SEDGWICK ? Bruce Behymer sums up his eight decades in agriculture with two words: horsing around.

“I’d guess there’s no better way to describe me,” said the man known as the master of the malaprop while he was the livestock reporter on KFH radio in Wichita.

Let his son, the director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Harvey County, try a description.

“He’s John Wayne with a wild sense of humor,” said the son, Bruce. “One of the last great cowboys. Storyteller extraordinaire. Tenderhearted old cuss. One of the guys you read about in cowboy poetry and John Steinbeck novels.”

There’s a story from Behymer’s youth that sums up his approach to life, courtesy of his son.

“He worked at a boys camp up in Colorado when he was young,” Bruce said. “He would put a toothbrush, the same color as the one he used, in his shirt pocket.

“When the boys were watching him work with horses, he’d lean over so that toothbrush would purposely fall out and land in a pile of horse manure. He’d grumble and clean it off on his boot heel, which also had manure on it. The kids thought this was the toughest son of a buck they had ever encountered.”

Behymer’s love for livestock led him to KFH, and it led him back to the farm after the Wichita Stockyards shut down in the 1970s.

“Love every kind of livestock — horses mostly,” the 82-year-old said. “I don’t know why. Just took a liking to them. I used to ride to church with my grandparents in a buggy pulled by horses. Maybe that’s it.”

Bruce Behymer, of Sedgwick, enjoyed his job as livestock reporter on KFH radio in Wichita for many years, until the Wichita Stockyards shut down in the 1970s.

Behymer’s dad — also Bruce, like his son and grandson — kicked off the family’s tradition in electronic journalism when he joined KFH after World War I.

“Dad did the early morning thing for them, the livestock markets, for a long time,” Behymer recalled. “Guess it naturally fit that I’d take over in 1966.”

But he brought a different twist — of the English language — to the job that earned him a reputation as a funny man.

“I’d get myself in a hurry reading the livestock numbers,” he said. “I’d get myself rolling there a bit and goof something up, turn ‘butter churn’ into ‘chutter burn.’ It kinda spilled out like that and people took a liking to it, I guess.”

The “livestock with a laugh” lasted for a decade, until the Wichita Stockyards closed.

But he misses the radio days.

“I guess you’d say I had a face for radio,” he said, chuckling.

Behymer’s favorite memories on the farm are of raising and breaking Pinto saddle horses.

And of the lean years on the farm, tinged with a laugh, of course.

“Alberta, here, has been a wonderful wife,” he said. “One year I made $100 farming. Not a real good year, huh?

“So she goes down and gets me this cowboy hat and tells me, ‘Here’s a present for farming so good.’ That’s our life in a nutshell.”

Behymer has been off the farm for three years, and that’s the only subject that seems to anger him.

“Haven’t lifted a board or toted a bucket of water since we left, either,” he said, frowning. “About all we do is go to the doctors.”

But it’s tough for the retired farmer to stay grouchy.

“Ah, I’m in pretty good shape, I guess,” he said, laughing. “My sense of humor has got me by.”