There’s an old saying, back from the early days of the American West, that cowboys should always “ride for the brand.”

A brand symbolizes the family behind a ranch, and cowboys were expected to have unwavering loyalty to the place where they worked. No matter the struggles, the personal disagreements, the frustrations, they rode for the brand.

And that pretty much sums up Kevin Kellar, said one of his longtime friends and coworkers, Tim Roberts.

For 40 years, Kellar managed Worthington Farms, caring for and breeding dozens of horses and maintaining a sprawling property in Reisterstown. He grew garden vegetables to share with neighbors in the summer and got up at 4 a.m. some days to plow farm roads in the winter. He raised three children and saw them all get married on the farm.

Through it all, he maintained his signature positive attitude and sense of humor — even if it was sometimes accompanied by a handful of expletives. Or, as Roberts put it: “When the suck-meter was at its worst, Kevin was at his best.”

Even the night before he died, he showed up at Roberts’ house to drop off his annual Christmas crab cakes. Though he didn’t own the farm, he rode for the brand.

“He wasn’t about himself,” Roberts said. “He was content to just do his job and do extremely well and represent the farm well.”

Kellar, also an avid sports fan and beachgoer who was known to tell extravagant stories, died Christmas Eve of pneumonia. He was 71.

He was born July 31, 1954, the third of Alexander and Jo Ann Kellar’s four children. His father was an electrician; his mother, a homemaker who passed a strong Catholic faith to her kids.

Growing up in Overlea, Kellar got a taste of the rustic life from visits with his paternal grandparents, who lived in a Pennsylvania mining town. His grandmother would sometimes go out, grab a chicken from the yard and send it straight to a frying pan.

Kellar attended The John Carroll School, a private Catholic high school in Bel Air a little under 30 miles from home. He sometimes hitchhiked to class, until he befriended Josh Pons, whose father owned the nearby Country Life Farm. Kellar started spending school nights there to make the morning commute easier, helping with farm work and the horses in his downtime, his family said.

He was a tri-sport athlete in high school, playing football, basketball and baseball. If you talked to him about it, he’d say he was “on the verge of going pro at just about everything,” joked his oldest son, Emmit Kellar. That wasn’t exactly true, but he was definitely a skilled sportsman, especially at baseball. It ran in the family: Kevin Kellar’s father played in the minor league with a short stint in the pros, and he coached his son’s teams.

Kellar went on to earn a history degree from the University of Maryland in 1976. He spent college summers working at Country Life Farm and was hired as a manager upon graduation.

In 1980, the owners of Worthington Farms were on the hunt for a stallion manager, and Kellar came highly recommended. He started his 45-year career there caring for two well-known horses, Lord Gaylord and Northern Raja, who repeatedly fathered champion racehorses and show jumpers. Lord Gaylord sired 357 foals over his lifetime — 309 of which raced and 252 won, The Baltimore Sun reported upon the horse’s death in 1998.

He was later promoted to farm manager, his son said. He was the farm’s jack of all trades — someone who made sure the horses were let out and brought back into their stables every day, cleaned up manure, fixed up the barns, and kept the grounds clean and the lawn mowed.

“You can outwork anybody if you put your mind to it, and that was always something that he personified,” Emmit Kellar said.

It was during Kevin Kellar’s early years at Worthington that he met his eventual wife, Julie, who started working there because she grew up riding horses, recalled their daughter, Emily Brown.

They were both outgoing, compassionate people who dreamed of starting a family. They could also both be quite hard-headed, their daughter said, but their stubbornness didn’t clash. Instead, they evened each other out, inspiring one another to aim higher and achieve more.

Kellar asked her to marry him one day as she was renovating their farmhouse, on the floor and covered in paint. She’d later tell her children it was the best moment of her life.

“It was so simple, but you could tell that there was so much love in that moment,” Brown said.

They raised Emmit, Emily and their youngest son, Ben. The kids spent their childhoods watching the births of several horses and picking up chores around the farm.

“You remember sitting on his lap, driving the tractor down the driveway, walking around while he attended to his stalls and just being around him while he did what he loved,” Ben Kellar said.

Even though the farm was demanding, Kellar always showed up for his kids, they said, whether in person at a sporting event or over the phone to give them advice. He took them to the Outer Banks on vacation or to the movies for fun. Ben Kellar remembers how his dad cried from laughter in a movie theater during the opening scenes of “Shrek.”

The Kellars also hosted a party every year after the Maryland Hunt Cup, a massive horse race that takes place on the farm. He always went above and beyond to make sure the farm was pristine ahead of the race, stressing himself out in the weeks before the event but ending the day with a drink and time with loved ones.

Living on the same farm all his life gave Kevin Kellar the opportunity to do the same, later, with his grandkids, who called him “K-Pop” (no relation to the Korean music genre).

“He really cherished that, because it was a situation where he grew up doing it and then had kids, and he watched the kids grow up doing it, and then we had kids, and then he watched his grandkids grow up a little bit doing it,” Emmit Kellar said.

Brown thinks the past few years of her father’s life were the most content he’s ever been, largely because of extensive time with his wife and children — and that’s saying a lot for a guy who was always pretty cheery. That makes his death even sadder, she said, but it also brings her comfort that he died with no regrets.

“He woke up every day, and he was the happiest guy on Earth, because he got to be outside, he got to be with his horses,” she said.

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