Lonnie Bailey served as a basketball coach and scoutmaster in the Salem area for more than 20 years before returning to Oklahoma to ranch. After wildfires tore through his land in March, some of the men and women he led as children are coming to help him rebuild.

"When my friends around the country learned about our event here, they just started coming," he said in a phone interview last week. "It is a humbling, humbling thing to witness."

Chris Shepard, who had Bailey as a scoutmaster growing up in Salem and now lives in Storrs, is in Oklahoma with his wife and two children helping round up and take care of Bailey's cattle. Noah Rappahahn, a Lebanon native who met Bailey when his sister Krista was playing basketball locally and now lives in California, will be going to the ranch in June to rebuild some of the fencing.

Bailey originally is from Oklahoma, but he lived in Montville and Salem from 1973 to 1996 while stationed at the Naval Submarine Base in Groton. During his time here, he served as a leader for both the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts and founded the Connecticut Storm basketball league for middle and high school students. Many of the kids he led as scoutmaster and coach frequently visited the ranch during the summers, including Shepard and Rappahan.

He said he returned to his home state to care for his aging parents and develop the ranch land he owned near Knowles, a town on the Oklahoma panhandle with a year-round population of eight. Before the wildfires in March, he managed 15,000 acres of grass for grazing more than 500 cattle and a few thousand acres of land for crops.

"Just prior to this fire, we had a tremendous ice storm that came through here and it took our power out for two weeks," he said. "It's a challenging place to live, that's for sure."

The March 6-8 fires, with small fires starting back up for the next four or five days, burned more than 1 million acres from Texas to Kansas. Bailey said he lost about 60 cattle, 5,000 acres of grass, 37.5 miles of fencing, two barns and his parents' house.

Shepard said he keeps in touch with Bailey and learned about the fires from him and by watching the news. He had helped with the cattle roundup when he visited in the summers as a teenager, and his 8-year-old son now will be able to watch as they vaccinate the calves and reunite them with their mothers so his son can help in the future. The challenge this time around will be rebuilding the corrals they had used for that job in previous years, since most of them were destroyed in the fire.

Rappahahn, who lives in Oakland, said he did a lot of odd jobs for Bailey in the 14 consecutive summers he spent on the ranch from fifth grade through college, and he hadn't enjoyed building fences. He feels honored to be able to help his mentor and plans to stay for at least two weeks.

"They're family to me," he said. "It's kind of like a second home for me."

Since the fires, the population of Knowles has ballooned to 80 people from surrounding states who came in with everything from equipment to temporary housing to help the ranchers rebuild.

The influx of help doesn't overshadow the fire damage and ensuing wind erosion threat, which Bailey called an "ecological powder keg" and compared to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But he is optimistic.

"We're up for the challenge," he said. "We will prevail."

a.hutchinson@theday.com