Friends: 'Nothing stopped Carole'

Former lieutenant governor had zest for 'adventure travel'

By Bill Harlan, Journal staff | Friday, October 26, 2007

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The memory of a piece of paper rattling in freshman legislator Carole Hillard's hand reminds a friend how Hillard attacked life.

"It was her first speech on the floor of the House," Kay Jorgensen of Spearfish said. "She read it word for word. Here was this strong woman, this extraordinary mother, and her hands shook so hard the paper rattled."

Jorgensen, also a House member at the time, later asked Hillard if she had a fear of public speaking. "She said, 'Yes,' and that's all she'd say about it," Jorgensen said. "Nothing stopped Carole."

Hillard, 71, who died Thursday in Switzerland from complications after a sailing accident in the Adriatic, overcame her fear of public speaking by staring it down over and over again, all over the world. Hillard served four years in the state Legislature.

She presided over the state Senate for eight years as lieutenant governor from 1995 to 2003, running with former Gov. Bill Janklow. They made an odd political couple. Janklow was a bare-knuckles politician who relished confrontation. Hillard was a conciliator, polite and kind to a fault. "I truly never met a human being that didn't find her to be gracious and genuine and warm," Janklow told the Associated Press on Thursday.

In 1996, Hillard was the early leader in a Republican primary for a U.S. House seat, eventually losing to John Thune, who went on to oust Tom Daschle in the Senate.

Hillard went on to serve on the state Corrections Commission, the Board of Charities and Corrections and the Governor's Crime Commission.

All those jobs required public speaking.

Friend and business partner Stan Adelstein of Rapid City remembers traveling with Hillard to Japan for the dedication of a Mount Rushmore replica there. "She didn't know she'd be asked to speak," Adelstein said. He and Hillard's husband, the late John Hillard, stood in front of her while she hurriedly scribbled out her remarks, which she read word for word. "She wanted to be very precise," he said.

After Hillard's second term as lieutenant governor, she went on to the career that most amazed her family and friends. She traveled to more than 60 countries as an international consultant to the U.S. State Department and to non-governmental organizations -- helping to organize elections on the West Bank, start businesses in Afghanistan and lobby for women's rights throughout the world.

Sailing in the Adriatic was only a postscript to the real reason for her last trip abroad -- a conference on federalism in Turkmenistan.

"She was really a missionary for democracy," South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds said Thursday. "She showed people how we govern ourselves -- what works and what doesn't work."

For her close friends, Hillard's globetrotting also meant a treat at Christmas. Her homemade cards featured pictures from her travels.

"In one, she was bungee jumping," friend Darlene Gage of Pierre said. (That was at Victoria Falls in Africa.) Hillard also tried skydiving. Other Christmas card photos pictured her "on every possible kind of animal conveyance," Gage said.

The cards also revealed a self-deprecating sense of humor. Gage shared some examples from the 2005 edition:

"A thorn among African roses," Hillard wrote under a group photo taken in Uganda, in which she was the lone Caucasian.

"Carole with a long-lost sorority sister," she wrote under a photo of an elderly Tunisian woman many years her senior.

And she returned to a pet issue.

"Woman power!" she wrote under a photo of women in the African state of Benin.

"I looked forward to these every year just to see what she was doing," Gage said. "She was a trailblazer."

In fact, Hillard was the second woman to serve as president of the Rapid City Chamber of Commerce and the first woman to be president of the Rapid City Council. She also was the first and only woman ever to serve as lieutenant governor of South Dakota.

Long-time friend Arlene Ham-Burr of Rapid City -- the first woman to be president of the Rapid City Chamber of Commerce -- who was in the state Senate when Hillard was lieutenant governor, attended Republican conventions with Hillard dating back to Detroit in 1980. "We had great philosophical debates," Ham-Burr said.

They never saw eye to eye on where to draw the line between mental health care and incarceration, but Hillard's internationalism proved contagious. Ham-Burr also said Hillard's commitment to international goodwill and "adventure travel" was contagious. Ham-Burr had planned to go with Hillard on a "heifer trip" this winter, to deliver a cow to a poor family in Mozambique.

Ham-Burr last saw Hillard at breakfast at Presho in September. Hillard had been inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame, with several of her five children present and many friends, including Ham-Burr.

Hillard didn't have much to say at the ceremony, but Ham-Burr said she was thrilled to be driving across South Dakota in her new red Audi TT Roadster. "She always wanted a sports car," Ham-Burr said. "She was pretty excited about it."

Her kids and grandkids were most important to her, friends say, but "adventure travel" remained a priority. Ham-Burr and Hillard, in fact, were planning a trip to Mexico next spring to watch migrating monarch butterflies.

"We made a pact we were going to mature with dignity together," Ham-Burr said. "How am I going to do that without her?"

Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or at bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com