Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Of my 20+ years of being a student, Coach Hilliard was by far the best history teacher of them all. I found his classes interesting and I learned a lot of world history and American history. And he held me to high standards of the written word - I’m sure Mrs. Gould was proud of him. But, some pieces of history brought on more stories than we really had time for, so we never got to WWII. Fortunately, there are many excellent books I have read over the years to fill in that hole. And the WWII museum in New Orleans is outstanding.
For some reason, I was at Madison Ridgeland school on a Saturday and I noticed Coach Hilliard was in the yard in front of the Teacher’s Home, across the street. I went over to speak to him. He had killed a snake and was trying to balance the snake on his hoe to put it in a trash can. After 3 or 4 tries, in which the snake always slid back off, I said, “Coach, do you want some help with that?” He replied in the affirmative and I picked up the dead snake and deposited it in the trash.
Another time, I was in his classroom in an off period and he had some of his basketball girls doing wrist curls with some sort of heavy rod. One of them was struggling with it. I took the rod from her and easily did several curls. I did not tell Coach that I had been carrying concrete blocks around the yard at home to help my dad with building a house.
In one of those history classes, we were assigned to keep a journal for a semester. I’m sure he had in mind that we would write about events that would one day be part of the history books. I’m afraid my journaling was more about day to day things going on in a small school in a small town and what comics I liked in the paper that day. It did teach me skills that were important in later life when I needed to document events in a coherent way.
When I retired and moved from NY back to MS, Elbert encouraged me to accept a position on the Pearl River Church Historic Council. I am not a historian, but I attended Pearl River Church for the first 10 years of my life and my parents are buried there. I have a very warm regard for the church and cemetery and had been taught to help maintain it, so I accepted. Subsequently, he asked me to chair the Council. I accepted and have endeavored to lead the team in maintaining the site and planning annual Lambuth Day celebrations there.
I will sincerely miss Elbert as mentor, historian and friend.
