with great music from jazz to folk to classical with some Willie Nelson and then Lyle Lovett thrown in, blasting out of tremendous speakers. He learned to craft lovely stained glass pieces in those years and loved collecting exquisite kaleidoscopes and art, including Navajo weavings. He happily had more time for his beloved golf, which he was good at. 

Montana had simmered in the back of Bruce’s mind as a place to retire ever since the western station wagon journeys, so off he and Wanda went to Bigfork in 1994. They loved having Glacier National Park as their “back yard”, and made a beautiful home for themselves where they welcomed visiting friends and family. He continued making wonderful stained glass treasures and he and Wanda continued seeking out and photographing birds and wildlife of all kinds, including the bears that wandered onto their lawn occasionally.

Bruce also used his retirement years to plan huge family trips to wonderful destinations - Mexico, Hawaii, French Polynesia, Hawaii again. And most extraordinary of all, we all flew to Kenya and Tanzania to celebrate his and Wanda’s 50th anniversary in 2007. It was a perfect and joyous time full of love and the unsurpassed splendor of African wildlife and landscapes.The family toast became “Happy safari!”.

The great sources of sorrow in Bruce’s life were the deaths of his two sons. Loren Bruce Henley, Jr., was killed by a drunk driver when he was only 22 years old in 1982. Then Brian James Henley died suddenly of cardiac arrest in 2016 just after Christmas, several years after he moved his family to Montana to help out with daily life in Bigfork. Bruce was also preceded in death by his parents; his stepmother, Elizabeth Henley; and his brother, Wendel Boyd Henley. 

Bruce is survived by his cherished wife, Wanda Irene Henley, of Bigfork; and their daughter, Cheryl Lynn Henley, MD, and her husband Jeffrey Donald Nichols, PhD, of Mountain Green, Utah. Also surviving are his daughter-in-law, Jacki Lynn Henley, and grandchildren Maxwell Ryan Henley and Madeline Rose Henley, all of Kalispell, Montana. Blarney, the Parti Yorkie, looks for him every day.  

Bruce’s clear instructions for cremation without ceremony were followed, and his ashes are to be cast onto a body of water (which may or may not be legal) chosen specifically by him. Happy safari forever. We will never stop missing you. We will never stop loving you.

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