text: William Pendry Bidelman was born on September 25, in 1918 in Los Angeles, California. Bidelman's father, the son of Howard Bidelman and Julia Pendry, had the same name but Bidelman did not use the designation "Jr.," after college. His father died suddenly when he was four, and subsequently Bidelman moved with his mother to Grand Forks, North Dakota where his grandparents (Architect Joseph Bell DeRemer and his wife Elizabeth) raised him. As a boy, Bidelman wrote to Alfred H. Joy at Mount Wilson, to ask how to become an astronomer. They later served together on the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Publications Committee in 1955 and 1956. He met his future wife, Verna Shirk, in grade school and became "smitten" with her at age 10.
  In a Grand Forks Central High School competition, Bidelman's tribute to North Dakota was judged best, and was read on October 20, 1935, at the Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, an annual event for essays by high school students about their states. In his essay, Bidelman praised North Dakota for its plains "covered with an ocean of wheat, rolling gently in the soft summer breezes", its rolling prairies, mighty rivers; International Peace Garden "in the heart of this continent", its industry, agriculture, and its "scores of untold secrets which have not been discovered to this day". He finished by quoting state poet James W. Foley, by writing: "North Dakota, hail to you!"
  At a 1977 IAU Symposium honoring the memory of Henry Norris Russell, Bidelman recalled reading during his high school years the "fascinating and inspiring" monthly articles Russell wrote for Scientific American. Saying it was "an important part of my early scientific education", Bidelman suggested they might be worth reprinting.
  Asked to make some remarks at that symposium, Bidelman said he had little personal knowledge of Russell, but could believe the comments he had heard that Russell was both a great scientist and a great human being, because he had found it to be true of most other influential astronomers. In addition to Alfred Joy, Bidelman recalled "with great pleasure" Bart Bok, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and Martin Schwarzschild from Harvard, and "the whole motley Yerkes crew: Struve, Greenstein, Henyey, Chandrasekhar, Kuiper and all the rest", and stated he marveled at his youthful contacts with them and their passionate devotion to science and to life. He ended his speech by saying:
  Among Bidelmans many interests were baseball, philately, music, and square dancing. His wife, Verna Pearl Shirk was born in 1918 in Grand Forks, North Dakota. She graduated from the University of North Dakota, and was a teacher and a poet who used her time for family, friends, and church work. The Bidelmans had four children, and also grandchildren and great-grandchildren. One daughter died in 2000, and Verna Bidelman died in 2009. They were married 69 years. Bidelman died at 92 on May 3, 2011, in Tennessee.