Tuff Hilliard
Picture: Walter Carl "Tuff" Hilliard (1914-1987),
with hands in brown jacket pockets, in front of his house
in Thermopolis, Wyoming, ca 1985.
This is Walter Carl "Tuff" Hilliard (1914-1987), father
of Carl Ralph Hilliard and Carol Hilliard Pearcy and grandfather of Bronson
Ralph and Brendan Michael Hilliard, and Shannon L. and Dean W. Pearcy.
He is the fraternal twin brother of A. E. "Sandy" Hilliard, the son of
A. F. "Jack" Hilliard, the grandson of Noah Hilyard, and the great-grandson
of Jeremiah Hilyard.
Tuff worked for Marathon Oil company for 43 years
as a field hand. He did any and all jobs in the field, and developed a
reputation as being both solidly reliable on the job and Herculean in his
physical strength.
Tuff married Velna Close, a school teacher, in 1935,
and the two had their first child, Carl Ralph Hilliard, in 1937. Carl,
called "Bud," is my father. Later, in 1941, Carol Beth Hilliard, my aunt,
was born.
The family first lived in Gebo, Wyoming, a coal-mining
and oil town outside Thermopolis, Wyoming, some 90 miles southeast of Cody.
Tuff worked in the oild field, Velna took care of the baby, and her father,
Ralph Close, worked as an electrician in the nearby coal mine.
The couple lived in Elk Basin, Wyoming, outside
Cody, and later in Dry Creek, Montana, from the time of World War II until
the early 1960s, when they moved to Lance Creek, Wyoming, an oil town in
eastern Wyoming. Finally, in 1977, Tuff retired, and he and Velna moved
to Thermopolis and bought the only house they ever owned.
Tuff was a fisherman, a woodworker, and a friend
to all who knew him. He taught me how to drive a stick shift (with great
difficulty, I might add), how to fish, how to shoot a shotgun. He was fond
of Westerns, liked Johnny Cash, watched "Hee-Haw" and "Sanford and Son,"
and voted Democrat his entire life.
He could also summarize a situation in peerlessly
abrupt style. Once, in criticizing a relative whose children had a propensity
to marry early, he said "None of her kids were happy unless they were married
right out of the eighth grade."
If you want to know how he talked, rent the John
Wayne movies "The Cowboys" and "True Grit." Tuff had the same intonation
in his voice, a raspy kind of western voice made rough by cigarettes, coffee,
and a hot, dry climate. He had a deep, manly chuckle for a laugh. Dad called
him "the Old Man," which is what we call our fathers in our family.
Tuff died June 1, 1987, of heart failure, at the
hospital in Casper, Wyoming. He joked with the nurses and EMT's in the
ambulance all during the two-hour ride from Thermopolis to Casper. His
last major project was changing the oil in my aunt's car. At his funeral,
grown men cried like little kids. One of his friends came up to me and
said, "that man was the best friend I ever had."
Not a bad epitaph. Tuff is buried in a cemetery
in Thermopolis, on the top of a red-dirt bluff that overlooks the town,
the Big Horn river, and the Big Horn Mountains in the distance. It is a
deserving place of rest for a good man, maybe the best I ever knew.
CONTINUE THE JOURNEY
Written by Bronson Hilliard