Staying busy in service to others
Ripple effects from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are being felt in many ways. One of those is that the hundreds of volunteers who comprise the Auxiliary to the Baylor Scott & White Medical Center – Waxahachie aren’t allowed to help due to the serious concerns with the coronavirus. The Auxiliary’s president Billie McCullough spoke with the Sun about her organization’s call to serve the community – and the sadness its members feel at being unable to contribute at this time. “We miss being with our volunteer family and the camaraderie we have,” she said. “We keep in touch by telephone but I miss seeing them.” McCullough said she began volunteering with the Baylor Auxiliary because she has to stay busy. “I enjoy helping others and it keeps me busy,” she said.
She became the president of the Baylor Auxiliary in July 2019 and will serve a two-year term. She is also chairperson of the guest services committee for the lobby and the surgical waiting room. “I really enjoy helping our patients and their families and I love being with our family of volunteers,” McCullough said of the volunteer work she and her fellow volunteers hope to return to soon.
McCullough was raised in Dallas and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1960. “We were the first complete class to graduate from there after it was built,” she said. After high school, she attended Draughon Business School and then went to work for John F. Beasley Construction Company in the Mercantile Building in downtown Dallas. “Back then, everything was done in downtown Dallas,” she said. “Shopping, movies, restaurants were all downtown.” When Billie and her husband, Don, married, they lived in DeSoto before moving in 1995 to Maypearl, where they owned a construction company. After retiring in the early 1990s as an outpatient coordinator for eight years at Healthbound Medical Center, she began a 10-year career from 2002-2012 as a substitute teacher in Maypearl ISD.
In talking with the Sun, she had a smile on her face as she spoke of seeing former students at the hospital, “I would see couples that I had taught with their babies and they would remember that I had taught them.” After her husband passed away in 2011, she moved from Maypearl to Waxahachie, where, at the suggestion of a friend, McCullough began volunteering with the Baylor Auxilary in July 2013. “I enjoy helping people and our volunteer group is like family,” she said. “They are a wonderful group of people. We have a screening process and we get the cream of the crop.”
She has two children and seven grandchildren; her only sister lives in England, where she hopes to visit later this year. In her spare time, McCullough enjoys playing cards once a week with friends. “We have been playing Keno for 18 years and we always have a great time,” she said, noting she also enjoys a monthly lunch with one of her granddaughters. McCullough expresses a deep faith in God and serves as an elder at Central Presbyterian Church in Waxahachie.
