Picture: Carl Ralph Hilliard (1937--), with mustache, horse, cigarettes, circa 1980.
Carl Ralph Hilliard
Picture: Carl Ralph Hilliard (1937--), with
mustache, horse, cigarettes, circa 1980.
This is my father, Carl R. "Bud" Hilliard, (son of Tuff, grandson of Jack, great-grandson of Noah) being a cowboy on a cattle drive near Creede, Colorado. The picture tells the whole story about dad, and really about the Hilyards as well, I think. Dad loves horses. My grandad, Tuff, loved horses, his brother Sandy was a nut about horses, and great-uncle Adam loved and bred horses, I believe. Horses are in the Hilyard family history, just as they are in American history.
Having been born in Wyoming and raised near Bridger, Montana (in the southern part of the state) Carl, called "Bud" by his family but not by ours, grew up doing western stuff: riding, shooting, fishing and camping. He also grew up as something of a small-town brain--a voracious reader and an excellent writer. After graduating from the University of Montana in 1959 with a degree in journalism and service in the Army from 1960-62, Carl began his career as a sportswriter at the Albuquerque Journal in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
It was there that he met and married my mother, Lana Blair Hilliard (1941--), and it was there that I was born on September 26, 1964. Dad quickly built a reputation as a good reporter, and we moved to Cheyenne, WY in the winter of 1965 when he got a job with the Associated Press. We stayed until June, 1967, when dad transferred to the Denver bureau of the AP.
Dad began covering state government and politics for the AP. To date, he has covered 30 consecutive sessions of the Colorado General Assembly, half a dozen national political conventions, four governors and their administrations, and today is the "dean" of reporters in Colorado, meaning the senior writer in the press corps and the man who asks the first question at press conferences (sort of like Helen Thomas of UPI at presidential press conferences).
Carl Hilliard has won a number of awards for news writing and his column, "capital close-up," which runs in nearly all of the small papers in Colorado. He is a past winner of the Lowell Thomas Award, given by the Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ) for Colorado's most outstanding journalist, and has won a number of awards from the Colorado Press Association for his columns. In 1995, we both won SPJ awards for column writing; I finished second and he third, in different classifications, however. It's rare to best the Old Man in anything.
He is a friend of the working man, a conservative Democrat in politics, a westerner by temperament, a skeptic by choice, a funny fellow in all circumstance, and a hero to me. He wears cowboy boots, drives a Honda CIVIC, likes country and western and folk music and raunchy humor. He is a legendary journalist in Colorado, and we're proud of him.
Dad is a good horseman, a great shot with a pistol or rifle, a great storyteller, a stupendous newsman of the old school (he gets the story right or doesn't print it), and like all the Hilliards in my immediate family except for me, he is not the slightest bit interested in genealogy. He looks about the same as in this picture, except that his mustache (and now, beard) are gray.
Written by Bronson
Hilliard