Billy Paul Loughridge (born April 19, 1935) is a cardiovascular surgeon, author, and health care consultant in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He practiced cardiovascular surgery in Tulsa, Oklahoma from 1967 until 1998. During this period he performed more than 10,000 surgeries. He also taught in medical schools, supervised surgery at two hospitals, wrote three books, and served as an expert witness in numerous legal cases involving medical issues. In the 1970s he worked for four years with engineers at a company which makes oil pumping equipment in an unsuccessful attempt to create an artificial heart. Beyond his medical practice, Loughridge was involved in numerous charitable, scientific, and cultural institutions, as a donor, board member, trustee, and officer.
Biography
Background, youth, and early education
Some of Loughridge's ancestors moved to Oklahoma from Georgia when it was the Indian Territory. The most prominent of these was Rev. Robert McGill Loughridge, a Presbyterian minister who came to the Indian Territory as a missionary in 1843. In 1890 Reverend Loughridge was the co-author and publisher of the first English-Muscogee (Creek) dictionary. His maternal great-grandfather, John Martin Tuck, operated a ferry on the Red River south of Marietta, Oklahoma in the late nineteenth century. Loughridge's father, William Floyd Loughridge was born in 1915 in New Mexico where the family was homesteading. However, by the 1920s facing dire poverty, they moved back to Oklahoma, where Loughridge's grandfather was a truck driver and farmed a small plot of land outside of Ardmore. B.P.'s mother, Elizabeth (Shorter) Loughridge, was born in Oklahoma in 1916. Both his parents grew up in Ardmore, but were only able to attend school until the eighth grade. After their marriage, during the Great Depression, William Floyd and Elizabeth moved to a farm owned by Elizabeth's family at Tuck's Ferry on the Red River in southern Oklahoma. Both B.P. and his older sister Floydena were born in a farmhouse at Tuck's Ferry, and spent their early years there. When B.P. was born (1935) tens of thousands of Oklahoma farmers were moving west, driven from their land by the Dust Bowl. Floyd and Elizabeth Loughridge did not move to California but when B.P. reached school age his parents moved back to Ardmore, because it could provide their son and daughter with greater educational opportunities. Loughridge and his sister were the first high school graduates in his immediate family.
At Ardmore High School he lettered in football as a defensive back. A determined, if not overly talented athlete, he became a Golden Gloves boxer, reaching the state quarter finals as a lightweight. While in high school and college he was also an amateur bull rider. For his fortieth birthday Loughridge participated in his final rodeo, riding a bull for six seconds. However, academics, not sports, were his real forte. Loughridge graduated from Ardmore High School in 1953, and would later be the first graduate of that school to hold a Fulbright Fellowship for study abroad. After graduating high school he entered the University of Oklahoma at Norman, intending to become a physician. In his first year, he worked as dish washer and server in exchange for room and board. Unlike most pre-med students at the time, Loughridge majored in sociology, because of his interests in social issues and his understanding that medicine could not be disconnected from the larger society. However, he had minors in both chemistry and zoology to prepare for medical school. At the University of Oklahoma he joined the Sigma Chi fraternity. Some four decades later he would be honored as a "Significant Sig" for his lifetime achievements.
He graduated from college in the spring of 1957 and that fall entered the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine in Oklahoma City. He financed his medical education with loans from the Kellogg Foundation, washing glassware at night at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, and working as an exterminator for a pest control company. He finished medical school in 1961 and shortly after graduation married Linda Faye Harrell (April 24, 1940 – August 16, 2012), who finished her undergraduate education at the University of Oklahoma that year. Their marriage would last more than half a century, until her death in 2012. After their three children were grown, Linda Faye focused her energies on charitable work with cultural institutions, like the Tulsa Philharmonic and Tulsa Opera, the Tulsa Junior League, and medical charities. She raised more than 1.5 million dollars for St. John Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma.