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Evelyn Hillard celebrated her 99th birthday with a reception Friday at Hillside Terrace, where she has lived for the last 17 years and with other parties and visits from relatives. She says she’ll celebrate her 100th next year. After that, no celebrations, except for possibly her 105th year.
She predicts she will live to see 106, although it’s not clear why she has chosen that number. A great-grandson teases that if she lives to 130, she can see his grandbabies born.
In nearly a century, Hillard has seen a great many changes in her life, and although she’s adapted to them, she’s still in the same place she started life as the first of three daughters born to Walter B. and Nellie Dauner. She was baptized in the Glendale Methodist Church at the age of six weeks and has gone to the same church all her 99 years.
Glendale School was across the road from the church, and she started her education there, but came to town for her junior and senior years and graduated from Pratt High in 1930.
She remembers a very busy Pratt business community. There were five grocery stories on Main Street, but her mother traded at McKown Grocery, bartering eggs and butter for things she needed. Next, a trip to town would include a stop at Jetts, where her dresses were bought. The family preferred Milne’s of the several drug stores, and shopped at a hardware store where K Lanes is now located. There was a 10-cent store in the middle of the second block, and later a Woolworth’s and then a Duckwalls.
In those days, farm women fed the men who came to help with the work. If her mother had a bunch of men for dinner, without enough warning to lay in supplies, she would call McKowns and they would send the groceries out with the mail route. Young Evelyn and her sisters were charged with waiting at the end of the lane to bring the groceries to the house.
The church and school were the center of community life. Glendale School had a literary society, as did several other country schools. Programs were held once a month, with the adults holding formal debates. They were boring to the kids, she recalled, but they always had a good time playing with their friends and performing their parts of the program.
In 1931 Evelyn Dauner married Clarence Hillard, a man in the community 13 years her senior. He told her he had first seen her in a buggy and decided to wait for her to grow up. They were married 59 years and their only son, Walter Clarence, died in 1999.
Evelyn Hillard celebrated her 99th birthday with a reception Friday at Hillside Terrace, where she has lived for the last 17 years and with other parties and visits from relatives. She says she’ll celebrate her 100th next year. After that, no celebrations, except for possibly her 105th year.
She predicts she will live to see 106, although it’s not clear why she has chosen that number. A great-grandson teases that if she lives to 130, she can see his grandbabies born.
In nearly a century, Hillard has seen a great many changes in her life, and although she’s adapted to them, she’s still in the same place she started life as the first of three daughters born to Walter B. and Nellie Dauner. She was baptized in the Glendale Methodist Church at the age of six weeks and has gone to the same church all her 99 years.
Glendale School was across the road from the church, and she started her education there, but came to town for her junior and senior years and graduated from Pratt High in 1930.
She remembers a very busy Pratt business community. There were five grocery stories on Main Street, but her mother traded at McKown Grocery, bartering eggs and butter for things she needed. Next, a trip to town would include a stop at Jetts, where her dresses were bought. The family preferred Milne’s of the several drug stores, and shopped at a hardware store where K Lanes is now located. There was a 10-cent store in the middle of the second block, and later a Woolworth’s and then a Duckwalls.
In those days, farm women fed the men who came to help with the work. If her mother had a bunch of men for dinner, without enough warning to lay in supplies, she would call McKowns and they would send the groceries out with the mail route. Young Evelyn and her sisters were charged with waiting at the end of the lane to bring the groceries to the house.
The church and school were the center of community life. Glendale School had a literary society, as did several other country schools. Programs were held once a month, with the adults holding formal debates. They were boring to the kids, she recalled, but they always had a good time playing with their friends and performing their parts of the program.
In 1931 Evelyn Dauner married Clarence Hillard, a man in the community 13 years her senior. He told her he had first seen her in a buggy and decided to wait for her to grow up. They were married 59 years and their only son, Walter Clarence, died in 1999.
Hillard’s long career with the Red Cross began in 1960 and lasted until 1992. During her time as chapter manager she helped at three hurricanes and a major tornado in Topeka. Her first hurricane was in New Orleans, where the airport was “all busted up” and nearly everything else in similar shape. She worked for three weeks in harsh conditions and only came home because she was needed for a family business decision.
After retirement, she worked for two and a half years at the Pratt Tribune, in charge of what was known then as the women’s page. During that time, she started writing a column she called “Echoes from Evelyn.”
In 1998, she reprised that column, touching on family matters, Pratt County history, or anything else that came to mind, until a final column sometime in 2009.
But don’t count her out. Always interested in history, she’s compiling a record of the small communities that are mere traces or less on the county landscape — Glendale, Fairview, Twin Mound, Springvale — she can name quite a number of them. Occasionally, she’ll think of a fact she needs to confirm and think, “I’ll call so and so,” before remembering most of her contemporaries are gone.
If she could live life over again, she can’t think of a single thing she would change.
“I’ve enjoyed every minute,” she said. “I had a good childhood, got married, worked in the church. I like all kinds of people; I’ve had arguments, but it never made me mad.”
At 99, her philosophy is to take one day at a time. Life has gone by so fast — some days she can’t believe she’s that old and doesn’t think she acts like she’s 99 — how ever one is supposed to act at that age.
