Photograph by Whitney Curtis
Bill Bingham was in seminary in Omaha, Neb., when, as his wife puts it, “the Holy Spirit put it in his heart to move to St. Louis.” So Bill, Ella, and their four kids moved into a ramshackle, barely habitable house in the College Hill neighborhood, off Vandeventer Avenue near I-70. They did mudding and drywalling, but they never could stop the ceiling from leaking. They prayed, regularly, for the absence of rain.
The Binghams’ neighbors weren’t quite sure why they’d settled into College Hill; crime was high, and yards were mud and weeds. Their kids didn’t care, though; they played ball on the vacant lot across the street.
Then some people showed up and started digging in the kids’ outfield. They’d affiliated themselves with a national organization called Habitat for Humanity, and they were going to build its first house in St. Louis.
Bill and Ella had never heard of Habitat, but they liked the idea of improving their neighborhood, so they crossed the street and pitched in. Their oldest son helped dig the basement, and Bill lent his newly acquired drywall expertise.
Bit by bit, the house went up. One especially humid day in the summer of 1987, Skip Larson, a retired 7UP executive who was one of the local founders of the St. Louis chapter of Habitat for Humanity, came down from the attic dripping with sweat. “Ella,” he said, wiping his forehead, “you and Bill are going to need to put a little more insulation in your house next year.”
She looked at Bill, and he looked at her. “Our house?” they repeated.
They’d already put in the required hours of sweat equity, without once thinking the house would become their own.
Now they watched, thrilled, as finishing materials were donated. Ella declared the salvaged orange-and-white floor tile “beautiful.” Volunteers invited the Binghams to their homes and offered furniture. Not the least bit stiff-necked, the Binghams took the kindness gladly, as proof of something larger.
“Catholic Charities donated so much,” Ella says. “The Society of St. Vincent de Paul donated $37,000 to do the first house.”
“Some Jewish kids came down from New York,” Bill adds, “and put a roof on the house. They stayed the entire summer.”
He leads a tour, talking about all of the churchpeople and Habitat volunteers they’ve hosted over the years. But when he walks into the kitchen, his smile fades. “This lady, her husband was a doctor, she was doing this,” he says, pointing to the backsplash tile. “I didn’t know at the time that she had cancer. I was standing right there working with her, and she never told me she was sick. She died two or three months later.”
He shakes his head, long used to life’s mysteries, but hating them no less. He is now bishop of the church he founded here, Perpetual Life, and Ella is the rector.
“The day they gave us the key, we didn’t have a stick of furniture over here,” she remembers, “but we slept here anyway, on the bedroom floor. Our hearts were just over-elated!”
There was a dedication ceremony: “[Former Missouri Sen.] Harriett Woods came. She came and prayed in this house,” Ella recalls.
Two weeks later, family members gathered there for Thanksgiving, loving the way no walls shut off the kitchen, so they could all keep talking to Ella while she whipped potatoes and sliced pies. The kids trimmed a white Christmas tree with blue ornaments, and Ella strung lights on the shrubbery out front.
That spring, Bill planted a crab-apple tree out front, a plum tree in back. Once the trees matured, their neighbor would gather the plums every year and make jam.
“This house began to bring the neighborhood back,” Bill says. “Once we planted grass, we started praying for rain! And after our neighbors saw the beauty of the grass and everything, they started to fix their places up. I planted tomatoes, peppers, squash, mustard greens, spinach—and then other folks started putting vegetables out, too.”
“Over the years, we learned to be giving and caring,” Ella says. “I think having a home where you’re comfortable, where you can work together as a family, helps you to do that.
“Later on, after God began to bless, we turned this home into a daycare,” she continues. “We did that for almost 10 years.” After all, their house had always been full of children. “We’d have 40 kids here at a time, because we started a baseball team,” Bill says. He’s grinning, but then his face clouds again. “One of our young baseball players had an asthma attack and died. We had to counsel and pray with the kids, right in this living room.”
The house will always be their home, Ella says, though they’ve since moved to Jennings—their daughter Terry wanted to move into the College Hill house with her two children.
But surely, with all of those donated materials and amateur help, there had to be problems with the house? “They had a contractor who came in and corrected a few things,” Bill says. “But we didn’t see any flaws. At that particular time, this was paradise. And look at it now: 23 years and volunteer help, and this house is still standing.”
Ella’s smiling; how could it not be? “It was built with a lot of love.”
